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The Fifth Discipline Quotes 第五项修炼说什么 第五项修炼 彼得·圣吉 管理大师
The Fifth Discipline Synopsis
Peter M.Senge - The Fifth Discipline : The Art and Practice of the Learning
Organization, 1990
From Chapter 1
"...The irony is that to do things faster, you often have to go slower. You have
to be more reflective. You have to develop real trust. You have to develop the
abilities of people to think together. Why? Because it requires you to go
through basic redesigns. You need to build a shared understanding of how the
present system works.... People must trust one another through difficult
systemic changes..."
" From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the
world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we
pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our
actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. When we
then try to "see the big picture," we try to reassemble the fragments in our
minds, to list and organize all the pieces. But, as physicist David Bohm says,
the task is futile-similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken
mirror to see a true reflection. Thus, after a while we give up trying to see
the whole altogether.
The tools and ideas presented in this book are for destroying the illusion that
the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this
illusion-we can then build "learning organizations," organizations where people
continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where
new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration
is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together….
As the world becomes more interconnected and business becomes more complex and
dynamic, work must become more "learningful." It is no longer sufficient to have
one person learning for the organization…. It's just not possible any longer to
"figure it out" from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the
"grand strategist." The organizations that will truly excel in the future will
be the organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity
to learn at all levels in an organization.
Learning organizations are possible because, deep down, we are all learners. No
one has to teach an infant to learn. In fact, no one has to teach infants
anything. They are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learners who learn to
walk, speak, and pretty much run their households all on their own. Learning
organizations are possible because not only is it our nature to learn but we
love to learn. Most of us at one time or another have been part of a great
"team," a group of people who functioned together in an extraordinary way who
trusted one another, who complemented each others' strengths and compensated for
each others' limitations, who had common goals that were larger than individual
goals, and who produced extraordinary results. I have met many people who have
experienced this sort of profound teamwork-in sports, or in the performing arts,
or in business. Many say that they have spent much of their life looking for
that experience again. What they experienced was a learning organization. The
team that became great didn't start off great-it learned how to produce
extraordinary results…
There is also another, in some ways deeper, movement toward learning
organizations, part of the evolution of industrial society…"The ferment in
management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent
with man's higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging."….
… At the heart of a learning organization is a shift of mind-from seeing
ourselves as separate from the world to connected to the world, from seeing
problems as caused by someone or something "out there" to seeing how our own
actions create the problems we experience. A learning organization is a place
where people are continually discovering how they create their reality. And how
they can change it. As Archimedes has said, "Give me a lever long enough . . .
and single-handed I can move the world."..
The Fifth Discipline Synopsis
Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline is divided into five parts. Part I is devoted
to laying out the argument that we are the creators of our own reality, i.e.,
that the solutions to the problems that we face are at our reach, that we have
the power to control our destinies.
Chapter 1 discusses the concept of "a Lever," or leverage points in a system
--where the smallest efforts can make the biggest differences. It also
introduces the five disciplines of the learning organization (systems thinking,
personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision and team learning). It
highlights systems thinking as the 5th discipline --the one which fuses them
into a coherent body of theory and practice.
Chapter 2 contains a description of seven learning disabilities which are often
responsible for organizational failure:
1 - I am my position
2 - the enemy is out there
3 - the illusion of taking charge
4 - the fixation on events
5 - the parable of the boiled frog
6 - the delusion of learning from experience
7 - the myth of the management team
It relates these disabilities to the core disciplines, and argues how the
disabilities can be overcome through mastering the disciplines.
Chapter 3 crowns the argument through an example: the beer game --which shows
how rational individuals that are part of a system but that act in isolation can
get trapped in problems related to their own thinking and behaviors.
Chapters 1, 2 and 3 are essential to understand Senge's argument. Some of the
concepts which flourish out of these three chapters are:
LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS. Organizations where people continually expand their
capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive
patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and
where people are continually learning how to learn together.
Today and in the future, the organizations that will truly excel will be the
ones that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all
levels in an organization. Learning organizations are fundamentally different
from traditional authoritarian "controlling organizations."
SYSTEMS THINKING. The world IS NOT created of separate unrelated forces.
However, individuals have difficulty seeing the whole pattern. Systems thinking
is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed
over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see
how to change things effectively and with the least amount of effort --to find
the leverage points in a system.
PERSONAL MASTERY. It is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening
our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of
seeing reality objectively. The discipline of personal mastery starts with
clarifying the things that really matter to us, of living our lives in the
service of our highest aspirations.
MENTAL MODELS. They are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even
pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take
action. the discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the
mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring
them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny.
BUILDING SHARED VISION. The practice of shared vision involves the skills of
unearthing shared "pictures of the future" that foster genuine commitment and
enrollment, rather than compliance.
TEAM LEARNING. The discipline of team learning starts with "dialogue," the
capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine
"thinking together." (Dialogue differs from the more common "discussion," which
has its roots with "percussion" and "concussion," literally a heaving of ideas
back and forth in a winner-takes-all competition.) Team learning is vital
because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern
organizations. "Unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn."
METANOIA --A SHIFT OF MIND. Systems thinking needs the disciplines of building
shared vision, mental models, team learning, and personal mastery to realize its
potential. Building a shared vision fosters commitment to the long-term. Mental
models focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings in our present ways
of seeing the world. Team learning develops the skills of groups of people to
look for the larger picture that lies beyond individual perspectives. And
personal mastery fosters the personal motivation to continually learn how our
actions affect our world.
But systems thinking makes understandable the subtlest aspect of the learning
organization --the new way individuals perceive themselves and their world. At
the heart of a learning organization is a shift of mind --from seeing ourselves
as separate from the world to connected to the world, from seeing problems as
caused by someone or something "out there" to seeing how our own actions create
the problems we experience. A learning organization is a place where people are
continually discovering how they create their reality. And how they can change
it.
STRUCTURE INFLUENCES BEHAVIOR. More often than we realize, systems cause their
own crises, not external forces or individuals' mistakes. In human systems,
structure includes how people make decisions --the "operating policies" whereby
we translate perceptions, goals, rules, and norms into actions.
The reason that structural explanations are so important is that only they
address the underlying causes of behavior at a level that patterns of behavior
can be changed. Structure produces behavior, and changing underlying structures
can produce different patterns of behavior. In this sense, structural
explanations are inherently generative. Moreover, since structure in human
systems includes the "operating policies" of the decision makers in the system,
redesigning our own decision making redesigns the system structure.
Interestingly, in the beer game and in many other systems, in order for you to
succeed others must succeed as well. Moreover, each player must share this
systems viewpoint.
Part II is devoted to the Fifth Discipline, Systems Thinking, which Senge calls
the cornerstone of the learning organization. Here the discussion becomes more
technical, especially Chapters 5 and 6, where "positive" and "negative" feedback
loops are discussed (Chapter 5), and where system archetypes are introduced
(Chapter 6 and Appendix 2).
Chapter 4 begins with a qualitative discussion of 11 Laws of the Fifth
Discipline:
1 - today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions"
2 - the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back
3 - behavior grows better before it grows worse
4 - the easy way out usually leads back in
5 - the cure can be worse than the disease
6 - faster is slower
7 - cause and effect are not closely related in time and space
8 - small changes can produce big results --but the areas of highest leverage
are
often the least obvious
9 - you can have your cake and eat it too --but not at once
10 - dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants
11 - there is no blame
All of which become clear once we let go of our linear, unidirectional causation
way of thinking, and adopt the systemic perspective --where relationships are
not always linear, and where causality may be traced through a feedback loops
back to its original source and effect it, as well as be effected by it.
Chapter 5 explains the concept of "feedback loops:"
[I]n systems thinking, feedback is a broader concept. It means any reciprocal
flow of influence. In systems thinking it is an axiom that every influence is
both cause and effect. Almost nothing is ever influence in just one direction.
It teaches people to draw them, and to see distinguish "reinforcing" from
"balancing" feedback ("positive" and "negative" feedback loops, respectively).
The chapter also illustrates the differing patterns of behavior of reinforcing
and balancing phenomena. Finally, there is a discussion about delays and how
they come into play to affect the behavior of systems which contain them.
Senge argues that systems thinking is needed more than ever because of the
complexity of the interactions of today's world. Systems thinking is a
discipline for seeing the "structures" that underlie complex situations, and for
discerning high from low leverage points.
He discerns detail from dynamic complexity --the latter are situations where
cause and effect are subtle, and where the effects over time of interventions
are not obvious. He argues that conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis
methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity.
He highlights that when the same action has dramatically different effects in
the short-run and in the long-run, there is dynamic complexity. When an action
has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in
another part of the system, there is dynamic complexity. When obvious
interventions produce non-obvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity.
The systems viewpoint is generally oriented toward the long-term view, and
toward the expanded and non-obvious consequences of actions. The essence of the
discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift of mind:
seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains, and
seeing processes of change (patterns) rather than snapshots (isolated events).
Chapter 6 introduces Senge's Systems Archetypes --generic structures which
embody the key to learning to see structures in our personal and organizational
lives. Two archetypes are discussed in the chapter: (1) limits to growth and (2)
shifting the burden. The others are explained in Appendix 2:
- balancing process with delay
- shifting the burden to the intervenor
- eroding goals
- escalation
- success to the successful
- tragedy of the commons
- fixes that fail
- growth and under-investment
When discussing each archetype, Senge illustrates the guiding structure, and the
resulting behavior (or pattern) generated. He also highlights where in the
system resides the leverage point(s). The discussion is enriched with practical
examples.
Chapter 7 underscores the principle of leverage, and discusses why the actions
of nonsystemic thinkers often result in failure to achieve the desired
objectives.
Chapter 8 illustrates the ideas behind Part II with an example: the rise and
decline of People Express --an illustration of the workings of the limits to
growth archetype.
Part II contains the technical aspects and the tools needed for systems
thinking. It goes beyond the concepts laid out in Part I to demonstrate the
value and importance of systems thinking in practice, and to prepare the reader
to use systemic analysis.
Part III devotes one chapter to each of the other four disciplines, and relates
them with systems thinking and each other. These chapters are complementary, and
ARE NOT essential to understand the core of Senge's argument.
Part IV contains six prototypes which are useful, but which also ARE NOT
essential.
Part V introduces a 6th Discipline: CODA --where the author discusses what lies
ahead, after the foundation established by the five disciplines is laid out.
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第五项修炼说什么
The Fifth Discipline English Language
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