Download Does Your Organization Have a Learning Disability?

Does Your Organization Have a
Learning Disability?
Senge: Chapter 2
THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE
Extraordinary Organizations…
• Are those that engage people’s commitment
and capacity to learn at all levels in the
organization
• Will recognize that the only truly
sustainable competitive advantage is the
rate at which organizations learn
• Nothing compares to the exhilaration that
comes from working within learning orgs.
Ordinary Organizations….
• Learn slowly if at all
• Characterize an organization that you are
aware of…..
Disciplines of the Learning
Organization
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Personal Mastery
Mental Models
Shared Vision
Team Learning
Systems Thinking
Systems Thinking
• All human endeavors are systems
Personal Mastery
• Continually clarifying and deepening our
personal vision
Mental Models
• Deeply engrained assumptions,
generalizations
Shared Vision
• Where there is genuine vision, people excel
• “Where there is no vision the people perish”
Team Learning
synergy
• The
of teams is the
ultimate exhilaration
• Some people, having experienced it once,
spend the rest of their lives looking for it
The Fifth Discipline
• IS, OF COURSE, SYSTEMS THINKING
• Subsumes and permeates all of the other
disciplines
• By enhancing the other disciplines, it
continually reminds us that the whole can
exceed the sum of its parts
• But ST also needs the other four disciplines
to realize its full potential
Metanoia--A shift of Mind
• The recreation of ourselves through learning
• Becoming able to do something we never
were able to do
• Re-perceiving the world and our relation to
it
• Extending our capacity to create
• There is within each one of us a deep
hunger for this type of learning
Putting the Ideas into Practice
• SENGE: The greatest societal problem
facing us today is the increased complexity
of our systems
• FORRESTER: Systems are
counterintuitive. Consequently, naïve
policy makers implement policies that have
just the opposite of their intended effect
Senge’s Metanoia
• Originally, he was interested only in public
sector problems
• But then corporate leaders came to him for
help
– These were thoughtful people, deeply aware of
the inadequacies of their own organizations
– All shared a commitment and capacity to
innovate that was lacking in the public sector
Who were these people???
•
•
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William O’Brien of Hanover Insurance
Edward Simon from Herman Miller
Ray Stata, CEO of Analog Devices
Trammel Crow
Arie De Geus of Shell Oil Co
Leaders from Apple, Ford, Polaroid,
4000 Managers who attended the Innovations
Associates workshops over eleven years
“I am my Position”
• We are trained to be loyal to our jobs—so much so
that we confuse our job with our personal identity.
• Most people see themselves within a system over
which they can exercise little control
• There is a kind of myopia in American
organizations that causes individual workers to
focus only on their small part rather than on the
larger system as a whole
• APICS is trying to address this problem
• We need to see ourselves in the context of the
larger system
“The Enemy is out There”
• Generally, we tend to see the problem as outside
us
– “no one can catch a ball in that darn field…”
• “Thou shalt always find an external agent to
blame”
– Marketing blames manufacturing—quality is poor, due
dates are missed, etc.
– Manufacturing blames Engineering
– Engineering blames Marketing
“The Enemy is out there” is
actually…
• A byproduct of “I am my position…”
– Because of the non-systemic ways of looking at
the world that it fosters
– When we focus only on our position, we do not
see how our actions extend beyond the
boundary of that position
– When those actions have consequences that go
beyond our position, they come back to hurt us
“The Enemy is out there”
manifests itself with statements
like..
•
•
•
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the Japanese are killing us
The labor unions are killing us
The government regulators are killing us
But this is always an incomplete story that
fails to recognize that “out there” and “in
here” are parts of the SAME SYSTEM
The Illusion of Taking Charge
• Being proactive is in vogue
– Just ask Steven Covey
• This means face up to difficult problems, stop
waiting for someone else to do something, solve
problems before they grow into crises, etc.
• We have a hooked on heroics culture—one that
always looks for leadership from the top
The Illusion of Taking Charge
• All too often pro-activeness is re-activeness
in disguise
• True pro-activeness comes from seeing how
we contribute to our own problems
The Fixation of Events
• We are conditioned to see life as a sequence
of events
• The situation unfolding in Kashmir is
viewed as a sequence of escalating events
• The situation in Israel/Palestine again is
seen as a situation involving events which
can be used to justify the position of either
side
The Fixation of Events
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The media reinforces the fixation on events
That is what they report
It is part of our programming
Distracts us from seeing the longer term
patterns of change that underlie events and
from understanding the causes that underlie
the patterns
Today, the primary threats to our
survival…\
• Stem not from events but from slow gradual
processes
– The environment
– The erosion of public education
–Generative thinking cannot be
sustained if people are
focused on events
The Parable of the Boiled Frog
• What is it???
The Delusion of Learning from
Experience
• We learn from taking an action and
observing the consequences of these actions
– What happens when we cannot observe the
consequences of our action?
– We all have a learning horizon—a span in time
and space within which we assess our
effectiveness
• We learn best from experience but we never
directly experience the consequences of
many of our most important decisions
The Delusion of Learning from
Experience
• Most people have short memories
• If cycles last longer than a year or two, they are
particularly hard to see and thus learn from
• To reduce the breadth of impact organizations are
decomposed into components
• But the departments create stovepipes that reduce
the observability of complex issues that cross
functional boundaries.
The Myth of the Management
Team
• Most management teams spend their time
fighting for turf
Disabilities and Disciplines
Prisoners of the System, or
Prisoners of our own Thinking
Senge: Chapter 3
THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE
The Retailer
The Wholesaler
The Brewery
Structure Influences Behavior
Redefining Your scope of
Influence
Learning disabilities and Our
ways of Thinking
The Laws of the Fifth Discipline
Senge: Chapter 4
THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE
Today’s problems come from
yesterday’s solutions
• IT solutions of yesterday are today’s
“problems”
– Bringing integration, complexity
– And along with complexity
• The potential for Chaos
• The potential for Catastrophe
Today’s problems come from
yesterday’s solutions
• THE CARPET BUMP: Jump on the bump
and the bump reappears somewhere else
• Why are sales of autos so slow this quarter?
– Because o f the tremendous rebates and zero
interest promotions of the previous quarters
The harder you push, the harder
the system pushes back
Behavior grows better before it
grows worse
The easy way out usually leads
back in
The cure can be worse than the
disease
Faster is slower
Cause and effect are not closely
related in time and space
results--but the areas of highest
leverage are often the least
obvious
You can have your cake and eat it
too, but not at once
Dividing an elephant in half does
not produce two small elephants.
There is no blame
Copyright C 2000 by James R.
Burns
• All rights reserved world-wide. CLEAR
Project Steering Committee members have
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appears at the bottom of each slide.
Prepared by James R. Burns