THE ART & PRACTICE OF THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION

The Fifth Discipline

Learning Organization

Adaptive vs Generative Learning

The impulse to learn in children goes deeper than desires to respond and adapt more effectively to environmental change.

The impulse to learn, at its heart, is an impulse to be generative, to expand our capability.

5 disciplines of Learning Org.

Personal Mastery

Organizations learn only through individuals who learn. Individual learning does not guarantee organizational learning.

People with a high level of personal mastery live in a continual learning mode.

Personal mastery is not something you possess. It is a process. It is a lifelong discipline.

Mental Models

• "Mental models" are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior.

• The discipline 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.

• Includes the ability to carry on ‘learningful’ conversations that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people expose their own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others.

Team Learning

• How can a team of committed managers with individual IQs above 120 have a collective IQ of 63? The discipline of team learning confronts this paradox.

• Starts with ‘dialogue’, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine ‘thinking together’.

• To the Greeks dia-logos meant a free-flowing if meaning through a group, allowing the group to discover insights not attainable individually

• [It] also involves learning how to recognize the patterns of interaction in teams that undermine learning.

Building Shared Vision

‘It’s the capacity to hold a shared picture of the future we seek to create’ . Such a vision has the power to be uplifting – and to encourage experimentation and innovation.

Systems Thinking

• ‘We learn best from our experience, but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions’

• We tend to think that cause and effect will be relatively near to one another. Thus when faced with a problem, it is the ‘solutions’ that are close by that we focus upon.

• When we fail to grasp the sistemic source of problems, we are left to "push on" symptoms rather than eliminate the underlying cause.

• Systems thinking shows that there is no outside - that the cause of your problems ar part of a single system.

7 Learning Disabilities

1."I am my position.“ - When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact.

2. "The enemy out there.“ - When we focus only on our position, we do not see how our own actions extend beyond the boundary of that position. When those actions have consequences that come back to hurt us, we misperceive these new problems as externally caused.

3. The Illusion of Taking Charge - All too often, "proactiveness" is reactiveness in disguise. If we simply become more aggressive fighting the "enemy out there," we are reacting

7 Learning Disabilities

4. The Fixation on Events - today, the primary threats to our survival come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes. Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people's thinking is dominated by short-term events.

5. The Parable of the Boiling frog -

Maladaptation to gradually building threats

7 Learning Disabilities

6. The Delusion of Learning from Experience - we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions

7. The Myth of the Management Team - "skilled incompetence"—teams full of people who are incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning.

11 Laws of Learning Organizations

1. Today's problems come from yesterdays' "solutions“

2. The harder you push the harder the system pushes back

3. Behaviour will grow worse before it grows better

4. The easy way out usualy leads back in

11 Laws of Learning Organizations

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

11 Laws of Learning Organizations

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 all at once

10. Dividing an elephangt into 2 does not produce 2 small elephants

11. There is no blame

Leading the learning organization

Leaders in learning organizations are responsible for building organizations where people are continually expanding their capabilities to shape the future - that is, leaders are responsible for learning.

Leaders as designers

1st task: Building a foundation of purpose and core values (governing ideas)

2nd task: develop policies, strategies and structures that translate governing ideas in decisions

3rd task: develop learning processes

Leaders as teachers

Helping people achieve more accurate, more insightful and more empowering views of reality

Bring to surface peoples mental models

Help people think at the Systemic Structure Level (L1: Events; L2: Patterns of behaviour L3: Systemic Structure)

Leaders as stewards

Commitment and responsability for the vision

Stewards of the vision: manage it for the benefit of others

Leader does not own the vision

7 Learning Disabilities

1."I am my position.“ - When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact.

2. "The enemy out there.“ - When we focus only on our position, we do not see how our own actions extend beyond the boundary of that position. When those actions have consequences that come back to hurt us, we misperceive these new problems as externally caused.

3. The Illusion of Taking Charge - All too often, "proactiveness" is reactiveness in disguise. If we simply become more aggressive fighting the "enemy out there," we are reacting

7 Learning Disabilities

4. The Fixation on Events - today, the primary threats to our survival come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes. Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people's thinking is dominated by short-term events.

5. The Parable of the Boiling frog -

Maladaptation to gradually building threats

7 Learning Disabilities

6. The Delusion of Learning from Experience - we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions

7. The Myth of the Management Team - "skilled incompetence"—teams full of people who are incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning.