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Out of
the Box Coaching and
Breakthroughs with the Enneagram,
Mary R. Bast, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved. Revised:
January 15, 2012
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The
Learning Organization
Learning organizations
are characterized by the five disciplines
described by Peter Senge in
The Fifth
Discipline:
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Mental models
are explicit – the deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or images that influence how we
understand the world and how we take action.
-
The
vision
is shared – shared goals,
values, and mission.
-
Individuals commit to personal mastery
(lifelong learning) –
continually clarifying and deepening their personal
vision, focusing their energies, developing patience, and seeing reality
objectively.
-
Teams commit to
team
learning
– suspend assumptions, discover insights not attainable
individually, recognize patterns of defensiveness that undermine learning.
-
Systems thinking is
predominant
(the "fifth" discipline)
– recognizing that businesses are
bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions that often take years to fully play
out their effects on each other; and when we're part of that
fabric, it's hard to see the whole pattern of change. Some key concepts
of
systems thinking:
-
Structure influences behavior (systems
cause their own crises); different people in the same structure tend to produce
qualitatively similar results (they get caught in the same ruts).
-
Structure in human systems is subtle,
including how people make decisions (the operating policies whereby we translate
perceptions, goals, rules, and norms into action).
-
People
often have potential leverage they don't exercise because they focus
only on their own decisions and
ignore how their decisions affect others.
-
It's
important to
address the underlying causes
of behavior at a level that patterns of behavior can be changed.
-
Leverage comes from
new ways of thinking. In
everyday thinking, learning has come to be synonymous with "taking in
information," or adaptive learning. The learning organization is
involved in generative learning
– learning that enhances our capacity to create
("learning about learning").
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