The Learning Organization
(Excerpted from The Fifth Discipline:
The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, by Peter M. Senge)

Learning organizations are characterized by carrying out the five disciplines Senge refers to in his book:

• Making explicit the mental models people hold -- the deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. 

• Ensuring a shared vision -- shared goals, values, and mission.

• Commitment of individuals in the organization to personal mastery (lifelong learning). Continually clarifying and deepening their personal vision, focusing their energies, developing patience, and seeing reality objectively.

• Commitment to team learning. Suspending assumptions, discovering insights not attainable individually, recognizing patterns of interaction that undermine learning (patterns of defensiveness).

• Systems thinking (the "fifth" discipline). Recognizing that businesses are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Understanding that because we are 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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