Learning Organizations

Why Learning Organizations?

Learning Organizations are “a group of people continually enhancing their capacity to create what they want to create.”

Peter Senge from MIT and author of the Fifth Discipline, coined this simple and elegant definition. He further explains that learning organizations are just really about what happens when a group of people really work at their best or how a group of people collectively enhance their capacities to produce the outcome they really wanted to produce. This can be a work team, family, social dance group, or a group of students.

Senge states, “What fundamentally will distinguish learning organizations (the people in them) from traditional authoritarian “controlling organizations” will be the mastery of certain basic disciplines”.

Senge, and the group at the Society for Learning Organizations, www.solonline.org, are promoting five key dynamics or “disciplines” for individuals and teams to “learn” and imbed within their families, work teams, and community structures.

Systems Thinking – is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively. The essence of the discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift of mind: to seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains, and to seeing processes of change rather than snapshots.

Personal Mastery – is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. If we have a personal vision and we also see current reality objectively, then the difference between the two causes “creative tension”. That tension can be used to draw us from where we are - in current reality - to the vision.

Commitment to the truth is the other part of the process. Understanding of current reality as well as a vision are necessary for creative tension to begin to work.

Mental Models – 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. It also about carrying 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.

Shared Vision – The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing a team or family system common “pictures of the future” that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. Openness to share and commit are key elements.

Team Learning (or family/social group) – 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”. In dialogue, there is the free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues, a deep “listening” to one another and suspending of one’s own views. In team learning all participants must “suspend” their assumptions, and must regard one another as colleagues, or shall we say fellow travelers and partners.