5.14. a conversation with peter senge new development in lea

The Fifth Discipline was the byproduct of many years of work by many persons but the book’s author Peter Senge deserves tremendous credit for weaving

together disparate bodies of research in an engaging, practical manner that changed the thinking of academics and executives alike. Now Senge is working

to build a sustainable movement and community around the concepts of organizational learning, building a consortium of companies to test the concepts

of organizational learning, issues of governance, change, and leadership.

A Conversation with Peter Senge: New Developments in Organizational

Learning

ROBERT M. FULMER J. BERNARD KEYS

Peter Senge is a senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is part of the Organizational Learning and Change Group. He is author of the widely acclaimed best selling book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Pmctice of the Leavning Organization and, with his colleagues Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith, and Art Kleiner, co-author of The Fifth Discipline Field- book: Strategies and Tools for Building a Leaming Organization.

In reviewing Peter Senge’s work, Fortune Magazine described his goal in life as that of “changing the thinking of the managerial world.” Both his readers and leadership seminar participants would agree. Recently, Senge and his colleagues established The Society for Organizational Learning (SOL).

This interview was conducted by Robert Fulmer, professor of management at the Graduate School of Business at The College of William & Mary, and J. Bernard Keys, Fuller Callaway Professor of Busi- ness at the Center for Managerial Learning & Business Simulation at the College of Business Admin- istration at Georgia Southern University.

F/K: You say in The Fifth Discipline that you wrote the book partially because you were afraid that organizational learning was going to become just another management fad.

SENGE: There was a very clear notion in my head, an intuition, that the learning idea would become a fad. I had lived through the vision fad and heard the president of the

AUTUMN1998 33

1. Building Shared Vision-the practice of unearthing shared “pictures of the future” that foster genuine commitment.

Personal Mastery-the skill of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision.

Mental Models-the ability to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to scrutinize them, and to make them open to the influence of others.

Team Learning-the capacity to “think together” which is gained by mastering the practice of dialogue and discussion.

5. Systems Thinking-the discipline that integrates the others, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice.

F/K:

United States talking about “the vision thing.” First, I didn’t think that I-or the people I worked with-should stand on the

sideline and watch it [organizational learning] go by. Keep in mind that work in the field had been going on for 20 years. If the book was to be successful, it was going to have to be a success primarily as a point of reference. People who examined organizational learning would have to take into consideration the basic ideas of systems thinking, shared vision, mental models, and the other things that we discussed in the book.

I didn’t think that the book would be the be-all and end-all of organizational learning. A subject as vast as organizational learning would never have a definitive statement, nor should it have. It should always be a growing, evolving thing.

It’s interesting to look back now, after seven years. As best I can tell, the book has become a point of reference. In my wildest hopes, I thought the book would sell maybe 10,000 or 20,000 copies-perhaps the 10,000 people already actively involved in this field would buy it. I knew exactly who I was writing the book for. It was the people really engaged in this kind of work; it was not, at the time, a book to convince anyone to join the field.

I spent over a year negotiating with the editor at Doubleday, making it clear that this would not be a “how-to” book. It took some convincing to make this point, but she agreed to it and stuck to her agreement. The implication of this was that it would never sell a lot of copies, because it was not written in the same style as most mainstream management books.

All of this resulted from the simple vision that I did want to put a stake in the ground for organizational learning. The hundreds of thousands of copies that have sold were a complete surprise. I’m not even sure that it’s such a good idea for the field that this book has been as popular as it has.

Using an engineering analogy, you suggested in The Fifth Discipline that five new “component technologies” were converging in bringing about learning organizations (see “The Five Disciplines”). The integration of these ideas in one book was unique. Would you comment on this?

SENGE: This integration didn’t just happen in the book; the book was a byproduct of about

34 ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS

15 years of work by several persons including me. The Western idea that a person owns an idea is bizarre-ideas are very much a product of our lifetime and of all the people who influence us directly and indirectly.

In any event, the work had been going forward in training, education, and con- sulting, weaving together the systems perspective and the personal developmental perspective in an organizational context. My work with two colleagues began in 1977 and 1978, when we created a program called “Leadership and Mastery.” One of the three people, Charlie Keifer, was a very savvy organizational consultant who had been mentored by a man here at MIT named Dick Be&hard-one of the grand old men of organizational change. The second was Robert Fritz, a composer and tal- ented musician who, among other things, had played clarinet for Dave Brubeck and taught composition. My background was systems. Interestingly, the three of us provided the strands that laid the foundation for the work-Robert was personal mastery, Charlie was the change guy, and I was the systems guy. We all brought our own personal philosophy to the strands as we wove them together.

F/K: Could you bring us up to date on your definition of a learning organization?

SENGE: Well, the idea of a learning organization has always been just that: an idea. There is a subtle distinction that not many people understand between generative ideas and descriptive ideas. You don’t want to go out and develop survey instruments and measurement instruments and ask, Are we a learning organization? That’s like asking, Am I a human being? We can spend a lot of time trying to define something like this. The learning organization, technically speaking, has always been simply a vision, and as a vision it has a life of its own, so that the more reality evolves the more the vision should evolve. Its purpose is not to exist as an idea-its purpose is to be generative in the world. Unfortunately, this is not very widely appreciated. Robert Fritz dealt with this with a timeless insight: “It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.” If one considers a vision only in terms of accomplishing something, they might set a very easy vision. On the other hand, one might set a very lofty vision-and reality moves more as a consequence. Which of those visions is more important?

The “learning organization” has always been that second kind of creature. At the elementary level, a learning organization is still a group of people working together to collectively enhance their capacities to create results that they truly care about. That is more or less the definition in the book-a simple definition built on what learning is all about. Learning is the ability to enhance one’s capacity to accom- plish something one really cares about. To enhance my capacity to do something I don’t care about isn’t really very significant learning.

Today there are a lot of nuances and additional ideas regarding the learning organization. Most of them have evolved in the last three years, in response to the question posed by Chris Argyris 20 years ago, “What is an organization that it might learn?” That was a great question.

In some sense, an organization doesn’t enhance its capacity to learn. In the first place, it is very difficult to define what an organization really is. No one can really define what Ford Motor Company or Microsoft really is. Sure, they are legal entities, and there is a set of buildings. But legal definitions or buildings hardly get to the heart of an organization, say like MIT or Ford. At a simpler level, we could say that an organization is a human community. It is a living community of people who have certain shared responsibilities. Therefore, we have been doing a lot of thinking in the

ACiIlZiMN1998 35

past three years about the nature of learning communities. This has led us to the question, “What is the nature of knowledge?” We realize that knowledge is multi-faceted. Consequently, learning communities are diverse and multi-faceted. They are the broadest possible notion of knowledge-creating tools, human capabil- ity, and practical know-how.

F/K Tell us about SOL-your new initiative.

SENGE: The key issue here is very simple and quite central. And it is one about which our work for the past 20 years has been silent. How do you organize for learning? What are the kinds of structural arrangements? What is the necessary distribution of power? Organizational structure is always about the distribution of power. What are the sort of governance processes that are conducive to building knowledge and creating new knowledge?

Questions have been brought to us again and again by practitioners. If you’re in a large organization, you must think about this because a big part of what occu- pies your attention is the question of who’s got power and who doesn’t, and what will happen to us if we try change, and people with power don’t like it. Part of what I was talking about earlier-the backlash-is a natural part of change processes in which innovators must confront established power structures. We have never paid much attention to this question until the cumulative evidence was so overwhelm- ing that we realized it was insane not to pay attention.

We arrived at this the same way we got into systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, and the other concepts central to our approach to organizational learning. We did it by applying the question to ourselves first. We asked, “How should the Organizational Learning Center be organized? How should power be distributed? What should be the governance process? What governance process would be most conducive to an organization producing knowledge?” We started this about two years ago. What eventually emerged was The Society of Organiza- tional Learning.

SOL represents a very different way to organize for producing knowledge. The person who helped us with this is probably the best thinker that I have ever met on the subjects of organizational structure and organic processes. Dee Hock, the founder of Visa International, is the person who helped us with our ideas. He’s an extraordinarily insightful and effective person. He built the most successful and interesting organization of the late 20th century. Everyone wants to write about Microsoft because it’s fun writing about someone who makes a lot of money, like Bill Gates. But few people realize that the market value of Microsoft is less than one-fifth the market value of VISA International.

One reason no one thinks of VISA International is that it has only 3,000 employ- ees. Another is that it has never made anyone a billionaire. The reason is that at its absolute core, VISA’s philosophy of governance is to localize power, authority and, consequently, wealth. It’s a bottoms-up holding company, owned by its member- banks. Its organizational framework is absolutely fascinating and more radical than anything else that I know about on its scale.

F/K: And you’re building on this model in SOL?

SENGE: Well, VISA provided an inspiration, but we are trying to build on the process that produced VISA, not copy VISA. SOL is really a marriage of organizational learning


and Dee Hocks new theories on organizing and distributing power and control. It potentially represents a very new stake in the ground.

F/K: The insignia and acronym for SOL are impressive-with the nice yellow sunspot and the acronym that stands for the sun, or source of learning.

SENGE:

F/K:

Dee told us it took two years to come up with the name VISA. He said what you need is a word that people anyplace in the world will understand and can commu- nicate. Further, it must be understood by anybody. SOL, of course, is Spanish for sun and has Latin roots. It fits the criteria well.

SOL’S purpose was worked out through a metaphor. We realized that our purpose had to do with knowledge. We also realized that our economy had not been able to build knowledge about its most pressing problems: inequality, environmen- tal destruction, concentration of wealth and power, problems that cause institutions such as school systems or corporations to fail, etc. Why is it that we can’t seem to bring together the best kind of theoretical thinking and the best kind of practical thinking? Why can’t we learn?

We developed a metaphor for knowledge based on the image of a tree. The roots are like the deep theory-the deepest timeless insights. They are below the surface and take a long time to develop. But ultimately the health of the tree is dependent on the health of its root system. The branches of the tree are like the methods-the tools-the ways people dig deep to address important problems. The fruit of the tree is the practical know-how. Ultimately, you know that learning is occurring when human beings are able to do something that they couldn’t do before. The essence of knowledge creation is the integration of this whole system. The tree is also a system because a tree produces more trees. What drives the tree as a system? The source of energy that makes the tree work, of course, is the sun. So, finally, we arrived at the source of energy that drives the knowledge-creating system, the human spirit and energy without which, like the sunshine, there would be no trees and no knowledge.

In “Communities of Commitment,” an article in the Autumn 1993 issue of Organiza- tional Dynamics, you and your colleague, Fred Kofman, extended your thinking about learning disabilities to summarize some of the barriers to creating the learning organization: fragmentation of problem solving, an overemphasis on competi- tion to the exclusion of collaboration, and a tendency of organizations to experiment or innovate only when compelled to do so. Do these barriers still exist today?

SENGE: Yes. That article, “Communities of Commitment,” was really the first place where the idea of a learning organization as a learning community began to take shape. It had been bubbling for a long time. I think that all of those barriers are still there-in spades! In fact, they are probably more there, not less, and I think there is probably a dynamic of change that we all misunderstand. We must recognize that all of us have a predis- position to linear thinking (A leads to B, B leads to C, etc.) when in fact an awful lot of change comes from situations where things get worse before they get better. It’s similar to the case of non-linear thermodynamics, where we talk about the system having to become more and more in disequilibrium, or disharmony, in order to move to a new state of order. I think these are quite common phenomena in nature.

If anything, those learning disabilities are even more present today. We have observed this in a lot of projects that we have undertaken. When I talked about putting a stake in the ground for The F@h Discipline, it was a stake to build a collab-

AUTUMN1998 37

oration, a consortium of companies, that could work together and start to build a critical mass for learning. We’ve had a lot of experience with this consortium in the past few years. Most of our experience has been very consistent around this dynamic of change. First, you must create pockets of profound change. One of the things that we wish to test is to determine if these ideas really work: “Can they make a differ- ence? Can people work together in profound change?” I think we have found that the ideas really work. But they also create a lot of unsettlement in the larger systems.

To understand this dynamic, consider that you are never going to bring about change in every part of a large organization at the same time. There will be certain areas where people are predisposed to change-or not to change-perhaps because of certain business needs. That means that some parts of the organization will progress more rapidly than others. If they are successful and produce significant enhanced results, the successes will threaten the remainder of the organization. If people have actually “learned” and begun to change how they think and act, their new behavior will also be threatening. Others not predisposed to change will react with a natural competitive response.

Threat tends to bring out people’s most habitual ways of thinking and acting. Con- sequently, the fragmentation of ideas and problem-solving becomes a little greater.

In some sense, it is as if you are turning a light up a little brighter and all the small imperfections in the existing system become more evident. At the same time, this bright light casts a stronger shadow, and those involved in the new innovative teams also become blind to their effects as the more traditional system. The net result is that we have seen people lose their jobs or fail to get promotions that they would have otherwise gotten. They put themselves very much at risk. In almost every organization that we have worked with successfully, there have been significant casualties.

F/K: This occurs as people who would become learners try to open up to promote change?

SENGE: As they try to become more authentic and more trusting, they become a huge threat to everyone around them. They start talking about things that nobody ever talked about. There are good reasons why people don’t talk about that stuff; you can lose your job talking about it! So, a simplistic way to think about this is to realize that to do this kind of work [promoting change and developing learning], you must create a counterculture. And the organization’s immune system mobilizes itself in response. We have not seen an exception to this. The specific outcomes are quite different, and the people who are at risk have invariably prevailed, often by going to work in other SOL-member companies. But sometimes work has, for a time, come to a complete halt in companies that were making a lot of progress.

F/K: This is probably why you have been dealing more with leadership of learning organizations recently. You have an article, I believe, entitled “Leading Learning Orga- nizations,” in which you deal with the type of leaders that promote learning and the ones who tend to prevent it.

SENGE: Yes. First, I think it’s worth reflecting on what leadership is all about. It has been argued, though perhaps not proven, that more has been written on the subject of leadership through the centuries than on any other subject related to management. Obviously, these are not simply matters about which one makes a definitive or once-and-for-all statement. It is well that we continue to explore questions such as, What do leaders do?


F/K:

What do we mean by leaders? Much literature about leadership has been dominated by a personal perspective about leadership-the leader’s style, the leader’s characteristics-even the word charismatic has gotten sucked into this. The tall person with the booming voice-characteristics like this are obviously very superficial.

A lot of people who are physically impressive are very shallow. Others who are very unimpressive physically are very deep. Ironically, the word charismatic comes from the church and means “gifts.” So which of my gifts, “charisma,” are important? Obviously not just a booming voice or imposing stature. There has been a tendency-maybe a fixation-to focus on personal qualities of leadership.

In our writing and thinking on communities of commitment, we have come to consider a concept that we call the “ecology of leadership”: How does an organization develop an effective and healthy ecology of leadership? This is to me a useful metaphor and a useful question. I really believe that leadership is always collective. Even at the simplest level, we might ask, “How can you know that there is a leader if there aren’t followers?”

Leadership is often exercised by groups and by very diverse types of people in very different situations. We Americans-perhaps the Europeans as well-make a mistake again and again. We use the word leader as a synonym to mean top management. There is no better way to confuse anything than to use two completely different words to mean the same thing. Use one word. If you mean top management, say that-don’t use leader. Think about pitchers and catchers in baseball. They rep- resent different roles, but either a pitcher or catcher can be a team leader. And there are many important leaders in organizations who are not top managers.

Leaders are people who help bring new realities into being. The fundamental function of leadership is that it is the way in which human beings create new realities. Managers, by contrast, seek to insure the effective operation of an organization within a given reality, more than creating a new reality. In that sense, most of the important leaders in organizations are technologists-people who help people learn new ways of doing something. They create a new reality around a new set of systems or ways of working. They are also what we call internal networkers, people who help spread new ideas. In large organizations they are especially important. Of course, executive leaders also matter. Therefore, it is really quite important that we begin thinking about leadership communities-diverse people, working collabora- tively in the service of something they care about.

This is why the notion of leadership ecology makes sense. What are the conditions in the organization that permit the growth of different types of leaders? What are the conditions in organizations that are conducive for leaders to do their work- to bring about new realities?

We are in the midst of a major study investigating two different questions: How do these different types of leadership function-line leaders, executive leaders, net- work leaders? And what are the forces that tend to sustain, impede, or undermine transformational initiatives (initiatives aimed at deep change at the personal, interper- sonal, and systemic levels)? As we begin to connect these two questions, a new way of theorizing about leadership is becoming apparent. There are working papers that deal with this, and we are now using them to organize research in SOL member companies.

Since we frequently work with management games, may we interject a question for our own interest. How important are games and simulations in your work here? I believe that you have used People’s Express, Hanover Insurance Claims Game, and other simulations to drive strategic planning sessions.

AUTUMN 1998 39

SENGE: Yes, games are vital to learning. In fact, you could say that they are intrinsic to learning. But you must define games broadly, because all learning processes involve at least two elements that define games.

First, you have to learn through doing at some level. From John Dewey forward, no learning theorist worth his or her salt would say that you could learn without some opportunity to take action. You know the Chinese proverb: I listen and I for- get, I see and I understand, I do and I learn (or I retain).

Second, you need to act in a context that includes safety. The child is a master- ful learner in part because the child spends a lot of time playing in an environment that provides a certain measure of safety. When you meet a person who is 80 years old and still playing, you meet a person who is a great learner. The spirit of play is important-the kind of lightness; “let’s try it.” And so what is a game except the spirit of play, of experimentation.

We know what children need to play. All learning is experiential and all learning requires safety. If we could only look at ourselves and be as considerate of one another as we are of our children, learning would occur naturally. If we were around a child that never played, we would say, “Give the kid a chance to play.” Why not give adults the chance to play?

F/K: From your observations of groups attempting to become “learning organizations,” what is working and what is not working?

SENGE: Obviously, the reasons for both success and failure are rather complex and hard to iso- late in a generic way. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that the two major themes that separate success and failure are commitment and community. And it’s not surprising that these are connected. We have found that committed champions are almost essen- tial for any type of organizational transformation. The process of changing from “business as usual” to embracing organizational learning as a way of life requires an unusual degree of commitment, because it insists that large numbers of people change the way they think and act. There is natural resistance to this, much of it at an uncon- scious level. People feel threatened, and usually there are setbacks along the way. When the change “hits the wall,” that’s where community is important. Being a cham- pion for transformation can be a lonely business. That’s why we insist on groups of individuals within an organization getting involved in efforts associated with SOL. This is another reason why I believe SOL is important. It provides for a larger community in which people who are experiencing difficulties in their organization can relate to individuals who have faced similar problems in other companies.

F/K: Ralph Waldo Emerson used to ask his friends, “What has become clear to you since last we met?” What is the most important thing Peter Senge has learned since the publication of The Fifth Discipline?

SENGE: Well, you know that was a trick question. Emerson used it to help him remember when he last saw the other person. By reviewing the topic, Emerson didn’t have to admit that he could not remember their last conversation. But you’re asking a legit- imate question, so I’ll try to respond.

Probably the most important lessons I’ve learned revolve around the incredible complexity of the challenges of creating learning organizations, or attempting to influence the tension between an incredibly important interest in this type of organizational transformation and the temptation for “fadism,” where organizations seek


simple solutions to extremely complex challenges.

F/K: What is your next major challenge or objective?

SENGE: I suppose it involves helping to build a sustainable movement and community around the concepts of organizational learning. We’ve struggled, first with the Cen- ter for Organizational Learning (OLC) and, more recently, as we have evolved into the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL), with how to gain diversity and reach without compromising the integrity of some very fundamental concepts and com- mitments. We want to be inclusive, but I worry about the large numbers of organizations that advertise themselves as being “specialists in organizational learning” but that actually have very little grounding in the fundamental disciplines. The challenge for all of us here at SOL is to manage and maintain growth, commitment, community, and scope without watering down the principles that make organizational learning a valuable objective for organizations of all types.

F/K: What is your personal vision for Peter Senge, circa 2002?

SENGE: Well, I don’t have a quantifiable objective in terms of members or books sold or many of the traditional measures. I suppose my real vision is to see SOL becoming a viable force around the world and in organizations ranging from business to schools, or health care institutions to government, with strong organizational components throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, Southern Africa, and South America. This would be a major achievement. Perhaps it is not likely to achieve this level of scope, but it’s a possibility.

PI l$ To order reprints, call 800-644-2464 (ref. number 9869). For photocopy permission, see page 2.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

See Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Currency Doubleday) and Peter Senge, Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith and Art Kleiner, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strate- gies and Tools for Building a Learning Organiza- tion. For descriptions of Peter Senge’s work beyond the books referenced above, see The Learning Organization in Action: A Special Report

from Organizational Dynamics (New York: American Management Association, 1994). This special report contains the article, “Com- munities of Commitment,” by Fred Kofman and Peter Senge as well as other contributions from the MIT Center for Organizational Learning. See also Leading Learning Organiza- tions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Orga- nizational Learning Research Monograph).


5.14. a conversation with peter senge new development in lea

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