The book’s subtitle -- The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization -- is also misleading. After a quick review, including a trip to YouTube to find someone else’s three-minute summary of the book, it seems clear that “Being a Learning Organization” isn’t the Fifth Discipline, although the way that title and its subtitle are paired would ordinarily make one think so. Instead, the book describes five disciplines that, if practiced, can help create learning organizations. Those five disciplines are: Systems Thinking, Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Building Shared Vision, and Team Learning.
This is the order that they are first presented in the book -- which would make one think that Team Learning is the Fifth Discipline, because it comes fifth on that list. But it isn’t. As you progress deeper into the book, it becomes clear that Systems Thinking is actually the Fifth Discipline, and that the other four disciplines are all part of that larger concept. They are not, in fact, five disciplines, they are four facets of one discipline, and that discipline, placed first because of that primacy, is therefore the First Discipline, not the Fifth.
Confused, yet? I was. But that’s okay. We’re better off just chucking all that terminology and hierarchy and just focusing on the subject that the book covers really well -- Systems Thinking.
Learning Disabilities
The argument for adopting this “discipline” is compelling. In one of the opening chapters Senge describes seven “learning disabilities” that typically keep people and companies from adopting a systems perspective. Among the most compelling for me is The Fixation on Events.
Our fixation on events is actually part of our evolutionary programming. If you wanted to design a cave person for survival, ability to contemplate the cosmos would not be a high-ranking design criterion. What is important is the ability to see the saber-toothed tiger over your left shoulder and react quickly. The irony is that, today, the primary threats to our survival, both of our organizations and of our societies, come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes; the arms race, environmental decay, the erosion of a society’s public education system, increasingly obsolete physical capital, and decline in design or product quality (at least relative to competitors’ quality) are all slow, gradual processes.
Another is The Parable of the Boiled Frog.
Maladaptation to gradually building threats to survival is so pervasive in systems studies of corporate failure that it has given rise to the parable of the “boiled frog.” If you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to scramble out. But if you place the frog in room temperature water, and don’t scare him, he’ll stay put. Now, if the pot sits on a heat source, and if you gradually turn up the temperature, something very interesting happens. As the temperature rises from 70 to 80 degrees F., the frog will do nothing. In fact, he will show every sign of enjoying himself. As the temperature gradually increases, the frog will become groggier and groggier, until he is unable to climb out of the pot. Though there is nothing restraining him, the frog will sit there and boil. Why? Because the frog’s internal apparatus for sensing threats to survival is geared to sudden changes in his environment, not to slow, gradual changes.
Even though the reality of this “boiled frog” phenomenon has been pretty well debunked, the idea persists because of its explanatory power. How many of our organizations, and how many of us, are slowly boiling frogs, succumbing slowly to existential threats that happen on too long of a timescale for us to perceive for the dangers they are?
This, above all, is the primary argument for changing your thinking -- from one focused on events to another focused on systems.
Rules of Systems Thinking
Systems thinking is a discipline with several hard and fast rules -- eleven of which Senge describes in the early chapters of his book. Each will likely challenge you and the way you traditionally think about things, but which, from a systems perspective, make perfect sense. Among the most compelling for me is: Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
By “effects,” I mean the obvious symptoms that indicate that there are problems -- drug abuse, unemployment, starving children, falling orders, and sagging profits. By “cause” I mean the interaction of the underlying system that is most responsible for generating the symptoms, and which, if recognized, could lead to changes producing lasting improvement. Why is this a problem? Because most of us assume they are -- most of us assume, most of the time, that cause and effect are close in time and space.
When we play as children, problems are never far away from their solutions -- as long, at least, as we confine our play to one group of toys. Years later, as managers, we tend to believe that the world works the same way. If there is a problem on the manufacturing line, we look for a cause in manufacturing. If salespeople can’t meet targets, we think we need new sales incentives or promotions. If there is inadequate housing, we build more houses. If there is inadequate food, the solution must be more food.
[But as we] eventually discover, the root of our difficulties is neither recalcitrant problems nor evil adversaries -- but ourselves. There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of reality in complex systems and our predominant ways of thinking about that reality. The first step in correcting that mismatch is to let go of the notion that cause and effect are close in time and space.
This is fundamental to systems thinking. Stated even more forcefully, we can turn to another of Senge’s rules: There is no blame.
We tend to blame outside circumstances for our problems. “Someone else” -- the competitors, the press, the changing mood of the marketplace, the government -- did it to us. Systems thinking shows us that there is no outside; that you and the cause of your problems are part of a single system. The cure lies in your relationship with your “enemy.”
This may be the most profound and essential thought of the entire book. There is no outside. Everything is part of the system, and if you don’t see that, you inevitably need to expand your view to take more parts of the system that is surely there into account.
Putting It Into Practice
There are several passages in this book that resonate with me strongly -- not just because they seem to provide unique insights into the general aspects of better strategy and execution, but because they seem to be addressing actual roadblocks in my actual organization.
Systems thinking is especially prone to evoking defensiveness because of its central message, that our actions create our reality. Thus, a team may resist seeing important problems more systemically. To do so would imply that the problems arise from our own policies and strategies -- that is “from us” -- rather than from forces outside our control. I have seen many situations where teams will say “we’re already thinking systemically,” or espouse a systems view, then do nothing to put it into practice, or simply hold steadfastly to the view that “there’s nothing we can do except cope with these problems.” All of these strategies succeed in avoiding serious examination of how their own own actions may be creating the very problems with which they try so hard to cope. More than other analytic frameworks, systems thinking requires mature teams capable of inquiring into complex, conflictual issues.
I run a trade association. Many of our KPIs are dependent on participation rates in specific programs by our membership. Fifty percent of our members, for example, should be sending at least one representative to our Annual Conference. Some, like this example, are tough for us to meet, but we rarely take a systems approach to the problem, or, if we do, we fail to include our own creativity and efforts in the system. Our systems only ever include the tried and true marketing tactics that have worked for years in getting the most engaged of our members to sign up for another conference.
But even though success depends on our getting some of the lesser engaged members to attend, we don’t alter our tactics and try to connect with them in some other way. Our system is defined by the newsletter announcements, emails, websites, and social media posts that are enough to remind and/or convince the base that it’s time to register. For some significant portion of our membership, those tactics are never going to convince them to attend -- and yet our strategy always and only doubles or triples down on these tactics.
What’s needed is a broadening of our defined system to include not just our established tactics, but our creative brains and personal influence as well. Pick up the phone. Ask a non-registered member why they aren’t attending, and use that information to design new tactics or, more likely, new value propositions that would convince them to attend in the future.
Things like that aren’t done because they’re not part of the system we’ve defined. And rather than recognize that and adapt the system, we fall back on several of the traps that Senge describes in his book. It’s the member, we might say. He’s the one making the decision to attend. There’s nothing I can do to change his mind.
For this and many other challenges I face, viewing the challenge in the context of an interactive system in which I play a key role, would likely bring needed insight and new action.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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