One of the few books that keeps coming to my mind and reminds me of my north star every time I need help is “The Fifth Discipline – The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization” by Peter Senge. I have used the principles and learnings from this book countless number of times during the last ten years since I read this book. 2022 has been an extremely busy year for me at work and have neither been able to read many books nor post any blogs. So, thought I will celebrate tenth anniversary of reading this book by sharing the key learnings from this book here.
Peter Senge aptly uses the example of aviation technology taking more than thirty years to serve general public after Wright brothers invented flying to highlight that an idea moves from invention to innovation only when diverse “component technologies” comes together to integrate an ensemble of technologies that are critical to one another’s success. Similarly, there are five “component disciplines” are gradually converging to innovate learning organizations. They are – Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Building Shared Vision, Team Learning and Systems Thinking. While the first four are effective on their own to a certain extent, the fifth discipline of Systems Thinking integrates the other disciplines, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice.
This blog post is not about these disciplines or even Systems Thinking but lists out two key topics that provides an understanding and basis for the core disciplines for building a learning organization. These topics are the 7 Learning Disabilities that lead to individuals and organizations failing in the long term and the 11 Laws of the Fifth Discipline that enables an organization to sustain its ability to learn and grow.
Learning Disabilities: We have seen a number of well-established companies vanish over a short period of time. A study estimates that the average lifetime of the largest industrial enterprises is less than forty years, roughly half the lifetime of a human being! We have seen a number of industry leaders disappear during the last fifteen years, the ones relevant to our context will be Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak and Blockbuster to name a few. In all these companies, there was abundant evidence in advance that the firm was in trouble. The evidence goes unheeded, though the individual managers are aware of it. The organization as a whole cannot recognize impending threats, understand the implications of those threats or come up with alternatives. This is a reflection of these organizations failing to learn, which could be due to a number of reasons – they way they are designed and managed or the way people’s jobs are defined. Most importantly, the way we have all been taught to think and interact create fundamental learning disabilities. It is important that we learn to recognize when these disabilities occur and take corrective action.
- I am my position: We are trained to be loyal to our jobs – so much so that we confuse them with our own identities. When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions across the organization interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why and the default assumption is that “someone else screwed up”.
- The enemy is out there: Humans have the propensity to find someone or something outside ourselves to blame when things go wrong. In a Product Development organization, it is common for business analysts and testers to blame developers – “if only developers write quality code, we can satisfy customers”. Developers and business analysts blame testers – “if only QA tests important scenarios, we can prevent defects in production”. Testers and developers blame business analysts – “if only BAs provide proper requirements, we can deliver solutions that customers really need”. “The enemy is out there” syndrome is actually a by-product of “I am my position” , and the non-systemic ways of looking at the world that it fosters.
- The illusion of taking charge: Many a times, managers proclaim the need for taking charge in facing difficult problems, be proactive in approach rather than react. But if we simply become more aggressive fighting “the enemy out there”, we are only reacting. True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems.
- The fixation on events: Conversations in many organizations are dominated by concern with short-term events like new budget cuts, who just got promoted or fired, missed milestone, etc. Our fixation of events is actually part of our evolutionary programming where our ancestors primarily needed only the ability to react to immediate threats to survive another day. However, if we focus on just events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we can never learn to create.
- 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 it is water at room temperature that is heated slowly, it will become groggier until it is unable to climb out of the pot. Similarly, we are also tuned to sensing sudden changes in our environment, but not to slow, gradual changes. We slip into what is famously referred as comfort zone and becomes very difficult to get out of it.
- The delusion of learning from experience: We learn from our experience but never directly experience the consequences of many of our important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.
- The myth of the management team: Every organization has a management team that is a collection of savvy, experienced managers who represent the organization’s different functions and areas of expertise. All too often, the managers tend to spend time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally and pretending that everyone is behind the team’s collective strategy.
This book covers these learning disabilities to highlight the need for the five disciplines of the learning organization. After I read this book ten years back, I consciously take a step back once in a while to introspect and look for any of these disabilities in myself and try to overcome if I found any.
The Laws of the Fifth Discipline: Systems Thinking that enables understanding complexity is the cornerstone of the learning organization. The eleven laws of this discipline helps us look at problems and opportunities holistically and avoid pitfalls of siloed thinking.
- Today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions”: Often we are puzzled by the causes of our problems, when we merely need to look at our own solutions to other problems in the past. For example – an organization that prioritizes reducing time to market thereby rushing a product to the market ends up dealing with quality issues and frustrated customers. Solutions that merely shift problems from one part of a system to another often go undetected because those who solved the first problem are different from those who inherit the new problem.
- The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back: Well-intentioned interventions to solve a problem call forth responses from the system that offset the benefits of the intervention, this phenomenon is called “compensating feedback”. For example – a person quits smoking to become more healthy but ends up gaining weight and suffers such a loss in self-image that he takes up smoking again to relieve the stress. When our initial efforts fail to produce lasting improvements, we push harder without understanding compensating feedback.
- Behavior grows better before it grows worse: Low-leverage interventions to solve problems actually work in the short-term as compensating feedback usually involves a delay. We declare victory too early and a new problem eventually shows up elsewhere in the system that someone else needs to solve now.
- The easy way out usually leads back in: We find comfort applying familiar solutions to problems, sticking to what we know best as it is easy for us. Pushing harder on familiar solutions while fundamental problems persist or worsen is a reliable indicator of non-systemic thinking reflecting “what we need here is a bigger hammer” syndrome
- The cure can be worse than the disease: Sometimes familiar solutions are not only effective but also addictive and dangerous. Alcoholism may start as simple social drinking to relieve stress but causes addiction and bigger problem in the long-term.
- Faster is slower: Organizations often go for quick fixes for problems that deliver results fast but don’t last long, despite being aware that solutions that stick take longer to show results.
- Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space: We tend to address symptoms rather than root cause as symptoms are readily visible while the real causes might have occurred at a different time. The first step in correcting this mismatch is to let go of the notion that cause and effect are closely related in time and space.
- Small changes can produce big results – but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious: We are usually tempted to go for familiar solutions to problems as they are the most obvious and easy to understand and implement. Understanding the system as a whole and deep analysis to identify the real underlying issue will help identify those small changes that have the potential to deliver the most.
- You can have your cake and eat it too – but not at once: Sometimes the knottiest dilemmas, when seem from systems point of view, are not dilemmas at all. They may just be false dichotomies. For example, we might not have to make a choice between quality and cost. They may both go up in the short-term but reduced rework in the long-term can bring in the required cost savings.
- Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants: Organizations are living systems that have integrity. Their character depends on the whole. Understanding the most challenging managerial issues require seeing the whole system that generates these issues. Dividing the system into silos can break this integrity.
- There is no blame: We tend to blame “others” for our problems. Systems thinking shows that there is no separate “other”, that you and the “other” are part of a single system.
Understanding the learning disabilities and the laws of systems thinking has helped me getting to the root of many problems over the years. It also prevented me from falling into the trap of familiar solutions that provide short-term relief but lead to bigger problems in the long-term.