| Creating
Quality Communities |
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| Creare
Comunita' di Qualità |
Introduction
We are losing ourselves as fields of dreams. To regain our balance,
we must create alternative ways of working and living together. Along
with total quality management and process reengineering, "organizational
learning" has become a buzzword. But there is no such thing as a "learning
organization." Like every linguistic creation, this phrase is a double-edged
sword that can be empowering or tranquilizing. When I speak of a learning
organization, I'm articulating a view that involves us-the observers-as
much as the observed in a common system. We are taking a stand for a
vision, for creating an organization we would like to work within and
which can thrive in a world of increasing interdependency and change.
It is not what the vision is, but what the vision does that matters.
Five Principles
Five operating principles are emerging. These principles are neither
rigid nor all encompassing.
- The learning organization embodies new capabilities. A
learning organization must be grounded in a culture based on transcendent
human values of love, wonder, humility, and compassion; a set of
practices for generative conversation and coordinated action; and
a capacity to see and work with the flow of life as a system.
In learning organizations, cultural norms defy our business tradition.
Acceptance of others as legitimate beings (love) replaces the
traditional will toward homogeneity. The ever-surprising manifestations
of the world show up as opportunities to grow, as opposed to frustrating
breakdowns for which somebody must take the blame (wonder). People
understand that life is not condensable, that any model is an
operational simplification always ready for improvement (humility).
And when they encounter behaviors that they neither understand
nor condone, people appreciate that such actions arise from viewpoints
and forces that are, in some sense, as valid as the viewpoints
and forces that influence their own behaviors (compassion).
Learning organizations are spaces for generative conversations
and concerted action. In them, language functions as a device
for connection, invention, and coordination. People can talk from
their hearts and connect with one another in the spirit of dialogue.
Their dialogue weaves a common fabric and connects them at a deep
level of being. When people talk and listen to each other this
way, they create a field of alignment that produces tremendous
power to invent new realities in conversation, and to bring about
these new realities in action.
One reason the myth of the great leader is so appealing is that
it absolves us of responsibility for developing leadership capabilities
more broadly. In learning organizations, the burden is shifted:
a perceived need for leadership (symptom) can be met by developing
leadership capacities throughout the organization (fundamental
solution) not just by relying on a hero leader (symptomatic solution).
Success in finding a hero leader reinforces a belief in the group's
powerlessness, thus making the fundamental solution more difficult.
In learning organizations, people are always inquiring into the
systemic consequences of their actions, rather than just focusing
on local consequences. They understand the interdependencies underlying
complex issues and act with perceptiveness and leverage. They
are patient in seeking deeper understanding rather than striking
out to "fix" problem symptoms-because they know that most fixes
are temporary at best, and often result in more severe problems
later.
Learning organizations are both more generative and more adaptive
than traditional organizations. Because of their commitment, openness,
and ability to deal with complexity, people find security not
in stability but in the dynamic equilibrium between holding on
and letting go of beliefs, assumptions, and certainties. What
they know takes a second place to what they can learn, and simplistic
answers are always less important than penetrating questions.
- Learning organizations are built by communities of servant
leaders. Leadership takes on new meanings in learning organizations.
The leaders are those building the new organization and its capabilities.
They walk ahead, regardless of their position or hierarchical authority.
Such leadership is inevitably collective.
Our conventional notions of leadership are embedded in myths
of heros-great individuals severed from their communities who
make their way through individual will, determination, and cleverness.
While there may be much to admire in such persons, our attachment
to individualistic notions of leadership may block the emergence
of the leadership of teams, and, ultimately, organizations and
societies that can lead themselves. While we wait for the great
leader who will save the day, we surrender the confidence and
power needed to make progress toward learning organizations.
As the myth of the hero leader fades, a new myth of teams and
communities that can lead themselves is emerging. But the emergence
of collective leadership does not mean that there are no "leadership
positions" like CEO or president in learning organizations. Management
hierarchies are often functional.
The clash of collective leadership and hierarchical leadership
poses a core dilemma for learning organizations. This dilemma
can't be reconciled given traditional notions of hierarchal leaders
as the people "in control" or "in charge." For this implies that
those "below" are not in control. A hierarchical value system
then arises that, as Analog Devices CEO Ray Stata puts it, "holds
the person higher up the hierarchy as somehow a more important
being."
Alternatively, the dilemma can become a source of energy and
imagination through the idea of "servant leadership," people who
lead because they chose to serve, both to serve one another and
to serve a higher purpose. Servant leadership offers a unique
mix of idealism and pragmatism. At one level, the concept is an
ideal, appealing to deeply held beliefs in the dignity and self-worth
of all people and the democratic principle that a leader's power
flows from those led. But it is also highly practical. It has
been proven in military campaigns that the only leader whom soldiers
will reliably follow when their lives are on the line is the leader
who is both competent and who soldiers believe is committed to
their well-being.
- Learning arises through performance and practice. It was
common in native American cultures to set aside sacred spaces for
learning. So too today, learning is too important to leave to chance.
It will not be adequate to offer training and hope that people will
apply new insights and methods. Nor will help from consultants be
sufficient to bring about the fundamental shifts in thinking and
interacting and the new capabilities needed to sustain those shifts.
It will be necessary to redesign work if progressive ideas are to
find their way into the mainstream of management practice.
A guiding idea for redesigning work will be virtual learning
spaces or "managerial practice fields." The learning that occurs
in sports teams and the performing arts is embedded in continuous
movement between a practice field and a performance field. It
is impossible to imagine a chamber music ensemble or a theater
troupe learning without rehearsal, just as it is impossible to
imagine a championship basketball team that never practices. Yet,
that is exactly what happens in most organizations. People only
perform. They rarely get to practice, especially together.
Several design principles come together in creating effective
practice fields: 1) the learner learns what the learner wants
to learn; 2) the people who need to learn are the people who have
the power to take action; 3) learning often occurs best through
"play," through interactions in a practice field where it is safe
to experiment and reflect; 4) learning often requires altering
the flow of time-slowing down the action to enable reflection
on tacit assumptions and counterproductive ways of interacting,
or speeding up time to reveal how current decisions can create
unanticipated problems in the long term; 5) learning often requires
compressing space so that the learner can see the effects of his
or her actions in other parts of a larger system (computer simulations
may be needed); 6) this practice field must look like the action
domain of the learners; and 7) the learning space must be shamelessly
integrated into the work space for an ongoing cycle of reflection,
experimentation, and action.
- Process and content are inseparable. Because our culture
is so caught up in separation, we have been led, according to David
Bohm, "to seek some fantasy of action that would end the fragmentation
in the content (of our thought) while leaving the fragmentation
in the actual process of thinking untouched." So, for example, executives
seek to improve fragmented policies and strategies without addressing
the fragmented and competitive relationship among the managers who
formulated the strategies and policies. Consultants propose new
process-oriented designs without addressing the modes of thinking
and interacting that cause us to focus on things rather than processes
in the first place. Management educators treat either "technical"
issues like operations, marketing, or finance, or behavioral issues
like culture, decision making, or change.
The separation between the issues we are interested in and the
processes we might use to learn about them may be the primary
obstacle to potential breakthroughs. For example, in one field
project, the team addressed the company culture of punishment
for bad news. But, rather than blaming the "culture" or "management,"
the members of the group explored their own reactions to hearing
about problems, especially from subordinates. They began to surface
their fears about mistakes and their automatic reactions and defensive
responses, like heightened competitiveness or a tendency to cover
up the problems. Gradually, they reached some deep insight into
their "culture of punishment" and their own role in sustaining
it.
- Learning is dangerous. Learning occurs between a fear and
a need. On the one hand, we feel the need to change if we are to
accomplish our goals. On the other hand, we feel the anxiety of
facing the unknown and unfamiliar. To learn significant things,
we must suspend some basic notions about our worlds and ourselves.
That is a frightening proposition for the ego.
Conventional learning is transactional. There is a learner who
has a certain way of operating and a certain knowledge. If this
knowledge proves to be incomplete or ineffective, the learner
may drop part of it, change some of it, or add some new ideas
to it. This may be an accurate description of how we learn to
find better bargains or make better investments, but it fails
to get to the heart of the learning involved when we question
deep beliefs and mental models.
The problem with this view is that the self is not separate from
the ideas and assumptions that form it. Our mental models are
not like pieces of clothing that we can put on or take off. They
are basic constitutive structures of our personality. Most of
the time, we are our mental models.
The learning required in becoming a learning organization is
"transformational learning." Static notions of who we are must
be checked at the door. In transformational learning, there are
no problems "out there" to be solved independent of how we think
and act in articulating these problems. Such learning is not ultimately
about tools and techniques. It is about who we are. We often prefer
to fail again and again rather than let go of some core belief
or master assessment.
This explains the paradox of learning. Even when we claim we
want to learn, we normally mean that we want to acquire some new
tool or understanding. When we see that to learn, we must be willing
to look foolish, to let another teach us, learning doesn't always
look so good anymore. It is little coincidence that virtually
all spiritual disciplines, regardless of culture or religious
setting, are practiced in communities. Only with the support,
insight, and fellowship of a community can we face the dangers
of learning meaningful things.
Developing Leadership Communities
Once we realize that building learning organizations is grounded in
developing leadership communities, a core question remains: "How do
such communities form, grow, and become influential?" Ford's Vic Leo
suggests a three-stage architecture of engagement: 1) finding those
predisposed to this work, 2) core community-building activities, and
3) practical experimentation and testing.
- Predisposition. It's easy to waste time trying to make
changes with people who do not want, or are not ready for, such
changes. For example, when people reflect on how they become involved
in systemic thinking and organizational learning, they discover
that they are drawn to the "systems perspective" by academic training
or life experiences. They are skeptical of conventional strategies
for improvement-reorganizations, training, management programs,
speeches from "on high." Predisposition is important, especially
in the early stages of building momentum when there are few practical
results to point to. Those not predisposed to systems thinking should
not be excluded, but they may play less important roles at the outset.
If they are not included, because they raise difficult questions
or disagree with certain ideas, what starts as a learning community
can degenerate into a cult.
- Community-building activities. How those predisposed begin
to know each other and to work together involves a cycle of community-building
activities and practical experimentation. The former must be intense
enough and open-ended enough to foster trusting personal relationships
and to lay a foundation of knowledge and skills. The latter must
offer realistic starting steps in applying new knowledge and skills
to important issues.
For example, at the Learning Center, we explore the tools, methods,
and personal dimensions of systems thinking, often resulting in
a "piercing experience," where the systems perspective begins
to take on a deeper meaning and the nature of the journey ahead
becomes clearer. In this journey, there are no "teachers" with
correct answers, only guides with different areas of expertise
and experience that may help along the way. Each of us gives up
our own certainty and recognizes our interdependency within the
larger community of practitioners. The honest, humble, and purposeful
"I don't know" grounds our vision for learning organizations.
- Practical experimentation and testing. What nurtures the
unfolding community is active experimentation where people wrestle
with crucial strategic and operational issues. In our work, we undertake
learning projects that focus on key issues, because of the motivation
for learning and because of the potential for significant improvement
in business results.
Currently, two "practice field" projects are underway: dialogue
projects and learning laboratory projects. Dialogue projects focus
directly on the deeper patterns of communication that underlie
whatever issues are being confronted by a management team. Learning
laboratory projects focus on areas such as new product development,
management accounting and control systems, and services management.
For example, a team at Ford, responsible for creating the next
generation Lincoln Continental, is also creating a New Car Development
Learning Laboratory. The project has two objectives: to improve
the effectiveness of the team in its current project and to develop
better theory and tools that will lead to broader systemic thinking
in product development at Ford. Early returns show unprecedented
levels of internal coordination.
The learning laboratories and dialogue projects all follow the
operating principles. What started as a "practice field" has led
to penetrating insights into critical business issues. The practice
fields are becoming integrated into everyday company activities.
When we started the pilot projects, we had a vision of transforming
organizations through learning processes focused on significant
business problems. We saw practice fields as a place where teams
could meet to reflect on structures, identify counterproductive
behaviors, experiment with alternative strategies, and design
solutions for actual work settings. The core of the projects were
"management flight simulators," computer simulations based on
systems thinking. The simulators would enable managers to "compress
time and space" to better understand the long-term consequences
of their decisions and to reflect on their assumptions.
We find that when people have a practice field where they can
relate to each other safely and playfully, where they can openly
explore difficult issues, they begin to see their learning community
as a new way of managing.
New Alternatives
Building learning organizations is not an individual task. It demands
a shift that goes all the way to the core of our culture. We have drifted
into a culture that fragments our thoughts, that detaches the world
from the self and the self from its community. We have gained control
of our environment, but we have lost our artistic edge. We are so focused
on our security that we don't see the price we pay: living in bureaucratic
organizations where the wonder and joy of learning have no place. Thus
we are losing the spaces to dance with the ever-changing patterns of
life. We need to invent a new learning model for business, education,
health care, government, and family. This invention will come from the
patient, concerted efforts of communities of people invoking aspiration
and wonder. As these communities manage to produce fundamental changes,
we will regain our memory-the memory of the community nature of the
self and the poetic nature of language and the world-the memory of the
whole.
Peter M. Senge is a faculty member of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and director of the Center for Organizational
Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management, (617) 253-1575. He is
the author of The Fifth Discipline and founding partner of Innovation
Associates.
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