I ordered Gary Hamel's new book, The Future of Management, to read over Christmas but before it arrived I decided to re-read the classic The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (1990). If you too need to refresh your memory, the five disciplines are the following:
1. Building shared visions to foster commitment to the long term;
2. mental models that focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings in our present ways of seeing the world;
3. team learning that develops the skills of groups to look for the larger picture;
4. personal mastery fosters the personal motivation to continually learn how our actions affect our world;
5. and the fifth discipline is systems thinking, closely linked to a learning organisation.
I wonder how many learning organisations there are out there...too few...
To me it is obvious that organisations dealing with knowledge on high-level should develop as learning organisations. And yet, many managers seem to run them as factories.
Def: Systems thinking is a methodology evolving from the application of system dynamics; a strategic simulation tool aimed at mapping and modelling the global interaction of processes, information feedback and policy across organisational sectors. It is being used widely in health and social care to design sustainable patient outcomes and to assist the attainment of performance targets for all service agencies along whole patient pathways. It can help to test new policies and to eliminate those which might have unintended consequences for the system as a whole. It also creates learning and communication for new-world ideas and insights.
Systems thinking teaches that there are two types of complexity: the detailed complexity and the dynamic complexity. The Fifth discipline primarily deals with the latter, the dynamic one.
