Peter Senge is an expert in organizational learning and founder of the Society for Organizational Learning. He authored The Fifth Discipline, which introduced concepts like learning organizations, systems thinking, and the five disciplines of a learning organization - personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. Senge's work focuses on developing organizations where people continually expand their capacity to achieve desired results through fostering new ways of thinking and learning how to see the organization as a whole.

2. Peter Michael Senge

Born 1947, Stanford, California.

Received a B.S. in Aerospace engineering from Stanford University.

Earned an M.S. in social systems modeling from MIT in 1972.

Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1978.

Founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL).

3. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice
of the Learning Organization (1990)

Convert companies into LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS.

Group problem solving using the systems thinking method .

The five disciplines represent approaches : Developing three core learning capabilities:
○ Fostering aspiration,
○ Developing reflective conversation,
○ Understanding complexity

5. The Learning Organization

Organizations
where
people
continually
expand their capacity to create the results
they truly desire.

New and expansive patterns of thinking are
nurtured.

Collective aspiration is set free.

People are continually learning to see the
whole together.

6. The Learning Organization
Adaptive
Learning
Generative
Learning
Learning
Organization

7. In a Learning Organization

Flexibility

People

Staff Opinions

Exchanging information

Learn new skills

Opportunities exist

Learning Occur

8. A compAny thAt needs to leArn…
1.
Employees seem unmotivated or uninterested in
their work.
2.
Workforce lack the skill and knowledge to adjust
to new jobs.
3.
Workforce simply follow orders.
4.
Lack communication between each other.
5.
Teams argue constantly
and lack real productivity.

10. The Five Disciplines

Distinguishes the learning organisation from traditional
ones on the basis of the mastery of five disciplines.

All five are concerned with a shift in focus from people as
„helpless reactors‟ to „active participants‟.

Who create the future instead of reacting to the present.

11. Five Basic Disciplines

12. 1. Personal mastery

Measured by the difference
between our goals and our
current reality.

Relieve the tension by reducing
your goals to match your current
reality.

Change your perception of your
current reality to be closer to
your goal.

13. 2. Mental Models

Deeply
ingrained
generalizations,
or
even
assumption,
pictures
of
images that influence how we understand
the world and how we take action.

The widely acknowledged truth that many
good ideas never get past the drawing
board.

Senge explains reason for this with
people‟s profoundly held „mental models‟
which
reject
unfamiliar.
anything
untried
or

14. 3. Shared Vision

Shared vision is the difference between people doing work because
they are told to and doing it because they want to.

Vision must be dictated to the organisation through a „top-down‟
process.

An organisational vision is not truly shared until it connects with the
personal visions of everyone inside the organisation

15. 3. Shared Vision

Allows the group to discover insights not attainable individually.

Is a shared vision only when it connects with the personal vision of people
throughout the organization.

Shows group how to recognize the patterns of interaction that undermine
learning.

Vision creates the spark; the excitement that lifts an organization out of the
mundane.

Fosters risk taking and experimentation.

Encourages building personal vision-personal mastery

17. 4. Team Learning

18. 4. Team Learning

Pooling knowledge, expertise and intellect to produce results which are
beyond the sum of the individual parts.

Begins with the practice of „dialogue‟, “the capacity of members of a team to
suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine „thinking together‟ .

When teams are effectively learning they are producing successful results.

Individual team members are growing faster than they could have on their
own.

If teams can not learn, neither can the organization.

19. 5. Systems Thinking

Fifth Discipline that integrates the other four:-

Is a language for learning and acting.

Helps us see how we create our reality.

Points to higher leverage solutions to problems.

Helps us understand and describe complex issues.

One can only understand a system by stepping back and viewing it
from a distance

20. The Laws of the Fifth Discipline

Today‟s problems come from yesterday‟s “solutions.”

The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.

Behavior grows better before it grows worse.

The cure can be worse than the disease.

Faster is slower.

21. Contd....

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

You can have your cake and eat it too--but not at once.

Dividing the elephant in half does not produce two small
elephants.

There is no blame.
(Senge (1990) pp.. 57-67)

22. The Learning Disabilities:

Most organizations learn poorly and create fundamental learning
disabilities

The seven learning Disabilities:1. "I am my position."
2. "The enemy out there."
3. The Illusion of Taking Charge
4. The Fixation of Events
5. The Parable of the Boiling Frog
6. The Delusion of Learning from Experience
7. The Myth of the Management Team

23. 1. I am my Position

Trained to be loyal to our job and confuse them with our own
identities.

Tendency to see responsibilities as limited to the boundaries of
position.

When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have
little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all
positions interact.

24. 2. THE ENEMY IS OUT THERE

The propensity to find someone or something outside ourselves to
blame when things go wrong.

Thou shall always find an external agent to blame.

Marketing
blames
manufacturing
blames
engineering
marketing.

This syndrome is a by-product of "I am my position”.
blames

25. 3. THE ILLUSION OF TAKING CHARGE

Proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise.

Aggressive fighting the „enemy out there‟ means we are
reacting.

True proactiveness comes from seeing how we
contribute to our own problem.

26. 4. THE FIXATION ON EVENTS
•
Focusing on events distract from seeing the longer-term patterns of
change.
•
Distracts from understanding the cause of those patterns.
•
Cave men needed to react to events quickly for survival-ability.
•
Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if
people's thinking is dominated by short-term events.

27. 5. The Delusion of Learning from
Experience

Practice makes permanent, rather than
perfect

28. 6. THE PARABLE OF THE BOILED FROG

We are adept at responding to sudden changes in our
environment.

We are terrible at assessing slow, gradual changes,
even when they threaten our survival.

29. 7. The Myth of the Management
Team

The team may function quite well with routine
issues.

But when they confront the complex issues that
may
be
embarrassing
or
threatening,
the
teamness seems to go to pot.

Avoiding anything that will make them look bad
personally

Pretending that everyone is behind the team‟s
collective strategy.

30. Books by him

The Fifth Discipline Field book: Strategies and Tools for
Building a Learning Organization (1994).

The Dance of Change.

The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning
Organizations (1999).

Schools That Learn (2000).

31. THANK YOU