Peter Senge defines a learning organization as one where people continually expand their capacity to create desired results through nurturing new patterns of thinking and collective aspirations. For organizations to excel in times of rapid change, they must be flexible, adaptive, and productive by tapping into people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels. Senge's five disciplines of a learning organization include personal mastery, where individuals clarify their vision and focus on self-development; mental models, where assumptions are challenged through inquiry; shared vision, where leaders translate personal visions into shared commitments; team learning, where dialogue and thinking together yields new insights; and systems thinking, which integrates the other disciplines by focusing on dynamics, interdependencies, and long-term goals

1. Peter Senge’s
Learning
Organizations

3. The learning organization
 According to Peter Senge learning
organizations are:
 …where people continually expand
their capacity to create the results
they truly desire, where new and
expansive patterns of thinking are
nurtured, where collective aspiration is
set free, and where people are
continually learning to see the whole
together

4. The learning organization
 The basic rationale for learning
organizations is that in situations of
rapid change only those that are
flexible, adaptive and productive will
excel
 For this to happen, it is argued,
organizations need to ‘discover how to
tap people’s commitment and
capacity to learn at all levels

7. Personal Mastery
 Organizations learn only through
individuals who learn
 Continually clarifying and deepening our
personal vision
 Focusing our energies
 Employees create an organizational
environment that encourages all fellow
employees to develop themselves toward
the goals and purposes that they desire
 Seeing reality objectively
 Deeply aware of growth areas and tension
between vision and reality

8. Personal Mastery
It embodies two underlying movements.
The first is continually clarifying what is
important to us
The second is continually learning how to
see current reality more clearly

9. A clear picture of current reality
(where we are relative to what we
want) generates what we call
"creative tension": a force to bring
them together, caused by the
natural tendency of tension to seek
resolution. The essence of personal
mastery is learning how to generate
and sustain creative tension in our
lives.

10. Mental Models
 Deeply ingrained assumptions and
generalizations that influence how we
understand the world and how we take
action
 Starts with turning the mirror inward;
learning to unearth our internal pictures of
the world, to bring them to the surface and
hold them rigorously to scrutiny. It also
includes the ability to carry on "learningful"
conversations that balance inquiry and
advocacy, where people expose their own
thinking effectively and make that thinking
open to the influence of others

11. Mental Models
 Personality
 Perception Process

12. What is Personality?What is Personality?
The dynamic organization within the
individual of those psychophysical systems
that determine his unique adjustments to his
environment. - Gordon Allport
– The sum total of ways in which an
individual reacts and interacts with
others, the measurable traits a person
exhibits

13. PerceptionPerception
 Unique interpretation of the situation, not an exact
recording of it. Perception is a very complex
cognitive process that yields a unique picture of the
world, a picture that may be quite different from
reality
 Perception is largely learned, and no one has the
same learnings and experience, then every
employee has a unique filter, and the same
situations/stimuli may produce very different
reactions and behaviors

14. Shared Vision
 A genuine vision leads to people wanting to excel and
learn
 one person's (or one group's) vision imposed on an
organization. Such visions, at best are command
compliance—not commitment
 Leaders must translate personal visions into shared
visions because it provides the focus and energy for
learning
 Unearthing shared ‘pictures of the future’ that foster
genuine commitment rather than compliance
 Leaders learn the counter-productiveness of trying to
dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt

15. Team Learning
 Team learning starts with ‘dialogue’. Greeks dia-logos
meant a free-flowing of meaning through a group,
allowing the group to discover insights not attainable
individually the capacity of members of a team to
suspend assumptions and enter genuine ‘thinking
together’
 Shows group how to recognize the patterns of interaction
that undermine learning

16. Systems thinking – the
cornerstone of the learning organization
A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and
we know that it will rain. Business and other human
endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible
fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play
out their effects on each other
Integrates the others, fusing them into a coherent body of theory
and practice
Interdependency and change
Focus on whole not individual parts
Long-term goals vs. short-term benefits
Better appreciation of systems leads to more appropriate action

19. All the disciplines are, in this
way, ‘concerned with a shift
of mind from seeing parts to
seeing wholes, from seeing
people as helpless reactors
to seeing them as active
participants in shaping their
reality, from reacting to the
present to creating the
future’

25. METANOIA - A SHIFT OF MIND
When you ask people about what it is like
being part of a great team, what is most
striking is the meaningfulness of the
experience. People talk about being part of
something larger than themselves, of
being connected, of being generative

26. DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION HAVE A
LEARNING DISABILITY?
DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION HAVE A
LEARNING DISABILITY?
 I AM MY POSITION – conc on own part only
and no integrated apch
 THE ENEMY IS OUT THERE - blaming others
 THE ILLUSION OF TAKING CHARGE – stop
waiting for others
 THE FIXATION ON EVENTS – predict the
events
 THE PARABLE OF THE BOILED FROG
 THE DELUSION OF LEARNING FROM
EXPERIENCE
 THE MYTH OF THE MANAGEMENT TEAM

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