System thinking

1. PETER SENGE RICHARD ROSS BRYAN SMITH
CHARLOTTE ROBERTS ART KLEINER

2. • What different organisations do to build
learning capacity? And
• Why some organisations use learning better
than others?
Senge codified these practices into
what he called 'The 5 Learning
Disciplines' as well as coming up
with the concept-label of 'learning
organisations’.
In 1990, Peter Senge published "The Fifth Discipline" (later followed by "The Fifth Discipline
Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization" in 1994).
His books pulled together his extensive research into:
5 writers with 5 disciplines
Peter Senge
Richard Ross
Bryan Smith
Charlotte Roberts
Art Klenier
Personal Mastery
Mental Models
Shared Vision
Team Learning
Systems Thinking

3. Organizational Improvement
According to Senge, “Great teams are learning organizations – groups of people who,
overtime, enhance their capacity to create what they truly desire to create.”
Continuous state of change is Senge’s vision for the productive, competitive, and efficient
institutions of the future.
Generating some thinking and action around change by:
Strategies
Real Work: Work
of implementation
Creating and building
great teams
Collection of reports
theoretical summaries
Reports

4. Getting Started
It addresses the basic concepts and ideas of the Learning Organization. It means the
continuous testing of experience, and the transformation of that experience into
knowledge-accessible to the whole organization, and relevant to its core purpose.
Each of the five disciplines is explained, and elaborated in the following Four questions.
These questions can help and guide a group's learning and improvement .
• Do you continuously test your experience?
• Are you producing knowledge?
• Is the knowledge shared?
• Is the learning relevant?
A section of getting started is about
the Wheel of Learning (Mastering the
Rhythm of a Learning Organization).
People pass:
Between action & reflection, and
Between activity & repose.

5. Systems Thinking (the fifth discipline)
It is a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces
and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems.
This discipline helps us see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in
tune with the larger processes of the natural and economic world (pg 6).
Systems is the cycles of cause and effect (pg 87). The time of your greatest growth is the
best moment to plan for harder times (pg87). A system is a perceived whole whose
elements “hang together” because they continually affect each other over time and
operate toward a common purpose (pg90).
In A Universal Language the subject-verb-object constructions of most Western
Languages (where A causes B) make it difficult to talk about circumstances in which A
causes B while B causes A and both continually interrelated with C and D (pg 88).
The tools of systems thinking: Casual loop diagrams, Archetypes (Models), and Computer
models. Systems thinking encompasses a large and fairly amorphous (unstructured) body
of methods, tools, and principles, all oriented to looking at the interrelatedness of forces,
and seeing them as part of a common process. The systems for describing how to achieve
fruitful change in organizations called “Systems dynamics”. The tools and methods are
the “links and loops”, archetypes (standards, models) , and stock-and –flow modeling (pg
89) .
X

6. Reinforcing Loops
when small changes become big changes (pg 114)
The two building blocks of all systems representations are as follow:
Reinforcing
• Generate exponential growth & Collapse
• Small change build on itself
• Linear thinking can always get us into
trouble
Balancing
• Generate the forces of resistance, which
eventually limit growth.
• Always bound to a target
• Are the mechanisms, found in nature and all
systems, that:
• Fix problems
• Maintain stability
• Achieve equilibrium
Systems thinking recognizes:
- the circular nature of cause and
effect,
- focuses on incentives and the
influence of organizational
structures on individual action.

7. A good systems thinker can see four levels operating simultaneously (pg 97):
Events
- Consider all the
individual
events/problems
- Replacing the events,
- Improve training
program,
- improve servicing, -
rewrites of the
operations manuals
Patterns of behavior
- Brainstorm about possible
solutions,
- List all the related factors,
- Introduce different way of
thinking,
- Work on patterns of
behavior,
- Review the problems
Systemic Structure
- Consider causal
relationship,
- List key interrelationship,
between factors,
- Discarding hypotheses,
- Draw diagrams
Mental models
- Change the system,
- introduce a new policy,
- incentives rewards,
- Prevailing motivations,
- Work on key
assumptions
- Deal effectively with
problems
- Restructured targets
To understand the problems and find solutions we can follow the Five Whys step by step (pg 108):
Step 1: Pick the symptom where you wish to start;
Ask the group Why is such-and-such taking place?
* put all the answers on the wall
Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, and Step 5:
* Repeat the process for every statement on the wall, asking “Why” about each one.
* Post each answer near its “parent”
* Follow up all the answers that seem likely
* You will find them converging, a dozen separate symptoms may be traceable back
to two or three systematic sources

8. Systems Thinking (the fifth discipline)
It is about bridging the gap between text and context. Offers everyone a deep and refreshing
look at what work can be and should be. All the stories, examples, exercises in five conceptual
touchstones--personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems
thinking. And these disciplines accurately reveal three core tasks in leadership:
1. looking at self,
2. developing others,
3. seeing the larger picture in order to chart a meaningful course.
Learning is essential for sustainable growth, for organizational and personal development. It is
a set of practices and perspectives, which views all aspects of life as inter-related and playing
a role in some larger system. The idea is on reinforcing and balancing.

9. Personal Mastery
It is about learning to expand our personal capacity to create results we most desire, and
creating an organizational environment which encourages all its members to develop
themselves towards the goals and purposes they choose (pg6).
The learning starts with each person. For organizations to learn and improve, people
within the organization must learn to reflect on and become aware of their own core
beliefs and visions. Personal Mastery covers the area of individual development and
learning. It covers the self-growth and self-improvement.
Personal mastery is the most
individual of the five disciplines for a
reason:
if individual learning can not occur,
then group learning can not occur.
The maturity to handle creative
tension and pursue total
development are elements of
personal mastery.

10. Mental Models
-Reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they
shape our actions and decisions (pg6) .
- Are the images, assumption, and stories which we carry in our minds of ourselves, other people, institutions,
and every aspect of the world (pg 235) which guide their institutional directions, practices, and strategies. It is
the pictures that we have in our head which represent reality.
- Differences between mental models explain why two people can observe the same event and describe it
differently; they are paying attention to different details. Mental models also shape how we act (pg 236).
- According to some cognitive theorists, changes in short term everyday mental models, accumulating over
time, will gradually be reflected in changes in long-term deep-seated beliefs (pg 237).
Mental models are simplifications of reality.
Mental models are a good thing as long as they
are explicit. The danger is when implicit mental
models are considered universal truths rather
than sets of conditions that reflect a place and
time.
There are 2 types of skills to consider:
1. Reflection: Slowing down out thinking
process awareness of how we form our
mental models.
2. Inquiry: Sharing views openly, developing
knowledge about each other assumptions
It is about:

11. The Ladder of inference
It is a common mental pathway of increasing abstraction, often leading to misguided beliefs
(pg 243).
I take actions based on my beliefs
I adapt Beliefs about the word
I draw conclusions
I make Assumptions based on the meanings I added
I add Meanings (cultural and personal)
Select “Data” from what I obsrve
Observable “data” and experiences
The
reflexive
loop
(our
beliefs
affect
what data
we select
next time)
We can improve our communications through reflection, and by using the laddr of inference in
three ways (pg 245):
1. Reflection  Awareness of our own thinking and reasoning
2. Advocacy  Making our thinking and reasoning more visible to others
3. Inquiry  Inquiring into others’ thinking and reasoning

12. Shared Vision
It is about building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared images of
the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope
to get there (pg6).
The discipline of building shared vision is centered around a never-ending process,
whereby people in an organization articulate their common stories – around vision,
purpose, values, why their work matters, and how it fits in the larger world (pg298).
It offers many strategies and perspectives on how to move an organization toward
continuous reflection, and also find a common cause with the rest of the people in the
organization, something that all work for. It is about the case for the stakeholders of an
organization to adapt their: vision Values Purpose goals
When a team has a shared
vision, they are all pulling in
approximately the same
direction.

13. Key precepts for a successful strategy for building shared vision (pg 298)
1. A deep purpose that expresses the organizations reason for existence.
2. An organizations founders’ aspirations, and the reasons why its industry came into being.
3. Not all visions are equal. Visions must emerge from many people reflecting on the
organization’s purpose.
4. To become more aware of the organization’s purpose ask the members of the organization
and learn to listen for the answers.
5. Designing and evolving ongoing processes in which people at every level of the
organization, in every role, can speak from the heart about what really matters to them and be
heard - by senior management and each other
6. “Creative tension” – the innate pull that emerges when we hold cleared pictures of our
vision close to or side by side with current reality.
In conclusion the shared vision discipline is essentially focused around building shared meaning,
Potentially none existed before. Shared meaning is a collective sense of what is important, and
why?

14. The following picture shows the five stages:
The further to the left the more the organization depends on a strong leader to tell
everyone what the shared vision should be.
The further to the right the more leadership, direction-setting, and learning capacity
the organization as a whole must have

15. Team Learning
It is about transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that
groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the
sum of individual member’s talents (pg6)
As we work with other people in teams or groups, we need to pass the stuff that
we have learnt and the wisdom we've acquired to others. At this stage, the
learning is no longer that of the individual, but the group.
It rely mostly on the work of William Isaacs and others, and make a case for
educating organization members in the processes and skills of dialogue and
skillful discussion.
Learning as a team also requires each of the other four disciplines to work well. Each member
of the team should have a level of personal mastery and acceptance of the shared vision.