INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

One way to influence long-term impact of “learning organization” was to establish an
intellectually challenging base of ideas and tools early in the fad cycle.  Wanted to establish
that the five disciplines are inescapable elements in building learning organizations.

Sobering questions: What if the time required understanding, applying, and eventually
assimilating the new capabilities suggested by a “new idea” is longer than the fad cycle?  How
can initial tentative explorations and experiments lead to an ongoing learning process that
continually increases capacity?

For example, the longer-term results of TQM show that despite countless internal and external
training programs) yet two-thirds of corporate quality programs “simply grind to a halt because
of their failure to produce hoped-for results”.  W. Edward Deming often referred to statistics
as “two percent of the work”.  The other 98 percent involved basic changes in the ways
people are recognized and rewarded and fundamental shifts in management – from setting
goals and driving people towards achievement to focusing on the continual improvement of
“the systems” that govern how the organization works.  There are few U.S. firms where such
deeper changes have taken root.

The demise of GM and IBM has one thing in common with the crisis in America’s schools and
“gridlock” in Washington – a wake-up call that the world we live in presents unprecedented
challenges for which our institutions are ill prepared.  We are learning that there is a deep
hunger to rediscover our capacity to talk with one another.  The explorations on dialogue
seem to be unearthing something very old and central.  It has been said that United States
was the first country in modern era founded on a vision.  Is it possible that in some real sense
that this vision was born out a capacity for dialogue?  That if we lose our ability to talk to one
another, we lose our ability to govern ourselves.  There is a growing awareness that the
present trends of unsustained resource consumption, pollution, social disintegration, and
ungovernability pose unprecedented threats to our future and have led to calls for radical
change.  That the changes required will be not only “in our organizations”, but in ourselves as
well.

There is a deep tendency to see the changes we need to make as being in our outer world,
not in our inner world.  The central message of “The Fifth Discipline” is more radical than
“radical organization design” – that our organizations work the way they work, ultimately
because of how we think and how we interact.  Only by changing how we think can we
change deeply embedded policies and practices.  Only by changing how we interact can
shared visions, shared understandings, and new capacities for coordinated action be
established.

But “redesigning mental models” is not like redesigning a piece of engineering equipment.  
We do not HAVE mental models.  We “ARE” our mental models.  They are a medium through
which we and the world interact.

“The eye cannot see the eye.”  Learning that changes mental models is immensely
challenging.  It is disorientating.  It can be frightening as we confront cherished beliefs and
assumptions.  It cannot be done alone.  It can occur only within a community of learners.

The five disciplines run in a very different direction and represent a deep universal change in
the traditional culture of western management.

The idea of a community of people working in a sustained effort to ground the basic learning
disciplines took root in the form of the Centre for Organizational Learning, established in 1991
at MIT.  The centre is a consortium of companies, including Ford, Harley-Davidson, Federal
Express, E, Intel, Herman Miller, AT&T, Philips Display Components, Merck, Shell Oil, US West
and GS Technologies.

Learnings of the Centre include:

When the learning disciplines are developed in concert, they can have a significant,
measurable impact.

For every success story, there is at least one “disappointment story”, where teams (1) lack
the power to act in domains about which they are learning (2) lack the organizational support
to sustain sufficient time and energy to develop new learning capabilities (3) lack a deep
commitment to do the hard work required of them personally and interpersonally.

People are working on themselves (reflecting deeply on their own assumptions and ways of
operating in that system) while they are working on “their systems”.

Those who lead in getting this work started appreciate deeply the need for a systems
perspective, for surfacing underlying assumptions, for tapping deep aspirations, and for more
generative conversations.  They don’t have to be convinced.  Some resonate almost
immediately with such ideas and do it for their own sake (not just because of the business).  
A “penetrating personal experience” was often necessary for people to begin to see firsthand
connections between changes in how people think and interact and how organizations work.

All the disciplines matter.  Each is limited with the other.

Significant progress in systems thinking seems to be harder to achieve than progress in the
other disciplines.  Part of the problem is motivational (few appreciate that even if we are
open and trusting, even if our genuine aspirations were highly aligned, even if we could
surface and challenge underlying assumptions effectively, our shared mental models might still
be highly fragmented and static.) and part of it is cultural (it is hard workd articulating our
mental models explicitly.  “No theory, no learning”.  If we cannot express our assumptions
explicitly in ways that others can understand and build upon, there can be no larger process
of testing those assumptions and building public knowledge) and lastly developing new
conceptual skills is hard work.  It requires a level of patience and perseverance absent from
most team-improvement efforts.

Effective progress can start in the middle as well as at the top of organizations, while in other
cases, active leadership by the CEO has proven insufficient to produce significant progress.  
What is vital is that there be “local line leadership” of learning efforts.  In all cases where
there has been significant progress, those leading efforts have had the power to take action
with regard to particular business issues.  As they develop their learning capabilities, new
insights and ways of working together are automatically translated into decisions and actions.

Such learning can happen at the top as well.  But tops management teams are often removed
from key operational policies and have less influence in creating change than widely assumed.  
So at best they may  be part of a larger learning effort rather than the “drivers” making the
changes happen.