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.