Table Of ContentThe Fifth Discipline Fieldbook
PETER M. SENGE
ART KLEINER
CHARLOTTE ROBERTS
RICHARD B. ROSS
BRYAN J. SMITH
The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook
Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization
First published in Great Britain by
Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 1994
3-5 Spafield Street, Clerkenwell
London EC1R 4QB
www.nicholasbrealey.com
Reprinted 1994, 1995 (twice, with corrections), 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010
Copyright © 1994 by Peter M. Senge, Charlotte Roberts, Richard B.
Ross, Bryan J. Smith, Art Kleiner
The rights of Peter M. Senge, Charlotte Roberts, Richard B. Ross, Bryan
J. Smith, Art Kleiner to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright. Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
ISBN 978-1-85788-060-1
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without
the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent,
resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form,
binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior
consent of the publishers.
Printed in India by Gopsons Papers Ltd., Noida
Contents
About the Authors
Getting Started
1 “I See You”
2 An Exchange of Lore and Learning
3 How to Read This Book
4 Why Bother?
5 Why Bother? (A CEO’s Perspective)
6 Moving Forward
7 Core Concepts About Learning in Organizations
8 The Wheel of Learning
9 Leadership Fields
10 Reinventing Relationships
11 Finding a Partner
12 Opening Moves
Systems Thinking
13 Strategies for Systems Thinking
14 What You Can Expect … As You Practice Systems Thinking
15 Brownie’s Lamb: Learning to See the World Systemically
16 Starting with Storytelling
17 The Language of Systems Thinking: “Links” and “Loops”
18 The Archetype Family Tree
19 Systems Sleuth
20 Enriching the Archetype
21 Seven Steps for Breaking Through Organizational Gridlock
22 Moving into Computer Modeling
23 Systems Thinking with Process Mapping: A Natural Combination
24 Where to Go from Here
Personal Mastery
25 Strategies for Developing Personal Mastery
26 What You Can Expect . . . from the Practice of Personal Mastery
27 Loyalty to the Truth
28 The Power of Choice
29 Innovations in Infrastructure for Encouraging Personal Mastery
30 Instilling Personal Mastery at Beckman Instruments
31 Intrapersonal Mastery
32 Where to Go from Here
Mental Models
33 Strategies for Working with Mental Models
34 What You Can Expect … in Working with Mental Models
35 The Ladder of Inference
36 Balancing Inquiry and Advocacy
37 Conversational Recipes
38 Opening Lines
39 Bootstrapping Yourself into Reflection and Inquiry Skills
40 Creating Scenarios
41 Shell’s Internal Consultancy
42 Double-loop Accounting
43 Where to Go from Here
Shared Vision
44 Strategies for Building Shared Vision
45 What You Can Expect … As You Build Shared Vision
46 Designing an Organization’s Governing Ideas
47 Building Shared Vision: How to Begin
48 Letter to the CEO
49 Letter to the CEO’s Partner
50 Strategic Priorities
51 Where to Go from Here
Team Learning
52 Strategies for Team Learning
53 What You Can Expect . . . from Team Learning
54 Dialogue
55 The Cauldron
56 Designing a Dialogue Session
57 Skillful Discussion
58 Skillful Discussion at Intel
59 Popular Postmortems
60 Silence
61 Reframing Team Relationships
62 Building an Organization that Recognizes Everyone’s Uniqueness
63 Tools for Discovering Learning Styles
64 Bringing Diverse People to Common Purpose
65 Designing a Company-wide Strategy for Team Learning
66 Executive Team Leadership
67 Where to Go from Here
Arenas of Practice
68 “Our Quality Program Isn’t Working”
69 Springing Ourselves from the Measurement Trap
70 Corporate Environmentalism
71 Training As Learning
72 Workplace Design
73 The Tricky Dynamics of Learning in a Family-owned Business
74 Creating a Learning Newspaper
75 Health Care
76 Education
77 Can Large Government Learn?
78 A Letter to an Aspiring Policymaker
79 The Local Community as a Learning Organization
Frontiers
80 Organizations as Communities
81 Merging the Best of Two Worlds
82 Bean Suppers
83 Free Agency, Employment Stability, and Community Boundaries
84 Operating Principles for Building Community
85 Microworlds and Learning Laboratories
86 Where the Organization Develops a Theory About Itself
87 Using Microworlds to Promote Inquiry
88 A Buyer’s Guide to Off-the-Shelf Microworlds
89 Creating Your Own Management Flight Simulator
90 The Du Pont Manufacturing Game
91 Creating a Learning Lab—and Making It Work
Endnotes
92 Coda
93 Acknowledgments
94 How to Stay in Touch with The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook Project
95 Contributors to The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook
Index
About the Authors
Peter Senge
Like my previous book, The Fifth Discipline, this “fieldbook” describes
the experimentation, research, writing, and invention of hundreds of people.
My colleagues in the organizations with which I am associated—the Center
for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, where
I am director; the consulting and training firm Innovation Associates, where
I continue to conduct “Leadership and Mastery” workshops; and the
Learning Circle, a new organization founded to develop the worldwide
community of learning organization practitioners—and I have come to
know, and often participate in, many new stories of change. More than ever
we are coming to believe that a “new type of management practitioner” is
emerging today, a person who is willing to combine his or her own personal
learning with broader collective action in an organization.
As we have met more and more people who fit this description, we realized
the potential value of a book—or a series of books—sharing the learnings
emerging in this growing community. Alone I would have been unable to realize
this vision, in part because of the demands of my commitments in building the
MIT Learning Center. Fortunately, a group of longtime collaborators shared the
vision of the Fieldbook. Each had been involved in implementing or
communicating about learning-organization principles and methods for ten years
or longer. It was delightful to watch how we quickly became a coherent team,
with each of us bringing his or her distinctive sensibility to the project.
The team of authors of the Fieldbook includes:
Charlotte Roberts—a speaker, consultant, program designer, and writer
whose work has focused on the executive team’s role in a learning
organization. Charlotte and I have probably co-led more “Leadership and
Mastery” workshops than any other team—it often seems like for much of
our adult lives. She is a principal at Innovation Associates, where she
codirects their quality-leadership practice. She has worked with a wide
range of organizations, from manufacturing to hardware and software
