The Age Of The Learning Organization Is About To Begin
How can we use The Fifth Discipline to connect Design Thinking, Agile and Lean Startup and take organizations to the next level?
Peter Senge “invented” the learning organization 28 years ago. In his book The Fifth Discipline he introduces his framework of five disciplined that need to be mastered in order to create a learning organization. He argued that the only sustainable source of competitive edge is an organization’s ability to learn faster and better than its competitors. In a increasingly complex and dynamic world, learning is key. The world has become even more complex, interconnected and dynamic than at the time Peter wrote his book. He also identified that it typically takes about 30 years for an invention to incubate into a commercially viable form. Well, it has been almost 30 years since Peter’s invention and the time has come for the learning organization to become the framework to organize the organization of the future.
The five disciplines are not enough
In The Fifth Discipline Peter identified five component technologies that he thought would make the learning organization a viable reality. I think that his five disciplines are not enough. I believe that the five disciplines need another framework of five technologies to work. Although The Fifth Discipline has been named one of the most seminal management books ever by Harvard Business Review, I have not seen a lot of companies implementing his ideas. I still see the old ways of thinking about organizations he describes in his book everywhere. When he describes what is wrong with organizations in 1990, it reads like it was written today. The one thing that is causing problems for humans — not being able to think in systems — is still as big a problem as it was in 1990. But I see some new developments that can power his framework of the five disciplines. The five disciplines form the missing link in today’s discussions about Agile, Lean Startup, Design Thinking, User Centered Design and Service Design. Peter’s framework of the learning organization can be fueled by these new technologies that are now rapidly becoming mainstream. It can become the glue that holds these ways together and prevent them from being discarded as fads. There is an opportunity here we must seize.
What learning really means
But before we go into the framework around the framework, we first have to talk about what Peter means with the term learning organization. Maybe first we have to talk about what he doesn’t mean with learning. For him learning is not about the consumption of information. Just following courses, reading books or attending conferences is not the learning Peter is talking about. He uses the word metanoia to explain what he means with learning. Metanoia means shift of mind. So learning is:
- Change yourself: To learn is to change oneself, to change ones mind, to re-create ourselves.
- Acquire new skills: Through learning we should become able to do something we we not able to do before.
- Seeing different: Through learning we perceive the world differently.
- Become more creative: And most importantly, through learning we extend our capacity to create.
An artistic view
He uses learning in a very creative way. Learning is about becoming more creative. He uses a more artistic view of learning than you would expect in a management book. Not only in his definition and goal of learning: to create, to become more creative. But also in his holistic approach to problems. Right in the beginning of his book he distances himself from the splitting up the world in little pieces that we are used to in our scientific culture. He agues that treating systems as a whole is the only way to solve problems on a fundamental level. This more in line with artistic thinking than scientific. A painter, for instance, always takes on the whole. If he splits up his image in pieces and works on them separately, he will never get them back together again. But this goes for organizational problems as well, but it’s harder to see.
“This, then, is the basic meaning of a learning organization — an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.” — Peter Senge
Always be learning
In his definition of a learning organization there is a clear link to the idea of Kaizen. Kaizen is Japanese and means change to become better. Learning is not a one time effort. Learning is a continuous activity that never ends. Once you stop learning you become old and die. So when it comes to learning there are two things that are important to remember:
- Learning is aimed at becoming more creative. If you acquired knowledge that doesn’t make you more creative, you have not learned. Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when you put it into action. Reading a book is easy. But putting the things you read into creative practice is the real challenge.
- Learning never stops. The more you learn, the more acutely aware you become of your ignorance. Learning is to be always in a state of learning.
The five disciplines
The five disciplines are five areas in which we must learn in order to create an organization that is able to learn faster and better than its competition. They are five study topics that are all linked to each other. They are most powerful if they are developed in connection to each other. And there is one discipline that helps to tie them all together: the fifth discipline, systems thinking. Systems thinking is the key concept of Peter Senge. This is the idea that got his whole thinking started. But he realized that systems thinking alone is not enough, it needed skills in other areas to come to fruition. That is why he created his framework of five topics, disciplines. And by discipline Peter means a development path for acquiring certain skills or competenties.
- Personal mastery. Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening your personal vision, of focussing your energy, of developing patience and of seeing reality objectively. Although the goal is to create a learning organization, it all starts and ends with personal learning abilities. If the people cannot learn, the organization cannot learn. Personal mastery is about finding your purpose and living your life in the service of your highest aspirations.
- Team learning. The strange thing is that a group of people can be less creative than an individual. Brainstorming typically produces lower quality ideas than individuals. But there is also the possibility of a group of people becoming far more creative than a single person. The group can then go on to produce great results and let their members grow faster than they would on their own. Key to team learning is open communication without assumptions and other elements that undermine learning. It’s about seeing what undermines learning and finding ways to fix that.
- Mental models. Mental models determine how we see the world. Often we are not aware of them. But they play a huge role in our creative abilities and our ability to communicate openly with others. Here one has to learn to see his own and other people’s mental models, analyze them and consciously change them when necessary. Being able to adopt multiple mental models and being able to see the mental models of others greatly helps your ability to solve problems. A mental model can prevent or help you to see the solution.
- Shared vision. Vision, a shared story, is one of the most powerful forces that can bring people together and move them. The problem with most visions is that they are not connected. It’s easy to retreat into a castle conference room somewhere and think up a nice sounding vision. The challenge here is to connect it to the ideas, frustrations and mental models of the others in your organization. This means you’ll need to listen, deconstruct, synthesize, test and continuously improve your vision together with others.
- Systems thinking. The fifth discipline brings it all together. Systems thinking starts from the idea that all things are connected. It’s impossible to fully understand how things are connected. Complex systems are black boxes and the only way to learn about their workings is to see them as a whole. If you do something in a system, observe what happens, adjust your theory and repeat. Systems thinking is taking a look at the bigger picture, looking beyond projects or technologies to see how the system as a whole behaves. If you want the system to move, get rid of destructive behavior, you have to commit to studying patterns. Find out what the hidden patterns are and learn how to change them.
The whole framework looks something like this:
The five technologies that can power the five disciplines
In recent years there have been some developments in thinking about projects and organizations that all point toward Peter Senge’s idea of the learning organization. These are not brand new ideas, but they have all reached a level of maturity and distribution that gives them enough power to fuel the five disciplines and the development of the learning organization. They are the five technologies the framework of the learning organization has been waiting for to finally become a viable reality. They all developed along their own paths, in their own niches and in their own pace. Now they can all come together and realize the learning organization Peter invented. These five technologies are also all connected. You have to grant me a broad definition of technology here. We are not talking about the invention of the airplane here. We are talking about organizations. The technology that works within organizations are not made of steel or even of bits and bytes. They are also not the disciplines or topics that Peter talks about in his book that you have to master. They are ideas, philosophies, ways that you can use to organize. They are tools that you can learn to develop not only your personal mastery, but also the shared visions and mental models. These are all technologies that work towards the same goal of the learning organization. They are the levers that you can use to move things. For me they are the missing link to implement the idea of the learning organization. They are the content, the how. They are the fruitful environment where you can let the learning organization bloom.
- User centered design. If there is one things that is a driver for change in organizations it’s the user. 24 hours a day Internet access and mobile devices have turned the world upside down for organizations. The experience the user has when interacting with your organization is the key defining element that determines whether he chooses you or your competitor. Digitization has opened up markets to new players and drastically lowered barriers of entry. Competition has changed and UX (User Experience) is the name of the game. For most companies this means abandoning the inside out perspective they used for decades. This means not only redesigning your services, but also reorganizing. The fast pace of change makes the learning organization the only option. And the focus on the user is a powerful target for shared visions.
- Service Design. This past decade companies have woken up the idea that designing a new nice, shiny user interface for their services is not enough. For a service to work, you have to design the whole: the interface, the processes, the technology, the strategy. Designers were used to being called in at the last moment to make things look more beautiful. It turned out that designers have skills that could be much more useful if they are involved in designing the whole, from the beginning of the project. Service Design developed a toolset to help design the inner workings of a service. This happens in co-creation. Designers work along side business people and technologists. Mental models about what design can do changed, personal skills of business people are developing towards design and teams can learn far better with the visual tools of the designers that sit at the table.
- Design Thinking. The whole move of designers to tables they did not sit at before is fueled by Design Thinking. In recent years more and more people discovered that using the mind-, tool- and skillset of designers in projects greatly enhanced the problem solving capacity. If you add the ways designers work and think to the dominant scientific approach, you get a very potent mix that is far better at addressing the complex, fast paced, unclear challenges of modern business. The skillset of designers is not only powering personal mastery of people, but also facilitating team communication and learning. It’s a major shift in mental models and creates a whole new dynamic in systems. Visuals also tend to help the development of vision. Design is a major force fueling the development of the learning organization. Learning by doing is the best way to learn. And Design Thinking also fits perfectly to Peter’s holistic and artistic ideas.
- Agile. If there is one thing a learning organization aims to create its agility. The iterative approach of Agile is aimed at incorporating progressive insights into solutions. The idea of the learning organization of Peter seems to have a broader time perspective. Agile is aimed at learning in a shorter timeframe, in projects. You only deviate from a plan when you have learned something new. Agile introduced a whole new system of collaboration and a mental model of project management. The rise of Agile is in a way the rise of a learning organization. It originated in software development and a lot of people associate it with IT, but it’s concepts are far wider applicable and are perfectly aligned with Peter’s idea of the learning organization. Adopting Senge’s framework will only make Agile more connected with how organizations operate. All the concepts that have been developed around Agile can only help with the realization of Senge’s ideas.
- Lean Startup. Another approach that is aimed at learning as quickly as possible is Lean Startup. Finding the right questions, testing assumptions and building stuff to learn are what make up the Lean Startup method. Where Senge covers broad topics and leaves a lot of room for development in these topics, Lean Startup offers down to earth and practical ways to learn. It’s all in the name of creating better products and services that are better connected to the users, business and technology. The approach really popularized the idea that design is much more powerful in finding questions and testing answers than beautification. Lean Startup is helping with getting the idea that learning is key into organizations.
If you connect the five disciplines of Peter Senge with these new technologies, you get the following picture:
Some of these technologies help promote the idea that learning is key. Some bring tools from the artistic world into the core of business which enhances the learning ability. They all help to change mental models. They all spread the word that systems thinking is crucial. They all provide new ways to study and direct systems. They all offer valuable skills to master in your quest for personal mastery. They all offer new ways for people to connect and learn together.
Use the fifth discipline
There is a lot of talk lately about how Design Thinking or Lean Startup doesn’t work. That is because people don’t incorporate it into a bigger system. That is because people are not willing to really learn. The learning organization is that system. If you connect these technologies to the framework of Peter Senge, they become much more powerful, they get a new purpose, a new goal. Connecting is the concept that gives Senge’s framework it power. If you can use the fifth discipline — systems thinking — to forge connections between the technologies, they will work. But the fifth discipline is not enough, you’ll need the rest of the framework to excel. With these new technologies we can finally start to use Peter Senge’s invention to improve our organizations.
