Book Review

Image Source: damien_p58, Creative Commons

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (No, not the Bruce Willis Film “The Fifth Element”) was first published by Peter Senge (MIT) in 1990. For me it was one of those books that proved to be a “mile marker” in my life.

A mile marker is one of the people, events, experience, or moments of learning that when you look back have influenced, shaped, or directed you along your way. I can identify specific “markers” in my mid to late twenties that clearly lead me to the consulting/coaching business. My wife was putting together a scrap book of our early lives recently and made the comment that I must have had consulting/coaching skills as a young child based of the comments classmates had written. Mile markers are important to identify to understand our own growth, development and direction.

The Fifth Discipline was one of those books for me. I had been educated in the discipline of Project Management at the engineering school of the University of Michigan. Managing and running things was a scientific discipline that could be learned and applied to getting things done. But, right from the start I had always felt that the most productive thing I could do was to help people grow, develop, learn and help the teams function well together. I believed that if we could improve the people side of the business, the business would be successful. Here was a book that “scientifically” presented these principles in an organized form.

What are the five disciplines?

• Personal Mastery
• Mental Models
• Building Shared Vision
• Team Learning
• Systems Thinking (Fusing it all together)

For this discussion I want to focus on number five, Systems Thinking.

We tend to be aware of System Structures “out there” in the “real world”. Physical structures like a manufacturing plant are visible to us. We can see the raw materials and parts coming in one end of the plant with the finished product exiting the other end. We can see what happens when parts don’t show up on time. We can identify “bottle necks” in the system and work to alleviate the restriction. We can even see the systems that are not so physical such as cost and demand relationships. The Fed works with a “system” to determine interest rates as they try to manage (manipulate) the economic structure. But what we don’t really see or more importantly don’t believe is that our individual human behavior works in a system across our team and company. Until we can step back and see things in a systemic way, we will fail to change the behavior that is causing the bottle necks and disruptions to our peak performance.

One of the reasons we don’t see “the system” in our teams and companies is what Senge describes as “Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space”. That’s one of the reasons I like business simulations. They allow us to act out and see the system at work in a closely related time and space. That brings me to the rest of my blog title: Paper Planes and The Beer Game. But, that’s all the time and space I have for this post. Tune in to Paper Planes and Beer Games in the next post.