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The Fifth Discipline - P.Senge (summary)
The Fifth Discipline
The title of Peter Senge´s book the Fifth Discipline cites one of the five Disciplines to create a Learning Organization. These five disciplines: A shared Vision (1), Mental Models (2), Team Learning (3), Personal Mastery (4) and System Thinking (5).The fifth Discipline, System Thinking, is the one discipline that binds the other four and therefore the discipline where the focus of Change Management should be.
The 5 disciplines will shortly be addressed in this article, as well as three levels of explanations, seven learning constraints and nine system archetypes which will help practicing Systems Thinking.
THE FIVE DISCIPLINES OF CREATING A LEARNING ORGANIZATION in more detail, are:
── Personal Mastery describes the strength of people to be proactive and keep on learning to continuously achieve results which are important for them. Two factors which are of importance in this discipline are: defining what is important to us (1) and being able to see the current reality as it is (2).
── Mental Models describe the presumptions and generalizations people have which influence their actions. The first step in having people change their Mental Models is to have people reflect on their own behavior and beliefs. One of the mental models in every organization is the official hierarchy.
── Personal values can overcome the shortcomings of hierarchical power. One important Value Senge describes is openness. One part of openness is to quit playing ´power games´ and be open and honest about what your real needs are.
── A Shared Vision means all employees in a company share the same vision of where the organization needs to go (instead of a vision-statement where management has written where the organization should be going). Only when the vision is authentic and shared, employees will automatically participate in the improvement processes to get the company closer to accomplishing its vision. Senge describes a shared vision as follows: People are not playing according to the rules of the game, but feed [feel] responsible for the game.
── Team learning includes two aspects. Effective teamwork leads to results which individuals could not have achieved on their own (1) and individuals within a team learn more and faster than they would have without the team (2). The team members have to be willing to shift their mental models and be open to learn from their colleagues.
── System Thinking is used to analyze patterns in an organization by looking at it from a holistic viewpoint rather than small unrelated manageable parts. Senge himself describes the elephant metaphor. When you split an elephant in two, you do not have two small elephants which you can take care of. You can only take care of the one complete elephant. An organization is like a living organism and should according to Senge also be managed as one. This discipline integrates the previous 4.
One way in which systems thinking is executed is the way in which situations are explained by employees. Senge describes THREE LEVELS OF EXPLAINATION: a reactive explanation based on events (1), a responsive explanation based on behavior (2) and a generative explanation based on structural level (3). These three ways of explaining are linked to one another. A System (level 3) leads to a certain behaviors (level 2) which can lead to certain events (level 1). The best way to change events is therefore to change the system, which will lead to different behavior.
Lifelong learning is important for an organization because learning results in creating. The more people in an organization learn, the more value they can create for the company. Traditionally there are SEVEN LEARNING CONSTRAINTS.
── The first one is the I-am-my-position syndrome. This syndrome is described by people talking about what tasks they perform in an organization instead of what value they add to the company goal. Talking in terms of tasks only results in lack of accountability for the product or service the company delivers.
── The second constraint for learning is the result from the first syndrome and is called the enemy is there syndrome. When people are task-focused, they are likely to not able to see their own influence on the company goals and as a result point to others in organization as the root cause of all problems.
── The illusion of taking charge is the third constraint for learning, and describes the danger of reactive action instead of proactive action. Proactive action is defined by people daring to face the results of their own behavior and the willingness to change it to prevent problems from reoccurring in the future.
── The forth constraint is the fixation on events instead of focus on small continuous improvements. Learning and improving should be part of everybody´s daily job and not just a temporary one day event or a project. Projects, by definition, are temporary and project teams are eliminated after a certain problem is solved.
── Constraint five is the parable of the boiled frog. A Frog held in a pan in which the water temperature slowly increases will die as soon as the water eventually boils, because the frog will not notice the temperature increase. To prevent this from happening to organizations in changing environments, changes of processes should be measured and evaluated.
The delusion of learning from experience is described because people seldom really know the outcome of their actions on the long term, while we tend to believe that we can know the long term outcome by looking at the short term outcome.
── The final constraint Senge describes is the myth of the management team in which people truly believe that management can solve all problems. When one thinks about it, it is obviously impossible that one manager knows everything about all processes and has all capabilities needed to solve each problem.
As a starting point for systems thinking, Senge describes 9 SYSTEM ARCHETYPES or behavior patterns which deserve management’s attention:
There is always a delay between the execution of actions and the final (long-term) results.
── A pattern of limited growth is the result of focusing on improving activities which focus on improving growth accelerating factors instead of reducing growth limiting factors.
── Moving the problem instead of solving it. This is what happens when only symptoms of the problem are addressed and not the root cause, The problem can than re-occur, in the same form but also in another department.
── Deteriorating Goals when situations get tuff. Goals are set aside due to a crisis or because of any other reason. This is simply not acceptable. The vision and its goals give direction to the company, especially in these difficult times!
── An escalation loop is a loop in which actors influence one another with a lose-lose situation as outcome. An example is a price-war between supermarkets, where multiple competitors eventually fight one another on being the cheapest, and none of them ends up with profit in the end. According to Senge, one should only encourage a culture in which win-win situations are created.
── Success to the successful is the archetype in which resources are allocated to the most successful activity which makes the unsuccessful ones even more unsuccessful because they receive fewer resources. This is not necessarily the best policy fir the long term.
── The politics to receive resources (for instance the budgeting game) is a situation where departments make up and alter numbers to receive more resources for their department instead of being able to see the scope of the entire organization and act accordingly.
── Solutions which do not solve, is a situation where short terms positive results lead to long term losses. For instance reducing Preventative maintenance on machines in a factory.
── Growth and underinvestment, is the trap where investing does not seem necessary because all is well at the moment. Not investing today, however, might lead to a lost opportunity for growth in the future because of a lack of skills or capacity.
In the Fifth Discipline (which is Systems Thinking) Senge encourages managers to look at problems from a holistic perspective. Stop trying to divide problems into smaller pieces and then try to solve each part. The metaphor Senge uses is the example of the broken mirror. When all small pieces of a broken mirror are glued back together, the reflection of the mirror will not be the same as the reflection from the originally unbroken mirror.
Within Systems Thinking, the in this article described nine archetypes can help to prevent common situations from happening and focus on improving the organization as a whole. It is the Principle which brings the other four principles together: Shared Vision, Mental Models, Team Learning and Personal Mastery.
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By Russell L. Ackoff
Pre-active-ists recognize that the roots of crime lie in society, in social conditions such as poverty, discrimination, poor heath, lack of education, and substandard and congested housing. But they do not believe that these conditions can be changed quickly enough to affect the crisis in crime. Thus, as pre-active-ists normally do, they accept the environment and seek to reform the criminal justice system within it. The inter-active-ist, on the other hand, does not believe that even the reforms proposed by pre-active-ists are possible without some fundamental changes in society. He does not believe, for example, that the money required to carry out pre-active reforms can be extracted out of our society as it currently operates. Therefore, the inter-active-ist does not believe that changes in society and the criminal justice system are separable [se-parable].
The inter-active-ist assumes a more aggressive posture toward the social environment of crime than the pre-active-ist does. He tries to use the crisis in crime to bring about changes in those aspects of society that breed it. He believes society needs correction even more than the criminal does, and that correcting the criminal without correcting the conditions that breed criminality cannot significantly reduce crime. This orientation leads to an inversion of the problems usually associated with criminal justice. The most fundamental of such transformations is that involving the concept of responsibility of such transformations is that involving the concept of responsibility for crime.
Recall that the re-active-ist believes the criminal to be exclusively or primarily responsible for the crime he commits. The pre-active-ist believes that the individual and his environment are jointly responsible for most crimes and, therefore, that criminality is like a disease: the germs must be there in the environment and the individual must be susceptible to them. The inter-active-ist, on the other hand, holds society primarily responsible for crime. He takes the individual's susceptibility to crime to be a product of social influences--an acquired characteristic, not an innate disposition.
Therefore, the inter-active-ist develops a strategy for treating the criminal that is based on the assumption that HIS CRIMINAL ACT is the Consequence of a crime COMMITTED by Society against HIM. Then, a person steals to avert starvation, for example, the threat of starvation is taken to be a social crime that requires more attention than the individual theft does. Such crimes can only be significantly reduced by eliminating the possibility of starvation. Race rioting can only be eliminated by removing racial discrimination. This view does NOT imply that the individual criminal requires no treatment but that the treatment he receives is directed to undoing the damage that has been done to him.
The inter-active-ist believes that justice should be more concerned with protecting the individual from society than with protecting society from the criminal. If the criminal is taken to be one whom society has wronged, then the justice system should protect him from further abuse by society. Because the inter-active-ist takes the principal function of the criminal justice system to be the CORRECTION of SOCIETY, punishment of either the criminal or society is irrelevant.
(Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, pp.193-194.)
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By Russell L. Ackoff
pp.204-205
Police
Pre-active-ist have suggested many possible reforms that would increase the effectiveness of the police. Most of these are directed at raising the rate of apprehension of offenders, not at crime prevention. Crime prevention has never been a central function of the police. The inter-active-ist believes it should be, hence advocates creation of a new prevention police force. The preventive police officer (man or woman) would have no power of law enforcement or arrest. He would not be armed in any way. But he would be conspicuously uniformed so that he could be easily identified.
The preventive policeman's principal function would require his getting to know the neighborhood to which is assigned and the people in it. To facilitate this process, he would be required to live in that neighborhood. The neighborhood should be small enough so that he can cover all of it on foot or bicycle. He would be there to help people or to help them get help whenever they needed it. He would be expected to know and understand the conditions in his neighborhood that breed crime and thus direct the activities of appropriate public and private agencies to their correction. His activity in the community would be completely positive--oriented to making it a better place in which to live.
When he sees criminality developing he would take corrective action, but if apprehension or forceful intervention is required, he would call on others to perform it.
This preventive policeman should be able to be contacted by anyone in his area at any time, day or night. When someone in his area is arrested he would be responsible for being sure the one apprehended knows his rights and receives whatever assistance he requires; for example, that proper legal aid is avaible. He would similarly help any ex-convicts who return to his area.
He would work with schools, clubs, and other organizations in the community to help make it as self-policing an area as possible. Put another way, his principal function would be to protect people from society and other who might abuse or misuse them. The preventive officer would testify in court on the crime-producing conditions operating on anyone form his area who is being tried for a crime. He would serve as a witness against the state, not as a witness for it.
The preventive policeman would require all the skills and training of a social worker and more, but his orientation would not be toward the alleviation of suffering so much as toward the removal of its causes.
(Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, pp.204-205.)
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Copy (cut) and Paste Text #RLA-TREAT
By Russell L. Ackoff
Tricks or Treat
treatment
pp.195-196
Types of Treatment
The treatment of an offender is a resultant of the type of facility used and the way it is managed. <skip a sentence> These, taken in relation to the perspectives of society on the offender, may be said to comprise philosophies of correction.
1. Deterrent (controlling). Such treatment is intended to prevent aggression or destruction in or out of a facility, at the time of detention or subsequently. The threat of punishment for doing something and the promise of reward for not doing it are both deterrents, or are intended to be so.
2. Clinical (therapeutic). Such treatment is intended to cure, reduce, or stabilize physical or mental illness, or a character defect recognized as pathological and believed to be actually or potentially responsible for self-destructive or anti-social behavior.
3. Supportive (protecting). Such treatment is intended to remove its recipient from anti-social influences or forces applied to him that he cannot resist except at great cost or risk; to protect him from threats of harm; and to provide him with physical and emotional care of which he has been deprived and which he needs.
Actual treatments frequently blend these pure types in varying proportions. Some clinical procedures, for example, require a good deal of control as well as support, especially at some stages.
Deterrence, therapy, and support do not in themselves necessarily require the placement of anyone in a closed facility. Security, therefore, ought not to be looked at as an aspect of treatment.
Very different types of offender may sometimes need some security. Few are likely to need a high degree of it all the time. Security measures are required in case other methods of control break down. The first task, therefore, is to ensure that these other methods, which should be an inherent part of facility's organization and management, are well designed and are in fact working as well as possible. Physical security becomes necessary only insofar as social security breaks down. If a facility's staff is able to maintain it as an open facility, there is no need for a perimeter.
Security measures may be required to safeguard either the boundary of a facility or to protect groups or individuals inside from each other or from themselves. There level of security maintained should depend in either case on the frequency expected in the breakdown of social controls. Physical security should be a reserve system, for emergency use only. Where the emergencies become too frequent the ground rules of the social control system have to be changed.
(Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, pp.195-196.)
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Copy (cut) and Paste Text #RLA
Gregorian Calendar
initiate 7/12/2013
update 7/13/2013
May 26, 2004
TRANSFORMING THE SYSTEMS MOVEMENT
By Russell L. Ackoff
(edited)
The situation the world is in is a mess.
Reform and Transform
1. Reformations and transformations are not the same thing. Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives. ([ changing the way the systems go after objectives ]) ([ changing the method and the process ])
2. Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue. ([ changes in the objectives ]) ([ changing the objective ])
3. Peter Drucker put this distinction dramatically when he said there is a difference between
3a. doing things right
(the intent of reformations)
and
3b. doing the right thing
(the intent of transformations).
Reformations and transformations are not the same thing.
Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives. Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue.
Peter Drucker put this distinction dramatically when he said there is a difference between doing things right (the intent of reformations) and doing the right thing (the intent of transformations).
([ does this mean we have been firing at the wrong target all these time ]) ([ it means placing a ladder up the wrong tree will let you to climb to the top of the wrong tree easier. Or climbing the ladder place on the wrong tree will get you to the top, the top is still the top, and that should count for some thing.
“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
--Stephen R. Covey.
])
DEVELOPMENT VERSUS GROWTH
[“ quality of life ” versus “standard of living”]
Rubbish heaps grow but do not develop.
Some nations grow larger without developing and others develop without growing.
1. Growth is an increase in size or number.
Development is an increase in competence,
the ability to satisfy ones needs and
desires and
those of others.
2. Growth is a matter of EARNing;
development is a matter of LEARNing.
3. Standard of living is an index of national growth;
“ quality of life ” is an index of its development.
4. Development is not a matter of how much one has but
how much one can do
with whatever one has.
4a. “ Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in Economics, proved this using the example of India. He was able to demonstrate that social disparities and badly functioning public institution and infrastructure in this country are primarily responsible for destitution and underdevelopment. In this sense, governance problems and a lack of political will have to be held accountable for turning population growth into a real development problem. ”*1
5. This is why Robinson Crusoe is a better model of development than J. Pierpont Morgan.
Because development is a matter of learning, one cannot do it for another. The only kind of development possible is self-development. However, one can facilitate the development of another by encouraging and supporting their learning. Nations must stop acting as though they can solve other nations' problems. Nations, like individuals, learn less from the successes of others than from their own mistakes.
One never learns from doing things right because, obviously, one already knows how to do it. What one derives from doing something right is confirmation of what one already knows. This has value, but it is not learning. One can only learn from mistakes, by identifying and correcting them. But all through school and in most places of employment we are taught that making mistakes is a bad thing. Therefore, we try to hide or deny those we make. To the extent we succeed, we preclude learning.
Corporate Myth
Corporations REAL principal objective
is to maximize
(1) the security,
(2) standard of living, and
(3) quality of life
of those making the decisions,
witness Enron and WorldCom,
base on a study conducted a while back at GE.
Principal objective of corporations is to maximize the security, standard of living, and quality of life of those making the decisions, not usually those that are proclaimed.
For example, most corporation proclaim maximization of shareholder value as their primary objective.
University Myth
One could mistakenly believe that the principal objective of universities is to educate students.
What a myth!
The principal objective of a university is
(1) to provide job security and
(2) increase the standard of living and
(3) quality of life of those members
of the faculty and administration who make the critical decisions.
The principal objective of a university is to provide job security and increase the standard of living and quality of life of those members of the faculty and administration who make the critical decisions.
Note that the more senior and politically powerful teaching members of the faculty are, the less teaching they do.
Faculty members know how to learn better than they know how to teach. Therefore, they should be acting as resources to students who are either engaged in teaching others, or learning on their own or with others cooperatively.
One of the great gifts I received from West Churchman, whose life we will remember and celebrate tonight, is that he let me go through graduate school teaching most of the courses I needed to take for graduation.
([ can I say the same thing about the military-industrial-complex, and
the national-security-technology-for-all-my-problem-complex, or, are they the same entity?
No, they have overlapping parts.
The principal objective of the [unamed organization, system, or sub-system] is
(1) to provide job security and
(2) increase the standard of living and
(3) quality of life of those members
of the ... and administration who make the critical decisions.
])
([
To generalize and to view it from one optic, the purpose of a system is
to maintain
(1) safety and security,
to improve the
(2) “ quality of life, ” and
to increase the
(3) “standard of living”
of the members making the critical decisions.
Cui bono, Latin for “to whose benefit?”, literally “as a benefit to whom?”
])
On Democracy
Democracy has to be learned. It cannot be imposed on others. It must be learned by experiencing it. It does not come to us naturally. All of us are brought up by adults who, even in permissive families, are authorities who control us or set limits within which we have freedom. In effect, we are raised in autocratic structures however benevolent they may be. Therefore, in a sense autocracy is more natural than democracy.
I was once involved in a project in Mexico which taught me how democracy could be learned. A group of us from several Mexican universities and a government agency were able to make available to a very remote Indian village in the Sierra Madras Mountains a substantial sum of money the village could use for its development. It alone had to make the decisions as to how to use the money of which I was a part had was to veto any decisions not made democratically and which did not involve development. Town meetings were initiated in the square in the center of the village, and after a series of tries the village members learned how to make decisions democratically. They also learned and difference between development and welfare.
On Prisons
The United States has a higher percentage of its population in prison than any other country, and simultaneously has the highest crime rate. We have more people in prison than are attending college and universities, and it cost more per year to incarcerate them than to educate them. Something is fundamentally wrong.
Most who are imprisoned are subsequently released. As criminologists have shown those released have a higher probability of committing a crime when they come out than when they went in, and it is likely to be a more serious crime. Prison is a school for learning criminality, not a correctional institution.
On US health care system
In quality the health care system of the United States is ranked 37th by the World Health Organization. We are the only developed country without universal coverage; about 42 million people in our country have no health care assured. Moreover, study after study has shown that much of the need for the care that is provided is created by the care that is given; excess surgery, incorrect diagnoses, wrong drugs prescribed or administered, unnecessary tests.
The fact is that the so-called health care system can survive only as long as there are people who are sick or disabled. Therefore, whatever the intent of its servers, the system can only assure its survival by creating and preserving illness and disability. We have a self-maintaining sickness- and disability-care system, not a health care system.
( By Robert Steele, Western governments have been corrupted by the medical industry that wishes only to focus on the Surgical and Pharmaceutical Remediation aspect of public health, because that is where the private profits are to be found. ([in this case, if you want to know why the system is broke, you follow the money; ...]) )
“systemic thinking”
Systemic thinking is holistic versus reductionistic thinking, synthetic versus analytic. Reductionistic and analytic thinking derives properties of wholes from the properties of their parts. Holistic and synthetic thinking derive properties of parts from properties of the whole that contains them. The creation of the department of Homeland Security is a prime example of reductionistic and analytical thinking; the whole formed by the aggregation of existing parts. In contrast, when an architect designs a house he first sketches the house as a whole and then puts rooms into it. The principal criterion he employs in evaluating a room is what effect it has on the whole. He is even willing to make a room worse if doing so will make the house better.
In general, those who make public policy and engage in public decision making do not understand that improvement in the performance of parts of a system taken separately may not, and usually does not, improve performance of the system as a whole. In fact, it may make system performance worse or even destroy it.
([ I would add, imagine holistic medicine versus reductionistic and analytic medicine. Would you treat your self, the heart, the mind, the body and every thing else using a holistic approach or in a reductionistic/analytic approach? Both? Neither? Hybrid? or what ever works. or how about eating right, living right, and not getting sick in the first place, and not living next to a pollution emitting facilities. ])
Source:
Russell Ackoff,
Transforming the Systems Movement(RLAConfPaper).pdf
online, 26 May 2004.
Note:
*1 famine, nutrition, water (OW)
pp.258-259
Famine, malnutrition, and a lack of drinking water have completely different causes. Simon Kuznets, the 1971 Nobel laureate in Economics, rightly posed the question of why population growth would have to impede economic growth. Automatically equating a growing population figure with economic problems stems from a point of view propagated two centuries ago by Thomas R. Malthus and his followers. In reality, a fatal relationship -- as postulated by Malthus -- does not exist. Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in Economics, proved this using the example of India. He was able to demonstrate that social disparities and badly functioning public institution and infrastructure in this country are primarily responsible for destitution and underdevelopment. In this sense, governance problems and a lack of political will have to be held accountable for turning population growth into a real development problem.
A series of scientific studies have shown that population growth is not generally the cause of poverty and underdevelopment. But rapid population growth exacerbates the search for solutions, and overtaxes existing infrastructure capacities and the ability of the labour markets to absorb a growing workforce. As a result, an increasing number of people in rapidly growing societies have no possibility of attending school or accessing medical care in the event of an illness or during pregnancy.
There may well be some sort of a demographic poverty trap in the least developed countries.
(Overcrowded World, Wie schnell wächst die Zahl der Menschen?Weltbevölkerung and weltweite Migration, Overcrowded World?, Global Population and International Migration, By Rainer Münz and Albert F. Reiterer, © 2007, English translation copyright © Julia Schweizer 2009, pp.258-259)
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