提供：MC & XM 1998-11
（摘自'The fifth Discipline - The Art & Practice of The Learning
Organization' by Peter M. Senge
）
以下为本人甚欣赏的一本书，抄出部份与大家分享：
'The fifth Discipline - The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization' by Peter M.
Senge
Chapter
1
"Give me a lever long enough ......
and single-handed I can move the world"
INTRODUCTION
From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This
apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous
price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense
of connection to a larger whole. When we then try to "see the big picture", we
try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces. But, as
physicist David Bohm says, the task is futile -- similar to trying to reassemble the
fragments of a broken
mirror to see a true reflection. Thus, after a while we give up trying to see the whole
altogether.
The tools and ideas presented in this book are for destroying the illusion that the world
is created of separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this illusion -- we can then
build
"learning organizations", organizations where people continually expand their
capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of
thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are
continually learning how to learn together.
As Fortune magazine recently said, "forget your tired old ideas about leadership. The
most successful corporation of the 1990s will be something called a Learning
Organization."
"The ability to learn faster than your competitors," said Arie De Geus, head of
planning for Royal Dutch/Shell, "may be the only sustainable competitive
advantage."
As the world becomes more interconnected and business becomes more complex and dynamic,
work must become more "learningful." It is no longer sufficient to have one
person learning for the organization. It's just not possible any longer to "figure it
out" from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the "grand
strategist." The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the
organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all
levels in an organization.
（收到时间 - 1998年 十一月 10日 星期二 18:14:8 ）
Peter Senge 对 DISCIPLINE 的说明If a learning organization was an engineering innovation, such as the airplane or the personal computer, the components would be called "technologies". For an innovation in human behavior, the components need to be seen as DISCIPLINES. By "discipline", I do not mean an "enforced order" or "means of punishment", but A BODY OF THEORY AND TECHNIQUE THAT MUST BE STUDIED AND MASTERED TO BE PUT INTO PRACTICE. A discipline is a developmental path for acquiring certain skills or competencies. As with any discipline, from playing piano to electrical engineering, some people have an innate gift, but anyone can develop proficiency through practice.
评注：discipline
在这里的用法，大概最接近的是“学问”或“学科”。上面说道：“一门学问是一个拓展的途径，从中获得实在的技巧与资历”，这是从一种“动态”的角度去看待它，非常具启发性。
（ty, 98-11-24）
不论古今中外，很多人都发出过如 PETER SENGE 一般的呼唤：
“你认识越多，便越醒觉自己的无知！”
To practice a discipline is to be a lifelong learner. You "never arrive"; you
spend your life mastering disciplines. You can never say, "we are a learning
organization," any more than you can say "I an an enlightened person." The
more you learn, the more acutely aware you become of your ignoranc. Thus, a corporation
cannot be "excellent" in the sense of having arrived at a permanent excellence;
it is always in the state of practicing the disciplines of learning of becoming better or
worse.
Practicing a discipline is different from emulating "a model". All too often,
new management innovations are described in terms of the "best practices" of
so-called leading firms. While interesting, I believe such descriptions can often do more
harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing
catch-up. I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate
another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another
"great person".
（收到时间 - 1998年 十一月 17日 星期二 8:8:10）
DISCIPLINES OF A LEARNING ORGANIZATION
There are 5 disciplines of the LEARNING ORGANISATION
Mastery might suggest gaining dominance over people or things. But mastery can also mean a special level of proficiency. A master craftsman doesn't dominate pottery or weaving. People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them - in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.
Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal
vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality
objectively.
As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organisation - the learning
organisation's spiritual foundation. An organisation's commitment to and capacity for
learning can be no greater than that of its members. The roots of this discipline lie in
both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, and in secular traditions as well.
But surprisingly few organisations encourage the growth of their people in this manner.
This results in vast untapped resources: "People enter business as bright,
well-educated,
high-energy people, full of energy and desire to make a difference," says Hanover's
O'Brien. "By the time they are 30, a few are on the 'fast track' and the rest 'put in
their time' to do what matters to them on the weekend. They loss the commitment, the sense
of mission, and the excitement with which they started their careers. We get damn little
of their energy and almost none of their spirit."
And surprisingly few adults work to rigorously develop their own personal mastery. When
you ask most adults what they want from their lives, they often talk first about what
they'd like
to get rid of: "I'd like my mother-in-law to move out," they say, or "I'd
like my back problems to clear up." The discipline of personal mastery, by contrast,
starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us, of living our lives in the
service of our highest aspirations.
Here, I am most interested in the connections between personal learning and organisational
learning, in the reciprocal commitments between individual and organisation, and in the
special spirit of an enterprise made up of learners.
"Mental models" are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalisations, or even
pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very
often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our
behaviour. For example, we may notice that a co-worker dresses elegantly, and say to
ourselves, "she's a country club person." About someone who dresses shabbily, we
may feel, "he doesn't care about what others think." Mental models of what can
or cannot be done in different management settings are no less deeply entrenched. Many
insights into new markets or outmoded organisational practices fail to get put into
practice because they conflict with powerful, tacit mental models.
Royal Dutch/Shell, one of the first large organisations to understand the advantages of
accelerating organisational learning came to this realisation when they discovered how
pervasive was the influence of hidden mental models, especially those that become widely
shared. Shell's extraordinary success in managing through the dramatic changes and
unpredictability of the world oil business in the 1970s and 1980s came in large measure
from learning how to surface and challenge manager's mental models. (In the early 1970s
Shell was the weakest of the big 7 oil companies; by the late 1980s it was the strongest.)
Arie de Geus, Shell's recently retired Coordinator of Group Planning, says that continuous
adaptation and growth in a changing business environment depends on "institutional
learning, which is the process whereby management teams change their shared mental models
of the company, their markets, and their competitors. for this reason, we think of
planning as learning and of corporate planning as institutional learning.
The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward;
learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface and
hold them rigorously to scrutiny. It also includes the ability to carry on
"learningful" conversations that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people
expose their own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of
others.
（收到时间 - 1998年 十一月 20日 星期五 18:45:29 ）
If any one idea about leadership has inspired organisations for thousands of years,
it's the capacity to hold a shared picture of the future we seek to create. One is hard
pressed to think of any organisation that has sustained some measure of greatness in the
absence of goals, values, and missions that become deeply shared throughout the
organisation. IBM had
"service"; Polaroid had instant photography; Ford had public transportation for
the masses and Apple had computing power for the masses. Though radically different in
content and kind, all these organisations managed to bind people together around a common
identity and sense of destiny.
When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar "vision
statement"), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they
want to. But many leaders have personal visions that never get translated into shared
visions that galvanize an organisation. All too often, a company's shared vision has
revolved around the charisms of a leader, or around a crisis that galvanizes everyone
temporarily. But, given a choice, most people opt for
pursuing a lofty goal, not only in times of crisis but at all times. What has been lacking
is a discipline for translating individual vision into shared vision -- not a
"cook-book" but a set of principles and guiding practices.
The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared "pictures of
the future" that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. In
mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counterproductiveness of trying to dictate a
vision, no matter how heartfelt.
How can a team of committed managers with individual IQs above 120 have a collective IQ
of 63? The discipline of team learning confronts this paradox. We know that teams
can learn; in sports, in the performing arts, in science, and even occasionally, in
business, there are striking examples where the intelligence of the team exceeds the
intelligence of the individuals in the team, and where teams develop extraordinary
capacities for coordinated action. When teams are truly learning, not only are they
producing extraordinary results but the individual members are growing more rapidly than
could have occurred otherwise.
The discipline of team learning starts with "dialogue", the capacity of members
of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine "thinking together".
To the Greeks dia-logos
meant a free-flowing of meaning through a group, allowing the group to discover insights
not attainable individually. Interestingly, the practice of dialogue has been preserved in
many "primitive" cultures, such as that of the American Indian, but it has been
almost completely lost to modern society. Today, the principles and practices of dialogue
are being rediscovered and put into a contemporary context. (Dialogue differs from the
more common "discussion", which has its roots with "percussion" and
"concussion", literally a heaving of ideas back and forth in a winner-takes-all
competition.)
The discipline of dialogue also involves learning how to recognize the patterns of
interaction in teams that undermine learning. The patterns of defensiveness are often
deeply engrained in how a team operates. If unrecognized, they undermine learning. If
recognized and surfaced creatively, they can actually accelerate learning.
Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit
in modern organisations. This where "the rubber meets the road"; unless teams
can learn, the
organisation cannot learn.
A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We
also know that after the storm, the runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the
sky will
grow clear by tomorrow. All these events are distant in time and space, and yet they are
all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, an influence
that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by
contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern.
Business and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible
fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on
each
other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole
pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system,
and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved. Systems thinking is a
conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past
fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them
effectively.
Though the tools are new, the underlying worldview is extremely intuitive; experiments
with young children show that they learn systems thinking very quickly.
It is vital that the five disciplines develop as an ensemble. This is challenging because
it is much harder to integrate new tools than simply apply them separately. But the
payoffs are
immense.
This is why SYSTEMS THINKING is the fifth discipline. It is the discipline that integrates
the disciplines, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice. It keeps them
from being separate gimmicks or the latest organisation change fads. Without a systemic
orientation, there is no motivation to look at how the disciplines interrelate. By
enhancing each of the other disciplines, it continually reminds us that the whole can
exceed the sum of its parts.
下一次，我们看看甚麽是 组织学习智障(Organisations Learning
Disability )
（收到时间：1998-11-26， by MC & XM）
Chapter 2
DOES YOUR ORGANISATION HAVE A LEARNING DISABILITY?
(TY 在这儿介绍了企业的生命周期，Peter Senge 在第二章的开头，提及了企业的寿命。)
大企业的寿命很少超过人类寿命的一半。1983年Royal Dutch/Shell的调查发现， 1970 年列名"Fortune 500"排行榜的公司，有三分之一已经消声匿迹。依Royal Dutch/Shell的估计， 大型企业的平均寿命不及四十年，约为人类寿命的一半！
大部份失败的企业，事先都会有许多的徵兆显示它们已出了问题，然而即使有少数管理者已微略察觉这些现象，也不会太留意。整体而言，组织往往无法辨清逼近的危机，无法体认这些危机的后果，或提出正确的对策。
也许在适者生存的法则下，如此汰旧换新对社会是好的，可把经济土壤重新翻过，重新把生产资源分配给新的企业和新的文化。然而对於员工及企业主，这是很痛苦的事。但如果高死亡率并非那些问题企业才会面临的威胁，而是所有企业都会面临的问题时，要怎办？如果即使是目前最成功的企业，其实还是很差劲的学习者，那怎办？
Learning disabilities are tragic in children, especially when they go undetected. They are
no less tragic in organisations, where they also go largely undetected. The first step in
curing them is to begin to identify the seven learning disabilities:
We are trained to be loyal to our jobs -- so much so that we confuse them with our own
identities. When a large American steel company began closing plants in the early 1980s,
it offered to train the displaced steelworkers for new jobs. But the training never
"took"; the workers drifted into unemployment and odd jobs instead.
Psychologists came in to find out why, and found the steelworkers suffering from acute
identity crises. "How could I do anything else?" asked the workers. "I am a
lathe operator."
When asked what they do for a living, most people describe the tasks they perform
everyday, not the purpose of the greater enterprise in which they take part. Most see
themselves within a "system" over which they have little or no influence. They
"do their job", put in their time, and try to cope with the forces outside of
their control. Consequently, they tend to see their responsibilities as limited to the
boundaries of their position.
Recently, managers from a Detroit auto maker told me of stripping down a Japanese import
to understand why the Japanese were able to achieve extraordinary precision and
reliability at lower cost on a particular assembly process. They found the same standard
type of bolt used three times on the engine block. Each time it mounted a different type
of component. On the Amercian car, the same assembly required three different bolts, which
required three different wrenches and three different inventories of bolts -- making the
car much slower and more costly to assemble. Why did the Americans use three separate
bolts? Because the design organisation in Detroit had three groups of engineers, each
responsible for "their component only". The Japanese had one designer
responsible for the entire engine mounting, and probably much more. The irony is that each
of the three groups of American engineers considered their work successful because their
bolt and assembly worked just fine.
When people in organisations focus only on their position, they have little sense of
responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when
results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume
that "someone screwed up."
A friend once told the story of a boy he coached in Little league, who after dropping
three fly balls in the right field, threw down his glove and marched into the dugout.
"No one can catch a ball in that darn field," he said.
There is in each of us a propensity to find someone or something outside ourselves to
blame when things go wrong. Some organisations elevate this propensity to a commandment:
"Thou shalt always find an external agent to blame." Marketing blames
manufacturing: "The reason we keep missing sales targets is that our quality is not
competitive." Manufacturing blames engineering. Engineering blames marketing:
"If they'd only quit screwing up our designs and let us design the products we are
capable of, we'd be an industry leader."
The "enemy is out there" syndrome is actually a by-product of "I am in my
position", and the non-systemic ways of looking at the world that it fosters. When we
focus only on our position, we do not see how our own actions extend beyond the boundary
of that position. When those actions have consequences that come back to hurt us, we
misperceive these new problems as externally caused. Like the person being chased by his
own shadow, we cannot seem to shake them.
The "enemy is out there" syndrome is not limited to assigning blame within the
organisation. During its last years of operation, the once highly successful People
Express Airlines slashed prices, boosted marketing, and bought Frontier Airlines -- all in
a frantic attempt to fight back against the perceived cause of its demise: increasingly
aggressive competitors. Yet, none of these moves arrested the company's mountingg losses
or corrected its core problem, service quality that had declined so far that low fares
were its only remaining pull on customers.
For many American companies, "the enemy" has become Japanese competition, labour
unions, government regulators, or customers who "betrayed us" by buying products
from someone else. "The enemy is out there," however, is almost always an
incomplete story. "Out there" and "in there" are usually part of a
single system. This learning disability makes it almost impossible to
detect the leverage which we can use "in there" on problems that straddle the
boundary between us and "out there".
Being "proactive" is in vogue. Managers frequently proclaim the need for
taking charge in facing difficult problems. What is typically meant by this is that we
should face up to difficult issues, stop waiting for someone else to do something, and
solve problems before they grow into crises. In
particular, being proactive is frequently seen as an antidote to being
"reactive" -- waiting until a situation gets out of hand before taking a step.
But is taking aggressive action against an external enemy really synonymous with being
proactive?
Not too long ago, a management team in a leading property and liability insurance company
with whom we were working got bitten by the proactiveness bug. The head of the team, a
talented vice president for claims, was about to give a speech proclaiming that the
company wasn't going to get pushed around anymore by lawyers litigating more and more
claims settlements. The firm would beef up its own legal staff so that it could take more
cases through to trial by verdict, instead of settling them out of court.
Then we and some members of the team began to look more systemically at the probable
effects of the idea: the likely fraction of cases that might be won in court, the likely
size of cases lost, the monthly direct and overhead costs regardless of who won or lost,
and how long cases would probably stay in litigation. (The tool we used is
"microworlds") Interestingly, the team's scenarios pointed to increasing total
costs because, given the quality of investigation done initially on most claims, the firm
simply could not win enough of its cases to offset the costs of increased litigation. The
vice president tore up his speech.
All too often, "proactiveness" is reactiveness in disguise. If we simply become
more aggressive fighting the "enemy out them", we are reacting -- regardless of
what we call it. True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own
problems. It is a product of our way of thinking, not our emotional state.
（MC提供，收到日期：98-12-4）
企业工程论坛 http://www.ee-forum.org/ 1998