Peter Senge and The Learning Organization

According to Peter Senge, author of the concept of the learning organizations, currently few of the traditional organizations live even half as long as a person - most die before the age of forty. The reason lies in their capacity (or would it be lack of capacity?) to learn. What "learning" really means in the organizational context? How to objectivelly build the necessary competences and orientation into the organizations?

In his work, Peter Senge also addresses how visions work. He believes nothing motivates change more powerfully than a clear vision. In fact the vision of the "Learning organizations" is that of...

...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 to see the whole together.

The basic rationale for such organizations is that in situations of rapid change only those that are flexible, adaptive and productive will excel. For this to happen, it is argued, organizations need to ‘discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels’.

When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It become quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit. (Peter Senge, the fifth discipline).

But what is learning?

As per Senge, learning concerns the enhancement of the capacity to create. It occurs when people are trying to do something that they want to do. Why do children learn to walk? Because they want to. It is our intrinsic drive to create something new or do something we have never done before that leads to learning. It is always related to doing something.

According to John Dewey,one of the most influential thinkers on education in the twentieth century, "All learning is a continual process of discovering insights, inventing new possibilities for action, producing the actions, and observing the consequences leading to insights."

The dimension that distinguishes learning from more traditional organizations is the mastery of certain basic disciplines or ‘component technologies’. The five that Peter Senge identifies are said to be converging to innovate learning organizations. They are:

Systems thinking

Personal mastery

Mental models

Building shared vision

Team learning

He adds to this recognition that people are agents, able to act upon the structures and systems of which they are a part. All the disciplines are, in this way, ‘concerned with a shift of mind from seeing parts to seeing wholes, from seeing people as helpless reactors to seeing them as active participants in shaping their reality, from reacting to the present to creating the future’.