The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

[Buddy]

This is not a full book review, but because the 7 learning disabilities in Chapter Two apply to the wider context of our own occupations and can be so easily transposed into an esoteric Work context, I thought I’d post them here for the reader’s benefit.

Introduction:
In chapter 2, Senge points out that it is no accident that organizations, like people, learn poorly. There are many reasons why which include the way jobs and such are organized and managed, but the most important reason as seen from the broadest perspective is that the very way we have been taught to think and act causes these learning disabilities.

Learning disabilities are especially tragic in children and no less so in organizations where they go largely undetected, but the good news is that demonstrations have shown that children learn systems thinking rather easily and adults can overcome the "in the box syndrome" with effort.

The first step, then, in overcoming these learning disabilities is to learn about them.

1. "I AM MY POSITION"

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 every day, 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 American 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 organization 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 organizations 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."

2. "THE ENEMY IS OUT THERE"

A friend once told the story of a boy he coached in Little League, who after dropping three fly balls in 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 organizations 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 my position," and the nonsystemic 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 organization. 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 mounting 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, labor 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 here" are usually part of a single system. This learning disability makes it almost impossible to detect the leverage which we can use "in here" on problems that straddle the boundary between us and "out there."

3. THE ILLUSION OF TAKING CHARGE

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 discussed in Chapter 17, "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 there," 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.

4. THE FIXATION ON EVENTS

Two children get into a scrap on the playground and you come over to untangle them. Lucy says, "I hit him because he took my ball." Tommy says, "I took her ball because she won't let me play with her airplane." Lucy says, "He can't play with my airplane because he broke the propeller." Wise adults that we are, we say, "Now, now, children—just get along with each other." But are we really any different in the way we explain the entanglements we find ourselves caught in? We are conditioned to see life as a series of events, and for every event, we think there is one obvious cause.

Conversations in organizations are dominated by concern with events: last month's sales, the new budget cuts, last quarter's earnings, who just got promoted or fired, the new product our competitors just announced, the delay that just was announced in our new product, and so on. The media reinforces an emphasis on short-term events—after all, if it's more than two days' old it's no longer "news." Focusing on events leads to "event" explanations: "The Dow Jones average dropped sixteen points today," announces the newspaper, "because low fourth-quarter profits were announced yesterday." Such explanations may be true as far as they go, but they distract us from seeing the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the events and from understanding the causes of those patterns.

Our fixation on events is actually part of our evolutionary programming. If you wanted to design a cave person for survival, ability to contemplate the cosmos would not be a high-ranking design criterion. What is important is the ability to see the saber-toothed tiger over your left shoulder and react quickly. The irony is that, today, the primary threats to our survival, both of our organizations and of our societies, come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes; the arms race, environmental decay, the erosion of a society's public education system, increasingly obsolete physical capital, and decline in design or product quality (at least relative to competitors' quality) are all slow, gradual processes.

Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people's thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create.

5. THE PARABLE OF THE BOILED FROG

Maladaptation to gradually building threats to survival is so pervasive in systems studies of corporate failure that it has given rise to the parable of the "boiled frog."

If you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to scramble out. But if you place the frog in room temperature water, and don't scare him, he'll stay put. Now, if the pot sits on a heat source, and if you gradually turn up the temperature, something very interesting happens. As the temperature rises from 70 to 80 degrees F., the frog will do nothing. In fact, he will show every sign of enjoying himself. As the temperature gradually increases, the frog will become groggier and groggier, until he is unable to climb out of the pot. Though there is nothing restraining him, the frog will sit there and boil.

Why? Because the frog's internal apparatus for sensing threats to survival is geared to sudden changes in his environment, not to slow, gradual changes.

Something similar happened to the American automobile industry. In the 1960s, it dominated North American production. That began to change very gradually. Certainly, Detroit's Big Three did not see Japan as a threat to their survival in 1962, when the Japanese share of the U.S. market was below 4 percent. Nor in 1967, when it was less than 10 percent. Nor in 1974, when it was under 15 percent.

By the time the Big Three began to look critically at its own practices and core assumptions, it was the early 1980s, and the Japanese share of the American market had risen to 21.3 percent. By 1989, the Japanese share was approaching 30 percent, and the American auto industry could account for only about 60 percent of the cars sold in the U.S.2 It is still not clear whether this particular frog will have the strength to pull itself out of the hot water. Learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic.

If you sit and look into a tidepool, initially you won't see much of anything going on. However, if you watch long enough, after about ten minutes the tidepool will suddenly come to life. The world of beautiful creatures is always there, but moving a bit too slowly to be seen at first. The problem is our minds are so locked in one frequency, it's as if we can only see at 78 rpm; we can't see anything at 33'/3. We will not avoid the fate of the frog until we learn to slow down and see the gradual processes that often pose the greatest threats.

6. THE DELUSION OF LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

The most powerful learning comes from direct experience. Indeed, we learn eating, crawling, walking, and communicating through direct trial and error—through taking an action and seeing the consequences of that action; then taking a new and different action. But what happens when we can no longer observe the consequences of our actions? What happens if the primary consequences of our actions are in the distant future or in a distant part of the larger system within which we operate?

We each have a "learning horizon," a breadth of vision in time and space within which we assess our effectiveness. When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon, it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience.

Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have system-wide consequences that stretch over years or decades. Decisions in R&D have first-order consequences in marketing and manufacturing. Investing in new manufacturing facilities and processes influences quality and delivery reliability for a decade or more. Promoting the right people into leadership positions shapes strategy and organizational climate for years.

These are exactly the types of decisions where there is the least opportunity for trial and error learning.

Cycles are particularly hard to see, and thus learn from, if they last longer than a year or two. As systems-thinking writer Draper Kauffman, Jr., points out, most people have short memories. "When a temporary oversupply of workers develops in a particular field," he wrote, "everyone talks about the big surplus and young people are steered away from the field. Within a few years, this creates a shortage, jobs go begging, and young people are frantically urged into the field—which creates a surplus. Obviously, the best time to start training for a job is when people have been talking about a surplus for several years and few others are entering it. That way, you finish your training just as the shortage develops."3

Traditionally, organizations attempt to surmount the difficulty of coping with the breadth of impact from decisions by breaking themselves up into components. They institute functional hierarchies that are easier for people to "get their hands around." But, functional divisions grow into fiefdoms, and what was once a convenient division of labor mutates into the "stovepipes" that all but cut off con¬tact between functions.

The result: analysis of the most important problems in a company, the complex issues that cross functional lines, becomes a perilous or nonexistent exercise.

7. THE MYTH OF THE MANAGEMENT TEAM

Standing forward to do battle with these dilemmas and disabilities is "the management team," the collection of savvy, experienced managers who represent the organization's different functions and areas of expertise. Together, they are supposed to sort out the complex cross-functional issues that are critical to the organization. What confidence do we have, really, that typical management teams can surmount these learning disabilities?

All too often, teams in business tend to spend their time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team's collective strategy —maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team. To keep up the image, they seek to squelch disagreement; people with serious reservations avoid stating them publicly, and joint decisions are watered-down compromises reflecting what everyone can live with, or else reflecting one person's view foisted on the group. If there is disagreement, it's usually expressed in a manner that lays blame, polarizes opinion, and fails to reveal the underlying differences in assumptions and experience in a way that the team as a whole could learn.

"Most management teams break down under pressure," writes Harvard's Chris Argyris—a longtime student of learning in management teams. "The team may function quite well with routine issues. But when they confront complex issues that may be embarrassing or threatening, the 'teamness' seems to go to pot."4

Argyris argues that most managers find collective inquiry inherently threatening. School trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding the people who excel in advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues. (When was the last time someone was rewarded in your organization for raising difficult questions about the company's current policies rather than solving urgent problems?)

Even if we feel uncertain or ignorant, we learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain or ignorant. That very process blocks out any new understandings which might threaten us. The consequence is what Argyris calls "skilled incompetence"—teams full of people who are incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning.

DISABILITIES AND DISCIPLINES​

These learning disabilities have been with us for a long time. In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman traces the history of devastating large-scale policies "pursued contrary to ultimate self-interest,"5 from the fall of the Trojans through the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

In story after story, leaders could not see the consequences of their own policies, even when they were warned in advance that their own survival was at stake. Reading between the lines of Tuchman's writing, you can see that the fourteenth-century Valois monarchs of France suffered from "I am my position" disabilities— when they devalued currency, they literally didn't realize they were driving the new French middle class toward insurrection.

In the mid-1700s Britain had a bad case of boiled frog. The British went through "a full decade," wrote Tuchman, "of mounting conflict with the [American] colonies without any [British official] send¬ing a representative, much less a minister, across the Atlantic . . . to find out what was endangering the relationship . . ."6

By 1776, the start of the American Revolution, the relationship was irrevocably endangered. Elsewhere, Tuchman describes the Roman Catholic cardinals of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a tragic management "team" in which piety demanded that they present an appearance of agreement. However, behind-the-scenes backstabbing (in some cases, literal backstabbing) brought in opportunistic popes whose abuses of office provoked the Protestant Reformation.

We live in no less perilous times today, and the same learning disabilities persist, along with their consequences. The five disciplines of the learning organization can, I believe, act as antidotes to these learning disabilities. But first, we must see the disabilities more clearly—for they are often lost amid the bluster of day-to-day events.

“The Fifth Discipline; The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization”, Peter M. Senge, Doubleday, 1994