The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization

codify your group intuition. You have created hypotheses about what has happened, and where opportunities for leverage might exist. Before committing yourself to any large-scale actions, run several small, relatively self-contained experiments.

BECAUSE SYSTEM DYNAMICS ILLUSTRATES THE INTERDEPENDENCIES within the current system, there is never a single right answer to any question.

you can gradually evolve a new type of organization. It will be able to deal with the problems and opportunities of today, and invest in its capacity to embrace tomorrow, because its members are continually focused on enhancing and expanding their collective awareness and capabilities. You can create, in other words, an organization which can learn

two indicators of performance change simultaneously.

read about them in Systems Archetypes: Diagnosing Systemic Issues and Designing High-Leverage Interventions by Daniel H. Kim (1993, Cambridge, Mass.: Pegasus Communications). Or see The Fifth Discipline, pp. 378-90; issues of The Systems Thinker;

Garrett Hardin in “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, December 13, 1968.

shared understanding of what the company stands for, where it’s going, what kind of world it wants to live in, and, most importantly, how it intends to make that world a reality.”*

THE BREAKTHROUGH STRATEGY by Robert H. Schaffer (1988,

In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than its competition. No outside force can take the momentum of that advantage away from you.

To practice a discipline is to be a lifelong learner on a never-ending developmental path.