The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization

Write in: “Level of sales” rather than “We’re selling less this year” or “Our sales have dropped in half.”

In systems thinking, every picture tells a story. From any element in a situation (or “variable”), you can trace arrows (“links”) that represent influence on another element. These, in turn, reveal cycles that repeat themselves, time after time, making situations better or worse.

PURPOSE An alternative method for telling your story, by hunting backward for the root cause of pernicious, recurring problems.* *This exercise is partly based on an established Japanese quality technique and its description by quality consultant Peter Scholtes. OVERVIEW Asking “Why,” five times, in a team setting, with discussion.

Use this archetype to distinguish between true “tragedies of the commons” and situations where you “shift the burden” of a painful decision to the next level up. It’s a true “tragedy” if the incentives at the individual level must work at cross-purposes when you look at the collective outcome.

Start by giving them an opportunity to talk about their personal vision for their life as a whole. What do they want to see, for themselves, in the future? With that as a starting point, how can their vision for the organization reflect and amplify their individual vision?

linear languages, like English, permit us to talk about the loop only one step at a time,

an ecosystem’s balance of predator and prey, or a company’s “natural” expenses, which, whenever you cut them, seem to balloon up somewhere else.

When you finish the deed, you move immediately back to the reflecting stage, perhaps with a formal postmortem. How well did it work out?

For every limit, there are effective strategies, but we usually don’t see them. Our natural tendency is to look for what worked in the past and to keep redoubling our efforts, instead of paying attention to the constraints.

Then comes the leap: What alternative solutions might you have tried, if the quick-fix avenue were not available to you? Would any of those alternatives have been more fundamentally satisfying?