The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization

Before you throw people into a room to practice skillful discussion, dialogue, and other team learning skills, they should learn basic inquiry (see page 253) and reflection (see page 246) skills.

Look at the performance involved with your worst current problem. If there are small triumphs and long troughs, there may be a “Fixes That Backfire” structure involved.

Strategic thinking also addresses core dilemmas. Inevitably, one of the factors that makes significant change difficult is conflict among competing goals and norms:

include any elements which are at least partly under your influence: if you can change the relationship of your company with suppliers, seeing that element as part of a vicious cycle may lead to insights about how you can influence the whole system.

if you get stuck, try working forward: What is the effect when this variable changes? What other elements must change?

The level of quality which customers would accept has driven the changes in the auto industry for the past twenty years, but no one has been able to agree on, or measure, that level of quality. A vision may drive the behavior of a team but never be articulated.

Choose a problem whose history is known, and which you can describe.

Reframe and address the root problem: give up the fix that works only on the symptom. Every fix that backfires is driven by an implicit target in the balancing loop. So make it explicit. What’s the problem you are really trying to fix?

When we do not take other people as objects for our use, but see them as fellow human beings with whom we can learn and change, we open new possibilities for being ourselves more fully.