The Fifth Discipline

Team Learning.

Shared vision is vital for the learning organization because it provides the focus and energy for learning. While adaptive learning is possible without vision, generative learning occurs only when people are striving to accomplish something that matters deeply to them. In fact, the whole idea of generative learning—expanding your ability to create—

The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.

Finally, some fear that personal mastery will threaten the established order of a well-managed company. This is a valid fear. To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive. If people do not share a common vision, and do not share common mental models about the business reality within which they operate, empowering people w

Many of the practices most conducive to developing one’s own personal mastery—developing a more systemic worldview, learning how to reflect on tacit assumptions, expressing one’s vision and listening to others’ visions, and joint inquiry into different people’s views of current reality—are embedded in the disciplines for building learning organizat

When the systems archetypes are used in conversations about complex and potentially conflictual management issues, reliably, they “objectify” the conversation. The conversation becomes about “the structure,” the systemic forces at play, not about personalities and leadership styles. Difficult questions can be raised in a way that does not carry inn

Building Shared Vision.

Systems Thinking.

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

Facing up to distinctions between espoused theories (what we say) and theories-in-use (the implied theory in what we do) Recognizing “leaps of abstraction” (noticing our jumps from observation to generalization) Exposing the “left-hand column” (articulating what we normally do not say) Balancing inquiry and advocacy (skills for effective collaborat