Holistic Approach

Imagine.

You work on a team where everyone works together beautifully. You trust each other, complement each other’s strengths, compensate for each other’s weaknesses, and aim for goals that have real meaning for all. No one has all the answers but everyone is willing to learn together. Each shares a vision of greatness, and collectively people consistently can accomplish what many think impossible.

Some know what it’s like to be part of such a team, but for most, the experience is the exception, not the rule. And it’s unlikely to change until we recognize that few great teams begin great. They develop their collective capacity; they learn.

According to Peter Senge, all organizations can enhance their capacities to continually learn. A senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management, Senge first introduced the learning organization in his 1990 bestseller, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, which has sold 500,000 copies and recently was cited by Harvard Business Review as one of the seminal management books of the last 75 years.

In 1991, he and colleagues founded the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, now the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL). SoL is a consortium of consultants, researchers (many from the Sloan School), and 25 member companies, including Ford, Hewlett-Packard, Shell, Federal Express, Harley-Davidson, Chrysler, and Intel who work together to build knowledge about “the interdependent development of people and their institutions.”

Senge, who also co-authored The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, and who lectures around the world, says top-down management has outlived its usefulness. “In the West, a manager is decisive, in control, has the answers. But a learning organization is a lifelong, open-ended journey.

“The world has become a smaller, more interdependent place. The era of the grand strategist, the person at the top who figures it all out and tells people what to do, is over. Our traditional ways of managing are just not going to work in the world as it evolves.”

Firms that will succeed, he says, will engage people at all levels in creating their collective future. But there are two problems. Achieving the changes takes time and they directly contradict the culture of industrial era enterprises.

Giving Up Control

“Most deep problems that go on in any one organization are universal to all organizations,” Senge says, “but they’re pretty invisible to us because we all grew up thinking the name of the game was control.

You don’t get promoted up the management hierarchy because you ask penetrating questions for which you don’t have the answers. You’re promoted because you make a good impression and project an air of confidence and certainty. But these are the very problems that keep organizations from learning. Organizations are full of people at the most senior levels who are ‘knowers’ rather than ‘learners.’”

A 1983 study revealed one-third of the companies in the 1970 Fortune 500 folded. Senge says the rate of corporate mortality is, if anything, greater today. “Organizations are so far from their potential for innovation, creativity, and long-term success because they’re dominated by games playing, internal politics and power dynamics of all kinds, and it causes a big part of ourselves to shut down.” he says, adding when people’s energy is set free from internal politics, it becomes available for creative work.

As antidotes, most members of SoL find that the five disciplines summarized in Senge’s first book are a good place to start:

* Early on, we’re taught to break apart problems to create manageable parts. But this creates a bigger problem. No longer are we connected to the consequences of our actions; we’re disconnected from the whole. Systems thinking enables us to see the patterns and interrelationships so that people can share responsibility for what is working and what is not.
* Personal mastery is commitment to personal growth, and a relentless willingness to uncover ways we limit and deceive ourselves and to do something about it.
* Our actions are based on ideas and assumptions deep in the psyche. Often we’re unaware of these mental models, yet they have power to hold us back or move us ahead. We need to become conscious and be willing to change.
* No organization is great without shared values and a deep sense of purposefulness. Shared visions breed excellence.
* Collective learning involves dialogue, where people suspend assumptions and think together to see problems in new ways and to align individual actions.

SoL’s members believe in the power of collaboration. “The changes to foster real learning aren’t easy for any of us, so we really need one another,” Senge says. “We’re all addicted to command and control, either as the one in control or the victim being controlled. Those patterns are embedded within us as children, so it’s quite impossible to change if you work in isolation.

“If you ask individual companies, what’s your most powerful experience being part of this consortium, again and again, they say, ‘God, I thought we were the only ones who had these problems.’ We discover and understand our problems by seeing each other, by looking in the mirror.

Once after a meeting involving many member companies, a woman said, ‘I know what this is: it’s Alcoholics Anonymous for corporations.’ At the time I laughed,” he says, “but the comment stuck in my head. I’m beginning to think she may be absolutely right.”

by Liz Karagianis

On Topic: business, entrepreneurship, faculty, industry