"From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world.  This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price.  We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a large whole.  When we then try to 'see the big picture,' we try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces.  But, as physicist David Bohm says, the task is futile -- similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken mirror to see a true reflection.  Thus, after a while we give up trying to see the whole altogether." 

This first paragraph sets the background for the whole book.  No more easy cures.  No more 'N simple steps to solve the issue X'.  Back to seeing how stones that you throw in the water today send ripples many miles and years away. 

A very sobering example of how interdependent is the world, may be found in the "beer game" described in Chapter 3.  Played many times by business executives attending Mr Senge's seminars, the game shows with quite shocking clarity how doing the obvious thing does not produce the obvious result.  How crises grow from logical actions of participants.  How quickly participants end up blaming each other.  For those of you who were ever involved in day-to-day running of a business this story should be only too familiar.  Unfortunately, the stress that we usually experience when it happens to us in our real lives, does not allow us to see the wheels turning,- but the book does. 

The other aspect of it, how many times managers in organizations should draw up plans that reflect only their limited scope of operation but are used as the basis for actions so far away, several levels up or down the chain?  It always leaves me wondering whether organizations will ever be able to make their planning worth the time spent on it. 

Or take another example, "a new citywide outbreak of drug-related crime is the result of federal officials intercepting a large shipment of narcotics -- which reduced the drug supply, drove up the price, and caused more crime by addicts desperate to maintain their habit"? 

The Fifth Discipline provides a clearer view of the five components (and the Systems Thinking that has to be called for in the described above situations, is one of them) that form the backbone of a learning organization that can survive the crises (that we often create ourselves). 

Personal Mastery.  Any organization is as good as individuals that form it.  Well, you may probably have stopped wondering long ago why people are sometimes so uncommitted to their employers.  You may as well know the answer through your own experience of being a part of hypocritical organizational culture. 

I once knew a salesman who was hated probably by everyone in his office for his aggressive, bullyish and heartless attitude to his colleagues, business partners and even clients.  Then one day the company sent him and some of his colleagues including me to another city for a one-week training course, away from the office pressures.  After a couple of days spent on the training course and evenings chatting in a bar, everyone suddenly realized how witty, funny and even charming this guy was!  One of his colleagues even confessed to me how she had been surprised to notice that change. 

But when we returned back to work we found this guy to be the same stinking office rat, unpleasant and aggressive.  I realized that this guy had actually had two sets of culture, one for work and another for life.  I guess you may find the same sort of hidden hypocrisy, if not as stark in many people in your office or even in yourself! 

As long as organizations try to force their employees to support business cultures that are not based on the natural human values of personal development, family life and loving the nature, employees will experience internal cultural struggle resulting in lack of commitment, poor performance and workplace conflicts. 

Mental Models.  Scientists argue that we see with the brain rather than eyes.  Thus the images that we actually observe are a combination of the previous visual experience of the brain and the optical information currently received through the eyes. 

Likewise all the events both in the past and in the future are seen through the prism of mental models that we created through our life experience.  Some of them help us to analyse the complexity we have to deal with while others somehow put us on the wrong track and we see the same old bad movie again and again. 

Chapter on mental models helps to analyse the prisms through which we analyse the world to make sure they work properly, and replace them if they don't.  The latter may prove difficult but until humans are able to develop and nurture mental models that do not fail, investors will be pumping money into worthless stocks, families will break apart at a horrible rate, and governments will be spending more money on catching drug-traffickers than on solving the social issues that create demand for narcotics in the first place. 

Shared Vision.  We all have visions of the future.  They are as Napoleon Hill put it "the blueprints of our ultimate achievements".  They are the most powerful fuel for our actions.  You can make people do the things you want through other means like fear of being fired but the only thing that lasts and can produce sustainable performance is individual vision. 

Now, all our visions are normally personal, the key for an organization therefore is to create a vision shared by the individuals in it.  To be self-sustaining this shared vision should be based on personal visions of individuals because "shared" visions based on the top manager's one never last. 

Team Learning.  In my university management class we made an experiment.  The class was given one of NASA's scenarios of a spaceship that performed an emergency landing on the Moon, some 100 miles from the nearest base.  Students were given a task of assigning priorities to the items that they would take with them from the ship in order to get to the base.  First students would do it individually, then deliberating in groups of 4-5.  Then both priority lists were compared to the NASA recommended one.  A degree of match would be represented by a score, the higher the more chances you had to survive. 

When individual and group scores were compared, we were really amazed to note that the student who had 40 individually appeared to be in the group with the score of 28, while another group that scored 43 consisted of students whose individual scores were less than 30! 

As Ann McGee-Cooper writes in Insights on Leadership, "within teams who know how to dialogue ... collective intelligence rises to become much higher that the brightest member of the team.  However, in teams where individuals compete to be right and have the last say, the collective intelligence falls below the level of the least bright team member because the brighter members begin to cancel each other out with power plays and intimidation". 

"Wanting to be right blinds people."  (John Heider. Tao of Leadership.) 

All five components brought together remove the blocks hindering the group learning that will be one of most powerful competitive advantages in the today's world. 

The book is really worth reading and applying to your business field.  In my own experience, The Fifth Discipline added a new dimension in understanding the needs of my clients and virtually created absolutely new approaches to doing business. 

You are kindly invited to order The Fifth Discipline from Eastbook and explore what the new management culture means to you.