It is amazing, I thought, how clear and direct you can be when you reach the end of your years (Deming was then almost 90). (Location 37)
Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable. (Location 39)
the fundamental learning units in an organization are working teams (people who need one another to produce an outcome), (Location 54)
“The relationship between a boss and subordinate is the same as the relationship between a teacher and student,” he said. The teacher sets the aims, the student responds to those aims. The teacher has the answer, the student works to get the answer. Students know when they have succeeded because the teacher tells them. By the time all children are 10 they know what it takes to get ahead in school and please the teacher —a lesson they carry forward through their careers of “pleasing bosses and failing to improve the system that serves customers.” (Location 64)
Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) (Location 122)
As one senior executive said, reflecting on her first learning experiment—“just getting people to talk to one another” as a way to rethink how their organization was structured—“… was the most fun I had ever had in business, and the ideas that emerged are still creating a competitive advantage for the company fifteen years later.” (Location 133)
Organizations work the way they do because of how we work, how we think and interact; the changes required ahead are not only in our organizations but in ourselves as well. “The critical moment comes when people realize that this learning organization work is about each one of us,” commented a twenty-year veteran of corporate organizational learning projects. (Location 136)
Note: this is really important because when you feel like the structure of an organisation is weighing you down/holding you back, it can be disempowering. what if you could change it by being the change? is this possible?
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 larger whole. (Location 151)
after a while we give up trying to see the whole altogether. (Location 155)
It’s just not possible any longer to figure it out from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the “grand strategist.” (Location 161)
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. (Location 162)
Learning organizations are possible because, deep down, we are all learners. (Location 164)
no one has to teach infants anything. They are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learners who learn to walk, speak, and pretty much run their households all on their own. (Location 165)
Most of us at one time or another have been part of a great team, a group of people who functioned together in an extraordinary way—who trusted one another, who complemented one anothers’s strengths and compensated for one another’s limitations, who had common goals that were larger than individual goals, and who produced extraordinary results. (Location 166)
have met many people who have experienced this sort of profound teamwork—in sports, or in the performing arts, or in business. Many say that they have spent much of their life looking for that experience again. What (Location 169)
The team that became great didn’t start off great—it learned how to produce extraordinary results. (Location 171)
Note: the transformation team has been the opposite of this - started off great, a team of superstars, galacticos, that ended and broke up because it DIDNT learn how to produce great results together.
Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people’s orientation toward work—from what Daniel Yankelovich called an “instrumental” view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more “sacred” view, where people seek the “intrinsic” benefits of work. (Location 177)
“The ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man’s higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging.” (Location 181)
What fundamentally will distinguish learning organizations from traditional authoritarian “controlling organizations” will be the mastery of certain basic disciplines. (Location 189)
Thus was the airplane invented; but it would take more than thirty years before commercial aviation could serve the general public. (Location 193)
Engineers say that a new idea has been “invented” when it is proven to work in the laboratory. The idea becomes an “innovation” only when it can be replicated reliably on a meaningful scale at practical costs. (Location 194)
Note: this is a powerful idea about thedifference between invention and innovation. also about what innovation means in a clear definition.
In these terms, learning organizations have been invented, but they have not yet been innovated. (Location 197)
In engineering, when an idea moves from an invention to an innovation, diverse “component technologies” come together. Emerging from isolated developments in separate fields of research, these components gradually form an ensemble of technologies that are critical to one another’s success. Until this ensemble forms, the idea, though possible in the laboratory, does not achieve its potential in practice. (Location 198)
During those intervening thirty years (a typical time period for incubating basic innovations), myriad experiments with commercial flight had failed. Like early experiments with learning organizations, the early planes were not reliable and cost-effective on an appropriate scale. (Location 203)
The DC-3, for the first time, brought together five critical component technologies that formed a successful ensemble. They were: the variable-pitch propeller, retractable landing gear, a type of lightweight molded body construction called “monocque,” a radial air-cooled engine, and wing flaps. (Location 205)
the DC-3 needed all five; four were not enough. (Location 207)
Today, I believe, five new component technologies are gradually converging to innovate learning organizations. (Location 210)
Note: 1. systems thinking 2. personaal mastery 3. mental models 4. building shared vision 5. team learning
You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern. (Location 216)
Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it’s doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved. (Location 218)
Note: this is what i experienced as an early career radiographer before i began to undsrstand - if only intuitively - that other parts of the system influenced the part i was directly experiencing.
Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively. (Location 220)
experiments with young children show that they learn systems thinking very quickly. (Location 222)
People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them—in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. (Location 225)
“People enter business as bright, well-educated, high-energy people, full of energy and desire to make a difference,” says Hanover’s O’Brien. “By the time they are 30, a few are on the fast track and the rest ‘put in their time’ to do what matters to them on the weekend. They lose the commitment, the sense of mission, and the excitement with which they started their careers. We get damn little of their energy and almost none of their spirit.” (Location 232)
surprisingly few adults work to rigorously develop their own personal mastery. (Location 236)
The discipline of personal mastery starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us, of living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations. (Location 238)
Here, I am most interested in the connections between personal learning and organizational learning, in the reciprocal commitments between individual and organization, and in the special spirit of an enterprise made up of learners. (Location 240)
Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. (Location 242)
Note: closely related to the way robert fritz says that our concepts can cause structural conflict.
Many insights into new markets or outmoded organizational practices fail to get put into practice because they conflict with powerful, tacit mental models. (Location 246)
Note: oh this is really clear to see in practice. people seem very driven by their concepts, experiences and ideas rather than creating a blank slate and deciding what they want to create.
Shell’s success in the 1970s and 1980s (rising from one of the weakest of the big seven oil companies to one of the strongest along with Exxon) during a period of unprecedented changes in the world oil business—the formation of OPEC, extreme fluctuations in oil prices and availability, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union—came in large measure from learning how to surface and challenge managers’ mental models as a discipline for preparing change. (Location 249)
Note: how did they do this?
The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the… (Location 256)
Note: ok, but what does the awareness lead to? robert fritz suggests, and my experience supports, that we should let go of concepts for the purpose of creating, rather than trying to change them. Concepts have no place in creating.
If any one idea about leadership has inspired organizations for thousands of years, it’s the capacity to hold a shared picture… (Location 260)
IBM had “service”; Polaroid had instant photography; Ford had public transportation for the masses and Apple had “… (Location 263)
all these organizations managed to bind people together around a common identity… (Location 264)
When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar “vision statement”), people excel and learn, not because they are… (Location 266)
many leaders have personal visions that never get translated into shared visions that… (Location 267)
given a choice, most people opt for pursuing a lofty goal, not only in times of… (Location 269)
What has been lacking is a discipline for translating individual vision into shared vision—not a “cookbook” but a set of… (Location 269)
The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared “pictures of the future” that foster genuine commitment and… (Location 271)
How can a team of committed managers with individual IQs above 120 have a… (Location 274)
in sports, in the performing arts, in science, and even, occasionally, in business, there are striking examples where the intelligence of the team exceeds the intelligence of the individuals in the team, and where teams… (Location 275)
When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results, but the individual members are growing more rapidly… (Location 277)
The discipline of team learning starts with “dialogue,” the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter… (Location 279)
(Dialogue differs from the more common “discussion,” which has its roots with “percussion” and “concussion,” literally a heaving of ideas back and… (Location 283)
The patterns of defensiveness are often deeply ingrained in how a team operates. If unrecognized, they undermine learning. If recognized and surfaced… (Location 286)
Note: how can you creatively surface patterns of defensiveness in a team?
If a learning organization were an engineering innovation, such as the airplane or the personal computer, the components would be called “technologies.” For an innovation in human behavior… (Location 289)
A discipline (from the Latin disciplina, to learn) is a developmental path for acquiring… (Location 292)
As with any discipline, from playing the piano to electrical engineering, some people have an innate gift, but anyone can… (Location 293)
To practice a discipline is to be a lifelong learner. You never arrive; you spend your… (Location 295)
Thus, a corporation cannot be “excellent” in the sense of having arrived at a permanent excellence; it is always in the state of practicing the disciplines… (Location 297)
