I first chanced upon Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline” some two decades ago when I was then working the public sector. The public sector was then caught up with the idea of Learning Organisations defined as places “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.”
Peter Senge’s Learning Organisation consists of five disciplines centring on three key pillars, The three pillars and five disciplines are: 1. Aspiration – i) Personal Mastery & ii) Shared Vision; 2. Generative Conversation – iii) Mental Models & iv) Team Learning and 3. Dealing with Complexity – v) System Thinking.
Interestingly, though there are five disciplines supporting Learning Organisation, Senge titles his book, “The Fifth Discipline”. The fifth discipline is the discipline of System Thinking, the art of dealing with complexity, what we often term the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, a subset of living.
It is easy in the scientific and information age to be swarmed and deluged by massive amount of data and hence, the term, “information-overload”. It is also common in the scientific age to develop the skills of analysis through the education system. While the ability to analyse is an important life skill, over-emphasis and overuse of this skill has led to many of our working adults, including graduates lacking in the ability to synthesise i.e. connect the dots and think laterally and systemically.
System thinking requires our ability to synthesise — to see the patterns, connect the dots, complete the jigsaw puzzle and see the whole (gestalt) instead of merely the parts. It is the concept of going beyond the symptoms to understand the causes of the issues at both the personal and organisational levels. It is the ability to understand inter-connectedness beyond linearity and simplistic cause and effect.
The good news is that increasingly in medicine, mental health and organisational development, practitioners now recognise that interventions should be more holistic than piece-meal. A first step is to humbly accept that we may not have all the answers immediately in a world of mystery and change. This humility and curiosity can then lead to discovery with a sense of awe and wonder as we slowly connect dots from past to present and possibly, the future.
To do all that will require a certain comfort level of working with paradoxes and complexity, a topic I will elaborate further in my next post.