“Wow” was my basic reaction after reading this book for the first time, but then the questions started kicking in.
When I started looking at systemic and systems thinking in April, The Fifth Discipline
Three of the five disciplines made me sit up and take notice – personal mastery, mental models, and systems thinking.
In his description of systems thinking as seeing the whole instead of the parts he introduced an aspect of the concept that hadn’t occurred to me – dynamism. A true understanding cannot be gained without looking at how different actions and interactions feed and influence each other. Somehow I’d been imagining something more static, I’m not sure why.
The remaining two, building shared vision and team learning didn’t capture my imagination the same way, perhaps because I’m currently more interested in improving my own abilities and not at directing learning in my department and company. I’ll definitely be keeping the book around because I hope that will change in the future.
I ended the book wondering what had happened to Peter Senge and the concept of a learning organization. The term was new to me, which only meant it hadn’t popped up noticeably in Business Week or any of the business blogs I’ve been reading this past year and a half. But did that mean it was a fad that had passed or just that nothing had changed recently?
A little bit of searching revealed the concepts to be alive and well. He’s speaking at a conference this fall and is actively engaged in education efforts. There are newsletters and consultants and organizations. There are other articles and resources I want to investigate and the Fieldbook
But first I want to go through this book again more closely, taking notes and, of course, blogging.
A fantastic review of Peter Senge’s ideas, and a great deal more material that is now on my reading list, can be found at www.infed.org
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Just stopping by from Liz Strauss’s Blog Show.
I learned about dynamism in the martial arts and NLP — have you checked them out?
I have Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline, too, but in my bookshelf. I started reading it a while back and stopped because I find it too nebulous. Now that you’ve written about it, I think I’ll go back and read it again.
Lori, I’m not sure what NLP is, but I’ll see if I can look it up. I took Tae Kwon Do for about a year, but that was over a decade ago and I’m afraid I didn’t take it very seriously as either a physical or mental discipline at the time. Thanks for making the suggestions.
Glad you found the post inspiring, Meikah. I hope you find the book to be also. Thanks for commenting.
I am glad you are enjoying this book. I have too. I first read it during my MBA program about 9 years ago, and have used it last year as part of a PhD program in Systems Science. I liked how much more was in that book when I took a harder look at things. We broke each chapter down, reviewed the terms and concepts, and applied the ideas to many other things. Yes, I think these ideas are alive and well in today’s world, and opening our eyes to a systems perspective really changes things. I keep that book handy for whenever its time to look to improve the state of my life, or the systems I interface with.
I’m excited to keep your blog on my radar. It seems we have very similar interests.
Thanks, David. It would have been cool to study it in a group environment like that. I intend to be publishing more about systems thinking as I study itand hope youll enjoy future posts.
My basic reaction, too would be a 'wow' to these disciplines mentioned. Truly, martial art is more on personal mastery, role models and thinking. With these few disciplines in mind, you'll have success in learning it by heart.
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