Posters on Learning Organization
(Set 4) - Quotations
As presented on workshops at the
Learning Organization Practitioners’
Network (LOPN), 2008
QUOTATIONS
“Systemic insights,
coupled with inquiry
and dialogue are the
corner stones of
adaptive learning
organizations and
teams.”
Peter Senge
“When placed in the same system, people
however different, tend to produce similar
results. The system causes its own
behaviour. The systems perspective tells
us that we must look beyond individual
mistakes or bad luck or personalities and
events to understand important
problems. We must look into the underlying
structures which shape individual actions
and create the conditions where types of
events become likely.”
Peter Senge
“Success of the beer game requires a shift of view for most
players. It means getting to the heart of fundamental
mismatches between common ways of thinking about the
game – our mental models of it - and the actual reality of
how the game works.
Most players see their job as "managing their position" in
isolation from the rest of the system. What is required is to
see how their positions interact with the larger system.”
Peter Senge
“The frog’s internal apparatus is geared to sudden
changes in his environment, not to slow, gradual
changes. Learning to see slow, gradual processes
requires slowing down our frenetic pace and
paying attention to the subtle as well as the
dramatic.
The problem is our minds are so locked in one
frequency, it’s as if we can only see at 78 rpm; we
can’t see anything at 331/3. We will not avoid the
fate of the frog until we learn to slow down and
see the gradual processes that often pose the
greatest threat.”
Peter Senge
“The term structure does not mean the “logical
structure” of a carefully developed argument or the
reporting “structure” of an organization
chart. Rather “systemic structure” is concerned
with the key interrelationships that influence
behaviour over time.
They are not interreationships between people but
among key variables, such as population, natural
resources, and food production in a developing
country or engineer’s product ideas and
technical and managerial know-how in a high-tech
company.”
Peter Senge
“There is a deep tendency to see the changes we need to
make as being in our outer world, not in our inner
world. The central message of “The Fifth Discipline” is
more radical than “radical organization design” – that our
organizations work the way they work, ultimately because
of how we think and how we interact. Only by changing
how we think can we change deeply embedded policies
and practices. Only by changing how we interact can
shared visions, shared understandings, and new
capacities for coordinated action be established.”
Peter Senge
“Being proactive is frequently seen as an
antidote to being “reactive”. All too often,
“proactiveness” is reactiveness in
disguise. If we simply become more
aggressive fighting the “enemy is out there”,
we are reacting – regardless of what we call
it. True proactiveness comes from seeing
how we contribute to our own problems. It
is a product of our way of thinking, not our
emotional state.”
Peter Senge
“The last step towards our vision is “letting it go”.
Vision is the “food” for our sub-conscious. The
subconscious can handle any amount of
complexity and translate our visions to reality.
All it needs is a very clear compelling picture.
Take all the time to make the picture clear. Letting
go is the act of releasing the vision from our
conscious reality to our subconscious.
When we don’t let it go, visions reduce themselves
to strategy and then it becomes less powerful.”
Sheila
“When we uncover our frames (mental models) and discover our own
frames it has a way of ‘releasing us from its grip”. Our frames fizzle
way and loses its power on us.
This is a powerful step forward in reducing our defensive attitudes
towards the world we live in and to begin the journey of exploring
systemic wholeness of many of the deep-seated challenges we face in
the world today.
The only problem in making that happen is our fears (of rejection,
failure and death). It gets in the way of uncovering our frames
because if we did uncover our frames, “fear cannot do its work”! This
often means not being able charge ahead of the world. So we
continue our journeys in life oblivious to our frames yet these frames
rule us and the world we live in.”
Sheila
“Values (honesty, integrity, loyalty, love,
hate, good, bad, right, wrong etc.) are
judgments we hold on to (on our
ladders of inference) when
we lose sight of systemic wholeness and
don’t see and understand the whole story.
Then it is the only thing we are left with.”
Sheila
“Nothing happens by accident. Everything has a
reason. The less we stay around to see the whole
story, “accidents” (crisis, chaos, downfalls,
declining sales, etc.) continue to happen and
worsen the very results we seek to create! We
don’t see the erosion. We see that we did not get
what we want.”
Sheila
“Systems Thinking is stepping back (to see
the patterns over time and their underlying
structures). Before that happens however,
we need to let go of the events and the
frames we have become attached to. ”
Sheila
THE END