Personal Transformation
Peter M. Senge
Table of Contents
Introduction
Fragmentation
Competition
Reactiveness
Building learning organizations requires personal transformations or basic shifts in how we think and interact.
As W. Edwards Deming says, nothing happens without "personal transformation." And the only safe space to allow for this transformation is a learning community. But at the heart of any serious effort to alter how we operate lies a concern with three dysfunctions of our culture: fragmentation, competition, and reactiveness.
We continually fragment problems into pieces; yet the challenges we face are increasingly systemic.
Our enchantment with fragmentation starts in early childhood. Since our first school days, we learn to break the world apart and disconnect ourselves from it. We memorize isolated facts, read static accounts of history, study abstract theories, and acquire ideas unrelated to our life experience and personal aspirations. Economics is separate from psychology, which is separate from biology, which has little connection with art. We eventually become convinced that knowledge is accumulated bits of information and that learning has little to do with our capacity for effective action, our sense of self, and how we exist in our world.
The word health has the same roots as "whole." Like people, organizations can get sick and die. They also need to be cured and healed. Yet, like physicians who focus only on their specialty, most consultants fragment complex situations into symptoms, treat the symptoms, and rarely inquire into the deeper causes. Consequently, management experts have very little ability to influence organizational health. All too often, their solutions contribute to a vicious pattern of "programs of the month" that fail and get replaced by the next program of the month.
Fragmentation results in "walls" that separate different functions into independent and often warring fiefdoms, making our society increasingly ungovernable. We know the problem as the dominance of "special interest groups" and political lobbies. Pointing fingers at each other is now a favorite national sport.
Many companies are trying to "reengineer" themselves away from stovepipe structures and toward horizontal business processes that cut across traditional functions and power hierarchies. While potentially significant, such changes often prove difficult to implement and those that are implemented only "reap the low-hanging fruit."
The walls that exist in the physical world are reflections of our mental walls. The separation between the different functions is not just geographic, it lives in the way we think. Redesigns that "throw down the walls" between different functions may have little enduring effect unless they also change the mental models that created the walls in the first place.
We have become overdependent on competition, to the extent that it is our only model for change and learning. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with competition. It can be great fun. It can promote invention and daring. The problem is that we have lost the balance between competition and cooperation precisely at a time when we most need to work together.
In the United States, we tend to see competition among individuals as the ultimate mechanism for change and improvement. We continually think in terms of war and sports analogies when we interpret management challenges. We need to "beat the competition," "overcome resistance to our new program," "squeeze concessions from the labor union," or "take over this new market." We have a metaphorical tunnel vision. We rarely think about how the process of developing leaders may be more like parenting than competing, or about how developing a new culture may be more like gardening than a military campaign.
Fascinated with competition, we often find ourselves competing with the very people with whom we need to collaborate. Members of a management team compete with one another to show who is right, who knows more, or who is more articulate or persuasive. Divisions compete with one another when they ought to cooperate to share knowledge. Team project leaders compete to show who is the best manager, even if it means covering up problems for which, ultimately, everyone will pay. Our overemphasis on competition makes looking good more important than being good. The fear of not looking good is one of the greatest enemies of learning. To learn, we need to acknowledge that there is something we don't know, and to perform activities that we're not good at. But in most corporations, ignorance is a sign of weakness; temporary incompetence is a character flaw.
How impossible it would be for a child to learn to walk if she were afraid of falling and looking foolish. Yet, that is exactly what happened in schools that made us feel foolish when we made mistakes, and continues in organizations that rank our performance on the basis of management-by-objectives.
In response, many of us have developed defenses that have become second nature-like working out our problems in isolation, always displaying our best face in public, and never saying "I don't know." The price we pay is enormous. In fact, we become masters of what Chris Argyris calls "skilled incompetence," skillful at protecting ourselves from the threat and pain that come with learning, but also remaining incompetent and blinded to our incompetence.
Overemphasis on competition also reinforces our fixation on short-term measurable results. Consequently, we lack the discipline needed for steady practice and deeper learning, which often produces few manifest consequences for long periods of time.
The quick-fix mentality also makes us "system blind." Many of today's problems come from yesterday's solutions, and many of today's solutions will be tomorrow's problems. What is most perplexing is that many quick fixes, from cost cutting to marketing promotions, are implemented even though no one believes they address underlying problems. But we still feel compelled to implement these "solutions." We need to show results, and fast, regardless of the long-term, system-wide consequences.
We have grown accustomed to changing only in reaction to outside forces, yet the well-spring of real learning is aspiration, imagination, and experimentation.
As children, we accomplish some of our most astounding learning without any external motivation. We learn to walk, we learn to talk, we learn to be human, not because we have to, but because we want to. Eventually, however, we become conditioned to react to others' directions, to depend on others' approval. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with external authority; it would be inefficient to learn about the dangers of finger-in-plugs experientially. The problem is that our current institutions exercise authority in a way that undermines our intrinsic drive to learn.
For most of us, reactiveness was reinforced daily in school. We solved problems identified by others, read what was assigned, wrote what was required. Gradually, reactiveness became a way of life. Fitting in, being accepted, became more important than being ourselves. We learned that the way to succeed was to focus on the teachers' questions as opposed to our own.
Reactiveness is a double ban on continuous learning. First, the attitude, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," prevents the steady improvement of products and processes. Moreover, when something is broken, the reaction is to call an expert-a specialist-to fix it. Regardless of the specialist's success, his intervention will create a black-box mentality that prevents the organization from developing its own capacities for continual learning.
The pervasiveness of a reactive stance is evident in the fixation on problem solving. Many managers think that management is problem solving. But problem solving is not creating. The problem solver tries to make something go away. A creator tries to bring something new into being. The impetus for change in problem solving lies outside ourselves-in some undesired external condition we seek to eliminate. The impetus for change in the creating mode comes from within. Only the creating mode leads to a genuine sense of individual and collective power, because only in the creating mode do people orient themselves to their intrinsic desires. It is a testament to how reactive we are that many leaders see the absence of vision as a "problem" to be solved in their company, and set about writing and disseminating vision and mission statements as the solution.
It is a small step from the problem-solving orientation to a system of management that is dominated by fear, the ultimate external motivator. Most leaders believe that people are willing to change only in times of crisis. This leads to the most pervasive leadership strategy in America-create a crisis, or at least a perception of crisis. Crises can produce episodes of change. But they produce little learning. Moreover, management by fear and crisis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because it does produce short-term results, managers see their crisis orientation as vindicated, people in the organization grow accustomed to "waiting for the next crisis," managers' belief in the apathy of the troops is reinforced, and they become more predisposed to generate the next crisis.
Fragmentation, competition, and reactiveness are not problems to be solved-they are frozen patterns of thought to be dissolved. The solvent I propose is a new way of thinking, feeling, and being-a culture of systems. Fragmentary thinking becomes systemic when we recover "the memory of the whole," the awareness that wholes actually precede parts. Competition becomes cooperation when we discover the "community nature of the self" and realize our role as challengers to help each other excel. Reactiveness becomes creating when we see the "generative power of language," how language brings forth distinctions from the undivided flow of life.
Together these changes represent a new "Galilean Shift." Galileo's heliocentric revolution moved us from looking at the earth as the center around which all else revolved to seeing our place in a broader pattern. In the new systems worldview, we move from the primacy of pieces to the primacy of the whole, from absolute truths to coherent interpretations, from self to community, from problem solving to creating.
The commitment required to build learning organizations goes beyond people's typical "commitment to their organizations." It encompasses commitment to changes needed in the larger world and to seeing our organizations as vehicles for bringing about such changes.