The Fifth Discipline

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about apporaching the difficulties of organizations and businesses using system thinking. It goes through the issues at hand, and how some problems are related to the system in itself rather than people. The goal is to create organizations that learn to work in this context.

🎨 Impressions

This book is very similar to the other books I read on system thinking. It draws upon the penultimate book on system thinking Thinking in Systems

The below sentence resonated with me. A "political environment" is one in which "who" is more important than "what." ' If the boss proposes an idea, the idea gets taken seriously. If someone else proposes a new idea, it is ignored.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• In most companies that fail, there is abundant evidence in advance that the firm is in trouble. This evidence goes unheeded, however, even when individual managers are aware of it.

• "Most management teams break down under pressure," writes Harvard's Chris Argyris—a longtime student of learning in management teams. "The team may function quite well with routine issues. But when they confront complex issues that may be embarrassing or threatening, the 'teamness' seems to go to pot."

• In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman traces the history of devastating large-scale policies "pursued contrary to ultimate self-interest,"

• Reading between the lines of Tuchman's writing, you can see that the fourteenth-century Valois monarchs of France. suffered from "I am my position" when they devalued currency, they literally didn't realize they were driving the new French middle class toward insurrection.

• In the mid-1700s Britain had a bad case of boiled frog. The British went through "a full decade," wrote Tuchman, "of mounting conflict with the [American] colonies without any [British official] sending a representative, much less a minister, across the Atlantic . . . to find out what was endangering the relationship . . ." By 1776, the start of the American Revolution, the relationship was irrevocably endangered.

• Different people in the same structure tend to produce qualitatively similar results. When there are problems, or performance fails to live up to what is intended, it is easy to find someone or something to blame. But, more often than we realize, systems cause their own crises, not external forces or individuals' mistakes.

• Leverage Often Comes from New Ways of Thinking. In human systems, people often have potential leverage that they do not exercise because they focus only on their own decisions and ignore how their decisions affect others.

• In other words, the majority of players in the game, many of them experienced managers, do much worse than if they simply placed orders equal to the orders they receive. In trying to correct the imbalances that result from "doing nothing," most players make matters worse, in many cases dramatically worse.

• On the other hand, about 25 percent of the players score better than the "no strategy" strategy, and about 10 percent score very much better. In other words, success is possible. But it requires a shift of view for most players.

• When your supplier can't get you the beer you want as quickly as normal, the worst thing you can do is order more beer. Yet, that is exactly what many players do. It takes discipline to contain the overwhelming urge to order more when backlogs are building and your customers are screaming. But, without that discipline, you and everyone else will suffer.

• The reason that structural explanations are so important is that only they address the underlying causes of behavior at a level that patterns of behavior can be changed. Structure produces behavior, and changing underlying structures can produce different patterns of behavior. In this sense, structural explanations are inherently generative. Moreover, since structure in human systems includes the "operating policies" of the decision makers in the system, redesigning our own decision making redesigns the system structure.

• The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.

• In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the horse Boxer always had the same answer to any difficulty: "I will work harder," he said. At first, his well-intentioned diligence inspired everyone, but gradually, his hard work began to backfire in subtle ways. The harder he worked, the more work there was to do. What he didn't know was that the pigs who managed the farm were actually manipulating them all for their own profit. Boxer's diligence actually helped to keep the other animals from seeing what the pigs were doing. Systems thinking has a name for this phenomenon: "Compensating feedback": when well-intentioned interventions call forth responses from the system that offset the benefits of the intervention. We all know what it feels like to be facing compensating feedback—the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back; the more effort you expend trying to improve matters, the more effort seems to be required.

• For most American business people the best rate of growth is fast, faster, fastest. Yet, virtually all natural systems, from ecosystems to animals to organizations, have intrinsically optimal rates of growth. The optimal rate is far less than the fastest possible growth. When growth becomes excessive—as it does in cancer—the system itself will seek to compensate by slowing down; perhaps putting the organization's survival at risk in the process.

• Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. Underlying all of the above problems is a fundamental characteristic of complex human systems: "cause" and "effect" are not close in time and space. By "effects," I mean the obvious symptoms that indicate that there are problems—drug abuse, unemployment, starving children, falling orders, and sagging profits. By "cause" I mean the interaction of the underlying system that is most responsible for generating the symptoms, and which, if recognized, could lead to changes producing lasting improvement

• The key principle, called the "principle of the system boundary," is that the interactions that must be examined are those most important to the issue at hand, regardless of parochial organizational boundaries.

• What makes this principle difficult to practice is the way organizations are designed to keep people from seeing important interactions. One obvious way is by enforcing rigid internal divisions that inhibit inquiry across divisional boundaries, such as those that grow up between marketing, manufacturing, and research. Another is by "leaving" problems behind us, for someone else to clean up.

• Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static "snapshots." It is a set of general principles—distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management

• *The essence of the discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift of mind:

  • Seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains
  • Seeing processes of change rather than snapshots

• The practice of systems thinking starts with understanding a simple concept called "feedback" that shows how actions can reinforce or counteract (balance) each other. It builds to learning to recognize types of "structures" that recur again and again: the arms race is a generic or archetypal pattern of escalation, at its heart no different from turf warfare between two street gangs, the demise of a marriage, or the advertising battles of two consumer goods companies fighting for market share.

• All ideas in the language of systems thinking are built up from these elements, just as English sentences are built up from nouns and verbs. Once we have learned the building blocks, we can begin constructing stories: the systems archetypes of the next chapter. REINFORCING FEEDBACK: DISCOVERING HOW SMALL CHANGES CAN GROW

• Psychologist Robert Merton first identified this phenomenon as the "self-fulfilling prophecy." It is also known as the "Pygmalion effect," after the famous George Bernard Shaw play (later to become My Fair Lady). Shaw in turn had taken his title from Pygmalion, a character in Greek and Roman mythology, who believed so strongly in the beauty of the statue he had carved that it came to life.

• Pygmalion effects have been shown to operate in countless situations. An example occurs in schools, where a teacher's opinion of a student influences the behavior of that student.

• In business, we know that "momentum is everything," in building confidence in a new product or within a fledgling organization.

• The feeling, as Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts put it, of needing "all the running you can do to keep in the same place," is a clue that a balancing loop may exist nearby.

• Leaders who attempt organizational change often find themselves unwittingly caught in balancing processes. To the leaders, it looks as though their efforts are clashing with sudden resistance that seems to come from nowhere. In fact, as my friend found when he tried to reduce burnout, the resistance is a response by the system, trying to maintain an implicit system goal. Until this goal is recognized, the change effort is doomed to failure.

• "One of the highest leverage points for improving system performance," says Ray Stata, CEO of Analog Devices, "is the minimization of system delays."

• "The way leading companies manage time," says George Stalk, vice president of the Boston Consulting Group, "—in production, in new product development, in sales and distribution—represents the most powerful new source of competitive disadvantage."

• Unrecognized delays can also lead to instability and breakdown, especially when they are long.

• MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLE: Don't push growth; remove the factors limiting growth. WHERE IT IS FOUND!

• But the more successful the quality circles become, the more threatening they become to the traditional distribution of political power in the firm. Union leaders begin to fear that the new openness will break down traditional adversarial relations between workers and management, thereby undermining union leaders' ability to influence workers. They begin to undermine the quality circle activity by playing on workers' apprehensions about being manipulated and "snowed" by managers: "Be careful; if you keep coming up with cost saving improvements on the production line, your job will be the next to go."

• Typically, most people react to limits to growth situations by trying to push hard: if you can't break your bad habit, become more diligent in monitoring your own behavior; if your relationship is having problems, spend more time together or work harder to make the relationship work; if staff are unhappy, keep promoting junior staff to make them happy; if the flow of new products is slowing down, start more new product initiatives to offset the problems with the ones that are bogged down; or advocate quality circle more strongly.

• Beware the symptomatic solution. Solutions that address only the symptoms of a problem, not fundamental causes, tend to have short-term benefits at best. In the long term, the problem resurfaces and there is increased pressure for symptomatic response. Meanwhile, the capability for fundamental solutions can atrophy.

• These are the generic dynamics of addiction. In fact, almost all forms of addiction have shifting the burden structures underlying them. All involve opting for symptomatic solutions, the gradual atrophy of the ability to focus on fundamental solutions, and the increasing reliance on symptomatic solutions. By this definition, organizations and entire societies are subject to addiction as much as are individuals.

• The primary insights in shifting the burden will come from (1) distinguishing different types of solutions; (2) seeing how reliance on symptomatic solutions can reinforce further reliance.

• To me, bottom line of systems thinking is leverage—seeing where actions and changes in structures can lead to significant, enduring improvements.

• Systems thinking finds it greatest benefits in helping us distinguish high- from low-leverage changes in highly complex situations. In effect, the art of systems thinking lies in seeing through complexity to the underlying structures generating change. Systems thinking does not mean ignoring complexity. Rather, it means organizing complexity into a coherent story that illuminates the causes of problems and how they can be remedied in enduring ways.

• Yankelovich uses the word "sacred" in the sociological not religious sense: "People or objects are sacred in the sociological sense when, apart from what instrumental use they serve, they are valued for themselves."

• The Koran ends with the phrase, "What a tragedy that man must die before he wakes up."

• A useful starting exercise for learning how to focus more clearly on desired results is to take any particular goal or aspect of your vision. First imagine that that goal is fully realized. Then ask yourself the question, "If I actually had this, what would it get me?" What

• The core leadership strategy is simple: be a model. Commit yourself to your own personal mastery. Talking about personal mastery may open people's minds somewhat, but actions always speak louder than words. There's nothing more powerful you can do to encourage others in their quest for personal mastery than to be serious in your own quest.

• As Albert Einstein once wrote, "Our theories determine what we measure." For years, physicists ran experiments that contradicted classical physics, yet no one "saw" the data that these experiments eventually provided, leading to the revolutionary theories—quantum mechanics Note: This is in resemblance to the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

• The problems with mental models lie not in whether they are right or wrong—by definition, all models are simplifications. The problems with mental models arise when the models are tacit—when they exist below the level of awareness.

• Institutionalizing reflection and surfacing mental models require mechanisms that make these practices unavoidable. Two approaches that have emerged to date involve recasting traditional planning as learning and establishing "internal boards of directors" to bring senior management and local management together regularly to challenge and expand the thinking behind local decision making.

• *HANOVER'S CREDO ON MENTAL MODELS

  1. The effectiveness of a leader is related to the continual improvement of the leader's mental models.
  2.  Don't impose a favored mental model on people. Mental models should lead to self-concluding decisions to work their best.
  3.  Self-concluding decisions result in deeper convictions and more effective implementation.
  4. Better mental models enable owners to adjust to changes in environment or circumstance.
  5. Internal board members rarely need to make direct decisions. Instead, their role is to help the General Manager by testing or adding to the GMs mental model.
  6. Multiple mental models bring multiple perspectives to bear.
  7. Groups add dynamics and knowledge beyond what one person can do alone.
  8. The goal is not congruency among the group.
  9. When the process works it leads to congruency.
  10. Leaders' worth is measured by their contribution to others' mental models.

• Skills of reflection concern slowing down our own thinking processes so that we can become more/aware of how we form our mental models and the ways they influence our actions. Inquiry skills concern how we operate in face-to-face (interactions with others, especially in dealing with complex and conflictual issues.

• Most managers are trained to be advocates. In fact, in many companies, what it means to be a competent manager is to be able to solve problems—to figure out what needs to be done, and enlist whatever support is needed to get it done. Individuals became successful in part because of their abilities to debate forcefully and influence others. Inquiry skills, meanwhile, go unrecognized and unrewarded. However, as managers rise to senior positions, they confront issues more complex and diverse than their personal experience. Suddenly, they need to tap insights from other people. They need to learn. Now the manager's advocacy skills become counterproductive; they can close us off from actually learning from one another. What is needed is blending advocacy and inquiry to promote collaborative learning

• Another way to say this is "reciprocal inquiry." By this we mean that everyone makes his or her thinking explicit and subject to public examination. This creates an atmosphere of genuine vulnerability.

• If managers "believe" their world views are facts rather than sets of assumptions, they will not be open to challenging those world views.

• Systems thinking is equally important to working with mental models effectively. Contemporary research shows that most of our mental models are systematically flawed. They miss critical feedback relationships, misjudge time delays, and often focus on variables that are visible or salient, not necessarily high leverage.

• Late in his career, the psychologist Abraham Maslow studied high-performing teams. One of their most striking characteristics was shared vision and purpose. Maslow observed that in exceptional' teams the task was no longer separate from the self. . . but rather he identified with this task so strongly that you couldn't define his real self without including that task.6

• As one highly successful CEO expressed it: "My job, fundamentally, is listening to what the organization is trying to say, and then making sure that it is forcefully articulated."

• Yet, there is a world of difference between compliance and commitment. The committed person brings an energy, passion, and excitement that cannot be generated if you are only compliant, even genuinely compliant. The committed person doesn't play by the "rules of the game." He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving the vision, he will find ways to change the rules.

• They told me of a stage in their project where certain critical software was several months behind schedule. The three engineers responsible came into the office one evening and left the next morning. By all accounts they accomplished two to three months of work that evening—and no one could explain how. These are not the feats of compliance

• Several "limits to growth" structures can come into play to arrest the building of momentum behind a new vision. Understanding these structures can help considerably in sustaining the "visioning process."

• In this case, the leverage must lie in either in finding ways to focus less time and effort on fighting crises and managing current reality, or to break off those pursuing the new vision from those responsible for handling "current reality." In many ways, this is the strategy of "skunk works," small groups that quietly pursue new ideas out of the organizational mainstream. While this approach is often necessary, it is difficult to avoid fostering two polar extreme "camps" that no longer can support one another.

• Individuals do not sacrifice their personal interests to the larger team vision; rather, the shared vision becomes an extension of their personal visions. In fact, alignment is the necessary condition before empowering the individual will empower the whole team.

• "We are not trying to win in a dialogue. We all win if we are doing it right." In dialogue, individuals gain insights that simply could not be achieved individually. "A new kind of mind begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning

• "The purpose of dialogue," Bohm suggests, "is to reveal the incoherence in our thought." There are three types of incoherence. "Thought denies that it is participative." Thought stops tracking reality and "just goes, like a program." And thought establishes its own standard of reference for fixing problems, problems which it contributed to creating in the first

• "The purpose of dialogue," Bohm suggests, "is to reveal the incoherence in our thought." There are three types of incoherence. "Thought denies that it is participative." Thought stops tracking reality and "just goes, like a program." And thought establishes its own standard of reference for fixing problems, problems which it contributed to creating in the first place.

• Defensive routines form a sort of protective shell around our deepest assumptions, defending us against pain, but also keeping us from learning about the causes of the pain.

• If anything, team skills are more challenging to develop than individual skills. This is why learning teams need "practice fields," ways to practice together so that they can develop their collective learning skills.

• The tools of systems thinking are also important because virtually all the prime tasks of management teams—developing strategy, shaping visions, designing policy and organizational structures—involve wrestling with enormous complexity. Furthermore, this complexity does not "stay put." Each situation is in a continual state of flux.

• Perhaps the single greatest liability of management teams is that they confront these complex, dynamic realities with a language designed for simple, static problems.

• "I moved to a town with a paper mill once," says Hanover's Bill O'Brien, "and when we drove into town we almost drove right out again. Two weeks later, we had all gotten used to the smell and didn't notice it. Organizational politics is such a perversion of truth and honesty that most organizations reek with its odor. Yet, most of us so take it for granted that we don't even notice it."

• A "political environment" is one in which "who" is more important than "what." ' If the boss proposes an idea, the idea gets taken seriously. If someone else proposes a new idea, it is ignored.

• There are always "winners" and "losers," people who are building their power and people who are losing power. Power is concentrated and it is wielded arbitrarily. One person can determine another's fate, and there is no recourse to that determination. The wielding of arbitrary power over others is the essence of authoritarianism—so, in this sense, a political environment is an authoritarian environment, even if those possessing the power are not in the official positions of authority.

• Challenging the grip of internal politics and game playing starts with building shared vision. Without a genuine sense of common vision and values there is nothing to motivate people beyond self-interest.

• Reflective openness is based on skills, not just good intentions. There are the skills of reflection and inquiry, first presented in the mental models

• Reflective openness lives in the attitude, "I may be wrong and the other person may be right." It involves not just examining our own ideas, but mutually examining others' thinking.

• The end result is the curious phenomenon of "open closedness," when everyone feels he has a right to air views, yet no one really listens and reflects. "Talking at" one other substitutes for genuine communication and dialogue.

• For example, being able to distinguish "facts" (direct observations) from generalizations based on those facts would have helped the executives with the "officer in the barrel."

• Nothing undermines openness more surely than certainty. Once we feel as if we have "the answer," all motivation to question our thinking disappears. But the discipline of systems thinking shows that there simply is "no right answer" when dealing with complexity. For this reason, openness and systems thinking are closely linked.

• Life comes to us whole. It is only the analytic lens we impose that makes it seem as if problems can be isolated and solved. When we forget that it is "only a lens," we lose the spirit of openness.

• That there are two fundamentally different types of problems: "convergent problems" and "divergent problems."6

• Convergent problems have a solution: "the more intelligently you study them, the more the answers converge." Divergent problems have no "correct" solution. The more they are studied by people with knowledge and intelligence the more they "come up with answers which contradict one another." The difficulty lies not with the experts, but in the nature of the problem itself. If

• This is why learning organizations will, increasingly, be "localized" organizations, extending the maximum degree of authority and power as far from the "top" or corporate center as possible. Local-ness means moving decisions down the organizational hierarchy; designing business units where, to the greatest degree possible, local decision makers confront the full range of issues and dilemmas intrinsic in growing and sustaining any business enterprise. Local-ness means unleashing people's commitment by giving them the freedom to act, to try out their own ideas and be responsible for

• This is why learning organizations will, increasingly, be "localized" organizations, extending the maximum degree of authority and power as far from the "top" or corporate center as possible. Local-ness means moving decisions down the organizational hierarchy; designing business units where, to the greatest degree possible, local decision makers confront the full range of issues and dilemmas intrinsic in growing and sustaining any business enterprise. Local-ness means unleashing people's commitment by giving them the freedom to act, to try out their own ideas and be responsible for producing results.

• "In the traditional hierarchical organization, the top thinks and the local acts. In a learning organization, you have to merge thinking and acting in every individual."

• The ambivalence of many senior managers to giving over greater authority and control of decision making is, in part, rooted in fear of loss. Will senior or corporate management become unneeded or somehow less important—mere window dressing in the locally controlled organization? This fear is unfortunate because it keeps many senior managers from discovering their new role in a locally controlled organization: responsibility for continually enhancing the organization's capacity for learning. One of the big problems plaguing organizations that are becoming more localized is that corporate management, paralyzed by the fear of what they might lose, are neglecting this very important new role.

• The illusion of being in control can appear quite real. In hierarchical organizations, leaders give orders and others follow. But giving orders is not the same as being in control. Power may be concentrated at the top but having the power of unilateral decision making is not the same as being able to achieve one's objectives. Authority figures may be treated deferentially, lavished with the highest salaries and other privileges of rank, but that does not mean that they actually exercise control commensurate with their apparent importance.

• Because of the lingering belief that you can control decisions from the top, many corporations vacillate between localizing and centralizing. When business goes well, decisions are made more and more locally. When business begins to founder, the first instincts are to return control to central management. This "on again/off again" pattern of decision making testifies to the deep lack of confidence which senior managers have in local decision makers.

• Those of us in top management often say to each other that we had more fun running a J&J company than anything since. If you are having as much fun running a big corporation as you did running a piece of it, then you are probably interfering too much with the people who really make it happen."

• The tragedy of the Sahel was rooted in steady growth of population and herd sizes from the 1920s to the 1970s. The growth accelerated from 1955 to 1965 due to unusually heavy rainfalls and assistance from international aid organizations who financed numerous deep wells. Each herdsman on the Sahel had incentives to expand his herd of zebu, both for economic gain and social status. As long as the common grazing lands were large enough to support these new, larger herds, there were no problems. But in the early 1960s, overgrazing began to occur. Eventually rangeland vegetation grew sparser. The sparser the vegetation, the more overgrazing, until it got to the point where the cattle consumed more foliage than the ranges could generate. The desertification reinforced itself as decreases in plant cover allowed wind and rain to erode the soil. Less vegetation was produced, which got overgrazed more severely to support the herds, leading to further desertification. The vicious spiral continued until disaster struck in the form of a series of droughts in the 1960s and 1970s. By the early 1970s, 50 to 80 percent of the livestock was dead and much of the population of the Sahel was destitute."

• Corporations have many depletable "commons" to share: financial capital, productive capital, technology, community reputation, good will of customers, good will and support of suppliers, and morale and competence of employees toAname just a few. When a company decentralizes, local divisions conipete with each other for those limited resources.

• One day he was summoned to the office of Chairman General Robert Wood Johnson. One of Burke's first product ideas, a children's chest rub, had failed dismally. When Burke walked in Johnson asked, "Are you the one who just cost us all that money?" Burke nodded. The general said/ "Well, I just want to congratulate you. If you are making mistakes, that means you are making decisions and taking risks. And we won't grow unless you take risks."

• Learning organizations practice forgiveness because, as Cray Research's CEO John Rollwagen says, "Making the mistake is punishment enough."

• "Captain Asoh, in your own words, can you tell us how you managed to land that DC-8 stretch jet two and a half miles out in San Francisco Bay in perfect compass line with the runway?" Asoh's response, though never recorded in the official NTSB minutes, has gone down in airline folklore: "As you Americans say, Asoh fuck up." The captain took full responsibility for the error. His crew, bound by the orders of Japanese decorum that prohibit criticizing a superior, had sat silently as Asoh landed.

• She said that when a person in a Japanese firm sits quietly, no one will come and interrupt. It is assumed that the person is thinking. On the other hand, when the person is up and moving about, coworkers feel free to interrupt. "Isn't it interesting," she said, "that it is exactly the opposite in American firms? In America, we assume that when a person is sitting quietly they aren't doing anything very important."

• For instance, O'Brien simply doesn't schedule short meetings. "If it isn't a subject that is worthy of an hour, it shouldn't be on my calendar."

• For example, one Ann Arbor Michigan study found that 36 percent of the children of executives undergo treatment for psychiatric or drug abuse each year, vs. 15 percent of children of non-executives in the same companies.

• If you find yourself in a situation where less time at home is leading to poorer family relationships, there can be strong psychological pressures to avoid family problems still further.

• "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay." In the learning organization, the boundaries between what is personal and what is organizational are intentionally blurred. Learning organizations enter into a new compact, or "covenant" as Max de Pree puts it, with their members. The essence of this compact is the organization's commitment to support the full development of each employee, and the person's reciprocal commitment to the organization

• Shell's Arie de Geus says that organizational learning occurs in three ways: through teaching, through "changing the rules of the game" (such as through openness and localness), and through play.

• Representation is the tool for adaptation. Simulation is the tool for creating.

• The "scientific management" revolution of Frederick Taylor took the traditional division of labor, between workers and managers, and gave us the "thinkers" and the "doers." The doers were basically prohibited from thinking. I believe our fundamental challenge is tapping the intellectual capacity of people at all levels, both as individuals and as groups.

• When Lyndon Johnson first became President, his "Great Society" inspired full-hearted support throughout the country, despite the tragedy which brought him into office. Johnson was a master enroller, with the patience to take Congress through his proposed legislation one bill at a time, with stunning results; out of ninety-one proposals, Congress only rejected two. His enrollment of the public was no less stunning: "His goals had been the country's goals," wrote historian William Manchester. But the results of Johnson's leadership eventually proved disappointing, in part, because Johnson could not keep his commitment to the truth. When he was told that the United States could not afford the Great Society and the Vietnam War at the same time, he began systematically lying about the costs of the war. "If I [tell Congress] about the cost of the war," he told his advisers, according to Manchester, "old [Senator] Wilbur Mills will sit down there and he'll thank me kindly and send me back my Great Society." Gradually Johnson began to isolate himself from criticism, even from his advisers; soon, many of the members of his Cabinet resigned. Eventually, Johnson's chain of lies found its way to public attention and became the "credibility gap"—so christened by the New York Herald Tribune in 1965. His leadership was effectively over—to the point where he could not run for reelection in 1968.

• Systems thinking teaches that there are two types of complexity— the "detail complexity" of many variables and the "dynamic complexity" when "cause and effect" are not close in time and space and obvious interventions do not produce expected outcomes.

• But what about detail complexity? What about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feedback processes in any real managerial situation, all operating simultaneously? How can we possibly cope with such complexity? What good is systems thinking, anyhow, if it only teaches us to identify a few feedback processes amid this welter of activity

• Systems perspective is that this enormous detail complexity renders all rational explanations inherently incomplete. Human systems are infinitely complex. "You can never figure it out," I suggested— because it's "un-figure-out-able." Nonetheless, we can enhance our mastery of complexity.

• However, if we begin to master a systemic language, all this starts to change. The subconscious is subtly retrained to structure data in circles instead of straight

• However, if we begin to master a systemic language, all this starts to change. The subconscious is subtly retrained to structure data in circles instead of straight lines. We find that we "see" feedback processes and systems archetypes everywhere. A new framework for thinking becomes embedded.

• "When this switch is thrown subconsciously, you become a systems thinker ever thereafter. Reality is automatically seen systemically as well as linearly (there still are lots of problems for which a linear perspective is perfectly adequate). Alternatives that are impossible to see linearly are surfaced by the subconscious as proposed solutions. Solutions that were outside of our 'feasible set' become part of our feasible set. 'Systemic' becomes a way of thinking (almost a way of being) and not just a problem solving methodology."

• *Each of the five learning disciplines can be thought of on three distinct levels:

  •  practices: what you do
  • principles: guiding ideas and insights
  • essences: the state of being of those with high levels of mastery in the discipline

Management Principles

• Management Principle: Don't push on the reinforcing (growth) process, remove (or weaken) the source of limitation.

• ***Management Principle: *Focus on the fundamental solution. If symptomatic solution is imperative (because of delays in fundamental solution), use it to gain time while working on the fundamental solution.

• ***Management Principle: *"Teach people to fish, rather than giving them fish." Focus on enhancing the capabilities of the "host system" to solve its own problems. If outside help is needed, "helpers" should be strictly limited to a one-time intervention (and everyone knows this in advance) or be able to help people develop their own skills, resources, and infrastructure to be more capable in the future.

• Management Principle: Look for a way for both sides to "win," or to achieve their objectives. In many instances, one side can unilaterally reverse the vicious spiral by taking overtly aggressive "peaceful" actions that cause the other to feel less threatened.

• Management Principle: Look for the overarching goal for balanced achievement of both choices. In some cases, break or weaken the coupling between SUCCESS TO THE SUCCESSFUL Structure: i i the two, so that they do not compete for the same limited resource (this is desirable in cases where the coupling is inadvertent and creates an unhealthy competition for resources).

• Management Principle: Manage the "commons," either through educating everyone and creating forms of self-regulation and peer pressure, or through an official regulating mechanism, ideally designed by participants.

• Management Principle: Maintain focus on the long term. Disregard short-term "fx," if feasible, or use it only to "buy time" while working on long-term remedy.

• Management Principle: If there is a genuine potential for growth, build capacity in advance of demand, as a strategy for creating demand. Hold the vision, especially as regards assessing key performance standards and evaluating whether the capacity to meet potential demand is adequate.