The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization

if you can implement your strategy so that your understanding (and ability to understand) continues to increase, then you don’t have to worry about “getting it all right” at the start. We call this the “enriching” stage.

PURPOSE To take the verbal and graphical descriptions of your story—the theories you are constructing— and capture the key elements into one or more of the “classic stories” of the systems archetypes.

But not every leader recognizes that his or her role requires just as much attention, or more, to design the emotional ambience of the leadership field and to develop the capacity to sense its boundaries. The stronger the field gets, the more chance that it will extend to customers, shareholders, and the network of competitors, suppliers, and globa

choose a problem which has been tackled before, with little or no success. This ensures that a systemic dynamic is at play.

STEP 1: CHOOSING AN ARCHETYPE You start by making guesses. You may have to trust…

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Once we start to become conscious of how we think and interact, and begin developing capacities to think and interact differently, we will already have begun to change our organizations for the better.

third variable, the corrective action or fundamental solutions—the capacity of the system to fix itself—declines. At moments of reflection and self-awareness, you suddenly…

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you can’t practice systems thinking as an individual—not because the discipline itself is difficult, but because good results in a complex system depend on bringing in as many perspectives as possible.

collective costs of their efforts can be brought to the attention of individual actors. The more clearly they see the structure, the more likely they are to stop.