The Fifth Discipline

We allow our goals to erode when we are unwilling to live with emotional tension. On the other hand, when we understand creative tension and allow it to operate by not lowering our vision, vision becomes an active force. Robert Fritz says, “It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.” Truly creative people use the gap between vision and

we identified several specific ways such balancing processes can thwart otherwise promising change initiatives: control-oriented managers who are threatened by new levels of openness and candor; delays in metrics that show costs of changes but take time to show benefits; polarization and competition between converts to a new way of doing things and

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.

Peter Drucker said that “making money for a company is like oxygen for a person; if you don’t have enough of it you’re out of the game.” In other words, profitability is a performance requirement for all businesses, but it is not a purpose. Extending Drucker’s metaphor, companies who take profit as their purpose are like people who think life is ab

In reinforcing processes such as the Pygmalion effect, a small change builds on itself.

Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people’s thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create.

the central principle of systems thinking, that structure influences behavior and that the leverage for change increases as we learn to focus on underlying structures, rather than events or behaviors. These structures are made up of beliefs and assumptions, established practices, skills and capabilities, networks of relationships, and awareness and

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 cure can be worse than the disease.