Peter Senge

We have been looking at his central ideas over the past two days as he is an important thinker in organizational development, and someone whose works you would benefit from reading.

There is a wealth of information about him and his ideas on the internet.

Here is an excerpt from a good one.

“Peter M. Senge (1947- ) was named a ‘Strategist of the Century’ by the Journal of Business Strategy, one of 24 men and women who have ‘had the greatest impact on the way we conduct business today’ (September/October 1999). While he has studied how firms and organizations develop adaptive capabilities for many years at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), it was Peter Senge’s 1990 book The Fifth Discipline that brought him firmly into the limelight and popularized the concept of the ‘learning organization'. Since its publication, more than a million copies have been sold and in 1997, Harvard Business Review identified it as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years.

“On this page we explore Peter Senge’s vision of the learning organization. We will focus on the arguments in his (1990) book The Fifth Discipline as it is here we find the most complete exposition of his thinking.

“Peter Senge

“Born in 1947, Peter Senge graduated in engineering from Stanford and then went on to undertake a masters on social systems modeling at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) before completing his PhD on Management. Said to be a rather unassuming man, he is is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL). His current areas of special interest focus on decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations so as to enhance the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals.

“Peter Senge describes himself as an 'idealistic pragmatist'. This orientation has allowed him to explore and advocate some quite ‘utopian’ and abstract ideas (especially around systems theory and the necessity of bringing human values to the workplace). At the same time he has been able to mediate these so that they can be worked on and applied by people in very different forms of organization. His areas of special interest are said to focus on decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations so as to enhance the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals. One aspect of this is Senge’s involvement in the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a Cambridge-based, non-profit membership organization. Peter Senge is its chair and co-founder. SoL is part of a ‘global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants’ dedicated to discovering, integrating, and implementing ‘theories and practices for the interdependent development of people and their institutions’. One of the interesting aspects of the Center (and linked to the theme of idealistic pragmatism) has been its ability to attract corporate sponsorship to fund pilot programmes that carry within them relatively idealistic concerns.

“Aside from writing The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990), Peter Senge has also co-authored a number of other books linked to the themes first developed in The Fifth Discipline. These include The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (1994); The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (1999) and Schools That Learn (2000).

“The learning organization

“According to Peter Senge (1990: 3) learning organizations are:
…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.

“The basic rationale for such organizations is that in situations of rapid change only those that are flexible, adaptive and productive will excel. For this to happen, it is argued, organizations need to ‘discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels’ (ibid.: 4).”