61 pages • 2 hours read
Peter M. SengeThe Fifth Discipline
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction to the Revised Edition-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “How Our Actions Create Our Reality … and How We Can Change It”
Introduction to the Revised Edition Summary
Peter M. Senge reveals that after publishing the first edition of the book in 1990, he was asked to have someone write a comment on the book jacket. Senge chose Dr. W. Edward Deming, an internationally respected expert in management practice. According to Senge, Deming replied to him with a profound sentence that unveiled a bigger truth within Senge’s book: The problem with organizations’ management is the prioritization of rewards rather than building character in everyone involved in the organization. He further explains that Deming rejected the standard idea of management for a method focused on knowledge and inspiration, built on three ideas: encouraging goal-setting, creating an atmosphere of critical thinking and reflectiveness, and accepting intricacies. Within these three ideas, there are five disciplines. Senge uses a three-legged stool as a model for this learning organization.
Deming had realized that the authoritative and subordinate roles in schools and businesses are the same, with a great emphasis on rewards being at the center of these dynamics. Senge then explains that following Deming’s passing, he discussed management systems with colleagues and concluded that there are eight elements within it: measuring value, emphasizing compliance, establishing results, absolutist thinking, conformity, planning and control, competition, and splitting of innovations. Senge still sees these as problems pervading the world and notes that while globalization and the rise of technology in business have brought people in the world together and encouraged more collectivism, they have also worsened the environment, income inequality, and the struggle for businesses to maintain efficiency in a changing world. He uses statements from 1990s Czech president Vaclav Havel to support this. Senge says that his editor Doubleday encouraged him to write this revision, which has allowed him to consult more people involved in organizational learning and make changes to the book, as well as add another chapter. He shows the ideas about collective work and behavior he found in the interviews he gave and concludes that the current management system is “dedicated to mediocrity,” and that it can be fixed by encouraging learning, curiosity, and teamwork (xviii).
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Give Me a Lever Long Enough … and Single-Handed I Can Move the World”
Senge argues that people’s tendency to fragment problems to make them simpler to understand and easier to solve also lowers their ability to look at the whole. He intends for the ideas in his book to help people innovate and learn. He then says that work must become more focused on learning and everyone in the institution must be dedicated to learning for that institution to thrive. He explains that learning is an inborn human trait and that collective learning and innovation around the world is important to improving the world and helping people thrive even outside of work.
Senge uses the story of the Wright brothers’ invention of the first powered flying machine and the steady development toward the first commercial plane to show the development and unity of components needed to turn an invention into an innovation. He then introduces the five disciplines a learning organization must use. Systems Thinking is the understanding of things functioning as systems, which is important for understanding patterns and creating change. Personal Mastery is the focus of learning and improving one’s skills and understanding throughout life. Mental Models are ideas and perceptions people have about the world, which rely on honest introspection and reflection to create important discussions and successful ideas. Shared vision involves turning an individual goal or aspiration into a collective one, toward which all people in the institution work. Team Learning centers on those in an institution pursuing knowledge together and creating a meaningful dialogue that will move the organization forward.
Senge emphasizes that he intends to encourage learning with the idea of these practices as disciplines and that the disciplines must be used together rather than separately to create lasting progress and success, with Systems Thinking as the “fifth discipline” that brings all the other disciplines together and makes the intended goals of the other four disciplines plausible (11). In turn, Systems Thinking relies on the other four disciplines as well. Without them, people lose sight of the nuanced understanding and innovation needed for learning. He then says that being able to adjust one’s understanding and thinking is important to finding meaning and learning, as is working toward a greater goal than the concrete. Senge then explains that he has learned about these disciplines and used them, with the book starting with an audience of people in management and business and expanding to other groups.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Does Your Organization Have a Learning Disability?”
Senge reveals that most large corporations only last about 40 years and that most of the companies that fail start having serious problems long before their failure that they either ignored or mishandled. He argues that organizations are susceptible to certain “learning disabilities” and that preventing failure depends on treating seven different learning disabilities. These are personal identification with one’s position to a fault, as shown with the efficiency of Japan’s automobile industry in comparison to America’s, seeing the problem as outside of one’s self without looking within to find flaws, reactive behavior disguised as proactive behavior, the centering of short-term events rather than gradual processes—an evolutionary skill helpful in basic survival but detrimental to living in the complex, more abstract modern world, ignoring subtle problems until it is too late—as with the idea of the “boiled frog,” the focus on learning by experience even when consequences are not directly linked to the actions, and the establishment of management teams that seek to give the appearance of success rather than address important but troubling questions. Senge then cites historians Barbara Tuchman and Jared Diamond, whose analyses of the failures of many groups in history show the significant presence of these learning disabilities. He says these disabilities are still present in the modern world and that he hopes the five disciplines will help address and treat them.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Prisoners of the System, or Prisoners of Our Own Thinking?”
Senge uses a beer game developed at MIT’s School of Management in the 1960s as an example of the “learning disabilities” discussed in Chapter 2 at play. In the game, the players are either the retailer, the wholesaler, or the brewery. In most instances, the retailer would order more beer as it grew in demand. When backlogs and delays occurred and led to shortages, the retailer would order increasingly more beers over the weeks. Eventually, this caused the wholesaler and brewery to have a surplus of beer as the retailer’s and customers’ demand for the beer decreased. Each of the players would blame the other players or customers for this dilemma and focus on the effects on the individual player instead of working together as a collective.
Senge, however, asserts that the structural problems influence the behavior of these players. All of the learning disabilities of the learning organization appear as the retailer, wholesaler, and brewery all fixated on their positions, not understanding the impact of their decisions on the rest of the organization. They also react to the shortage by panicking, leading to the eventual surplus and not noticing the warning signs until it is too late to fix the problem. They also focus on individual events rather than looking at the full pattern. The managers of each team also lose sight of the others’ problems and do not communicate effectively to their team, worsening the problem. Instead of doing these things, Senge encourages all doing the beer game to remain calm when backlogs occur and continue ordering the necessary amount rather than overordering. He also says that to change the patterns of behavior, people must understand the structure of the system and change the system to shift the collective behaviors into healthy, productive ones.
Introduction to the Revised Edition-Part 1 Analysis
The Introduction to The Revised Edition gives an update on the events that have occurred in the worlds of management and organizational learning since the original edition was written in 1990. Senge notes that globalization and the rise of technology are changing the world of management drastically, and soon management practices must change to accommodate them. Senge also realizes after the book’s publication and receiving feedback from Deming that there were aspects of organizational learning he did not completely understand. He recognizes Deming’s understanding that the prevailing management system in the Western world is mechanistic and creates compliant workers and opportunistic overseers who only prioritize personal rewards and isolate themselves from other aspects of the global system. It is also making the problems of climate change, the drug trade, and income inequality progressively worse and cannot last long without severe consequences to both the social and economic systems of the world. Part 1 introduces the flaws that create problems for many managers and businesses and the disciplines Senge encourages managers to implement to reach their fullest potential.
Senge introduces Bill O’Brien and W. Edwards Demings in the Introduction and Part 1 as figures who have inspired his work in systems and who share his philosophies on the world. He also includes them as authorities on the subject of organizational learning, whose ideas support Senge’s arguments and, thus, provide ethos. Senge also incorporates stories about businesses and historical events and the nature of the beer game to show people both business and non-business examples of how the nonsystemic forms of thinking in Chapter 2 hurt people and the ways the disciplines introduced in Chapter 3 help them. Senge’s detailed description of the beer game is meant to give readers, especially those in management, a play-by-play example of how the players’ actions create problems in a continuous, disastrous cycle of cause and effect. The game also provides a digestible, fun demonstration of the concept that can be replicated by readers who wish to learn from the game.
The World as a Connected System is a central concept that is introduced early in the book. Senge argues that fragmentation in organizations is harmful because it oversimplifies the world. Fragmentation also makes it harder for people to see how their actions and attitudes affect other people. This fragmentation plays a major role in the “learning disabilities” that plague companies in Chapter 2, particularly in the disabilities “I Am My Position,” “The Enemy Is Out There,” and “The Fixation on Events” (18-21). Overt identification in one’s position causes one to lose sight of their role in other parts of the system. Blaming others for one’s failures makes them unaware of their own involvement in a management problem, and focusing on details of events ignores the patterns that connect those events and lies at the heart of the situation. Senge warns readers about these flaws because they cause damage to businesses. Senge instead recommends using systemic practices to avoid these flaws and solve the problems related to the flaws. The dysfunction in most playthroughs of the beer game highlights the individualized perspective Western management systems create in people, making them incapable of putting themselves in the places of people in other positions. It also makes them unable to look within by feeding the idea that other people are to blame for one’s problems. Senge further argues that good communication is essential to making a business thrive and that one of the major struggles in the beer game is the lack of communication. As the players in the beer game failed to communicate with each other, this worsened the shortage-surplus cycle and made the players blame each other rather than reflect on their actions. Likewise, businesses that become too self-focused in various parts and unable to reach out to the other divisions will be more prone to suffer these consequences. Senge wishes to show his readers these problems and help them think more systemically.
Chapter 2 introduces The Importance of Honesty in Teams by highlighting the flaw of “The Myth of the Management Team” (24). This flaw involves management teams pretending a situation is controlled and stable to maintain an image of competence (24-25), derailing the related theme of The World as a Connected System. While management often wants to avoid appearing weak or admitting mistakes, doing so creates a sense of wholeness and unity that results in success and team happiness and cohesion. He cites Chris Argyris’s reference to this as “skilled incompetence,” highlighting the image-centered refusal to acknowledge problems with the management team (25). Senge explains that this is dangerous because the lack of honesty present can cause devastating problems to go unnoticed by management teams.
Learning as an Ongoing Process is subtly introduced in Senge’s description of the flaw of not seeing one’s internal flaws and in Senge’s analysis of the beer game in Chapter 3. He argues that the blame of external forces for one’s problems gives one an external locus of control, in which the person believes external forces are preventing them from solving their problems or achieving success. Instead, he encourages those playing the beer game, and the readers in and out of the management world to have an internal locus of control. People must examine themselves and consider their involvement in problems to grow as a person and learn better strategies. This creates a sense of accountability that can take a business farther than self-centered, individual departments working against one another. By naming the self-important, individualized perspective that many in upper management or business ownership live by, Senge is able to attach a sense of morality and rationality to the opposite, suggested approach of teamwork and open, honest communication.
