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Personal Mastery
Personal mastery is what Peter Senge describes as one of the core disciplines
needed to build a learning organization. Personal mastery applies to individual
learning, and organizations cannot learn until their members begin to.
Personal Mastery has two components. First, one's goal. Second, one must
have a true measure of how close one is to the goal. (Senge, 1990)
'Goal' in this context, is not used the same way it normally is
in management. Managers have been conditioned to think in terms of short-term
and long-term goals. Long-term goals for the American manager are often
something to be achieved in the next three to five years. In personal
mastery, the goal, or what one is trying to achieve, is much further away
in distance. It may take a lifetime to reach it, if one ever does.
Mental Models
A mental model is one's way of looking at the world. It is a framework
for the cognitive processes of our mind. In other words, it determines
how we think and act.
A simple example of a mental model comes from an exercise described in
The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. In this exercise, pairs of conference
participants are asked to arm wrestle. They are told that winning in arm
wrestling means the act of lowering their partner's arm to the table.
Most people struggle against their partner to win. Their mental model
is that there can be only one winner in arm wrestling and that this is
done by lowering their partner's arm more times than their partner can
do the same thing to them.
Shared Vision
A shared vision of an organization is to be built of the individual visions of its members.
Only by integrating individual visions and developing them, through a well facilitated process, into a common direction, can a true shared vision emerge.
The leader's role in creating a shared vision is to share their own vision with the employees. This should not be done in order to impose the vision on others, but rather to encourage them to share their own. Based on these visions, the organization's vision should evolve.
Team Learning
"How can a team of individual IQs above 120 have a collective IQ of 63?"
This is the basic paradox confronted by the discipline of Team Learning. It starts with “dialogue” (the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions, entering into a genuine “thinking together.”)
Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in organizations. Unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn!
Systems Thinking
Businesses, like other human endeavors, are systems. They bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effect on each other.
Since we are part of the lacework, it’s hard for us to see whole patterns of change. So we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated events, wondering why our deepest problems never go away.
Systems thinking is a framework, body of knowledge and tools aimed to making full patterns clearer.
The five disciplines at work
Each of the five disciplines is basically a 'stand alone.' However, years
of study and implementation of the LO principles around the world, teach
us that the combination of the five (tailor-made to a specific organization)
will enable to create a real learning organization.
In order to put theory and practice together, please read on to know what
is a
Learning Organization, and what is it not.
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