TFDF Getting Started: 2. An Exchange of Lore and Learning

The Purpose of The Fieldbook

This book is for people who want to make their organizations more effective, while realizing their personal vision. You can apply theories, methods, and tools, increasing your own skills in the process. You can create, in other words, an organization which can learn.

It would be nice to compile a definitive book of diagnosis and technique which could because the learning organization equivalent to Architectural Graphic Standards or the Physicians' Desk Reference. But architects, physicians, and other professions evolved their tools and methods over hundreds of years. Management, particularly the management of learning organizations, is much younger. It will take years of experimentation and testing for a full-fledged handbook to be published.

Instead it is time for a "fieldbook" -- a collection of notes, reflections, and exercises "from the field."

The Five Disciplines

The Core of Learning Organization Work is Based Upon Five "Learning Discipline" -- lifelong program of study and practice:

• Personal Mastery -- learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire, and creating an organizational environment which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.

• Mental Models -- reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions

• Shared Vision -- building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared images of the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.

• Team Learning -- transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members' talents.

• Systems Thinking -- a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that  shape the behavior of systems. This discipline helps us see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in tune with the larger processes of the natural and economic world.

To practice a discipline is to be a lifelong learner on a never-ending developmental path. 

In organizations, we believe the people who contribute the most to an enterprise are the people who are committed to the practice of these disciplines for themselves -- expanding their own capacity to hold and seek a vision, to reflect and inquire, to build collective capabilities, and to understand systems.

Senge, P.M. et.al., (1994) The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook., Doubleday, NY. P4~7.