Introduction
Peter Senge described learning organizations as places where “people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive pattern thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to learn together. Each of these disciplines involves a body of theory and techniques that must be practiced in order for mastery to develop” (Senge 1990). The disciplines are systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning.
System Thinking
System thinking is the discipline of seeing wholes, perceiving the structures that underlie dynamically complex systems, and identifying high-leverage change opportunities. Peter Senge uses a rainstorm as an example of how humans interrelated actions have a diverse affect on each other, and how humans usually don’t see those invisible links because it takes years to take form. Because people don’t usually see them for years and only focus on snapshots, it arises the questions of why there problems never seem to get solved. According to the author Peter Senge, “Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively” (1990, p.468). The approach of systems thinking is fundamentally different from traditional forms of analysis. Traditional analysis focuses on the other constituents of the systems set of elements that interact to produce behavior of which it is part, which in meaning, instead of isolating smaller and smaller parts of the system being studied, systems thinking works by expanding its view to take into account larger and larger numbers of interactions as an issue is being studied (Daniel Aronson) (Raines, 2009).
Personal Mastery
Personal mastery; the special level of proficiency. The
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