Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

• Systems Thinking – a way of thinking about, and language for describing and
understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape behaviour of systems.” (Senge,
1990)
In 1994, Peter Senge with four colleagues (Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard R. Ross, and
Bryan J. Smith) published “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a
Learning Organization”. The book lists the ten following reasons for building a learning
organization:
“Because we want superior performance;
To improve quality;
For customers;
For competitive advantage;
For an energized, committed workforce;
To manage change;
For the truth;
Because the times demand it;
Because we recognize our interdependence; and
Because we want it.”
In fact, any one of these reasons could be sufficient to justify the effort. But not every organization
is ready for this. TQM may be an advantage at the start. As the authors of the Fieldbook noted:
“One of the most powerful discoveries for us during the past several years has been seeing how
closely our work on learning organizations dovetails with the ‘Total Quality’ movement. Again and
again we have found that organizations seriously committed to quality management are uniquely
prepared to study the ‘learning disciplines.” (Senge…at al., 1994) These lessons were fully proved
by the author’s own experience – only organizations that were successful in implementing real
quality management systems and succeeded in creating a TQM environment were sufficiently
prepared to further development as ‘learning organizations’.
Neil Glass suggests a useful parallel between common training and learning. A learning
organization can be very different from a highly trained organization. Training (of individuals) is all
about how to do specific activities well and is based on single-loop thinking. Learning is aimed at
being able to assess whether you are doing it right. Training gives you better efficiency (doing
things better) – learning builds effectiveness (doing the right things). A single-loop learning
organization tries to improve its processes, but at the same time is able to question whether those
are the right processes by using double-loop learning.” (Glass, 1998) Thus, as we see, BPR, as a
specific mind-set, also links quite well with organizational learning.
131