Senge's Fiffth Discipline

1. THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE It is vital that the five disciplines develop as an ensemble. This is challenging because it is much harder to integrate new tools than simply apply them separately. But the payoffs are immense. This is why systems thinking is the fifth discipline. 

2. It is the discipline that integrates the disciplines, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice. It keeps them from being separate gimmicks or the latest organization change fads. 

3. But systems thinking also needs the disciplines of building shared vision, mental models, team learning, and personal mastery to realize its potential. 

4. Building shared vision fosters a commitment to the long term. 

5. Mental models focus on the 

openness needed to unearth shortcomings in our present ways of seeing the world. 

6.Team learning develops the skills of groups of people to look for the larger picture that lies beyond individual perspectives. 

7. And personal mastery fosters the personal motivation to continually learn how our actions affect our world. Without personal mastery, people are so steeped in the reactive mindset ("someone/something else is creating my problems") that they are deeply threatened by the systems perspective.

8.  Lastly, systems thinking makes understandable the subtlest aspect of the learning organization-the new way individuals perceive themselves and their world. 

9. At the heart of a learning organization is a shift of mind-from seeing ourselves as separate from the world to connected to the world, from seeing problems as caused by someone or something "out there" to seeing how our own actions create the problems we experience.

10. A learning organization is a place where people are continually discovering how they create their reality. And how they can change it. As Archimedes has said, "Give me a lever long enough... and single-handed I can move the world."