Senge and Sensibility

Senge and Sensibility

Senge and Sensibility

Topic:  Senge and Sensibility

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Peter Senge popularized the
notion of the learning
organization in his book The
Fifth Discipline – although Chris
Argyris first used the term over a
decade earlier. Senge summed up the
learning organization as “a group of
people who are continually enhancing
their capability to create their future”.
This involves an approach to learning
going far deeper than the simple onceand-
for-all digestion of information.
According to Senge, learning is
“about changing individuals so that
they produce results they care about,
accomplish things that are important
to them”, and it is the best way for a
company to come to terms with a
rapidly changing world.
In spite of the book’s somewhat
surprising popularity, Senge was
disappointed with companies’
responses. They either paid no more
than lip service to it or turned their
backs on his learning strategies
altogether. Many corporations were
mistake-averse, often punishing those
making mistakes even when the
errors were relatively harmless.
He realized that one of the most
change-averse elements within an
organization is its culture. It can often
survive downsizing or re-engineering
with remarkable tenacity, but new
forms of learning cannot go far in the
face of cultural hostility. In The Dance
of Change, Senge reflected on these
failures, arguing that understanding
the factors that are obstructing change
is needed first. Senge isolated three
elements that promote change; on the
other hand, he also found 10 reasons
for doing nothing or for moving
backwards. He hints that the forces
of inertia within an organization may
be so great that they frustrate even
the most driven CEO but says that
some of the obstacles can be redrawn
to help develop a learning
organization. For example, an excuse
for not adopting a change initiative is
often “lack of time”. If this is taken
sincerely, it can be an opportunity to
reframe the use of time within the
organization as a whole.
Then, in Presence, based on
hundreds of interviews with businessmen,
academics and scientists, Senge
examined the nature of change
and their ways of dealing with it.
It presented a radically new approach
to learning. In his latest book
(co-authored with Bryan Smith,
Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur and Sara
Schley), The Necessary Revolution,
Senge once again strikes out into
unknown territory for a business book.
Obviously the people you’re talking
to, people who work in organizations,
aren’t natural revolutionaries. While
people understand the argument, are
they prepared to act?
Well, we all act to the degree of
which we’re capable and willing.
Almost all the stories and examples
in the book involve people and
organizations with which a bunch of
us have had a long-term involvement.
One of the hardest things about this
book – and it was very different in
many ways from The Fifth Discipline
– is that almost all of the stories are
out of date by at least a year or two
already because of the inevitable
delays in writing and editing, revising
and all that; so there are much →
Special report Senge and sensibility
From The Fifth Discipline to his latest book, The Necessary Revolution,
Peter Senge has ploughed a unique and groundbreaking furrow. He explains
to Stuart Crainer why change is imperative.
72 Business Strategy Review Winter 2008 © 2008 The Author | Journal
compilation © 2008 London Business School
better stories today about how a
lot of those projects have continued
to unfurl.
Do you think that the economic
downturn will halt people’s
enthusiasm for some of these ideas?
It’s a very natural question. You can
look at it two ways. Obviously,
resources of many sorts are going to
be constrained. With innovation, at
some level there’s always an
investment process. You’re investing
time, energy, money and other kinds
of resources now for some bigger
benefit down the road. So investment
just gets harder. On the other hand, I
think most people are pretty clear
that we’re at the very beginning of
much bigger changes; and the
problems that are happening,
whether they’re purely economic,
natural disasters or social
instabilities, most of them pretty
much tie right back into the reasons
we’re doing this in the first place.
So, I think the downturn will have an
effect but I believe that all real, deep
change comes out of people making
choices, often profound choices.
There is an old joke that gravity is not
negotiable. These are not matters in
which human beings can go 180
degrees opposite to the way nature
works. So, in that sense, I think that
the bubble is collapsing and most of
the major issues we face in the world
tie back to that. The impetus doesn’t
get less: it gets greater.
There are exciting things and
interesting stories from around the
world in the book. Is there a sense of
a movement, some sort of
commonality that unites them?
I think so. All these issues reflect our
inability to see interdependence.
We’ve created this incredible web
around the world, and yet we’re
mostly blind to it. Naturally we’re
blind to how it operates beyond just
what it gives us in the immediate
sense; and when something goes
awry, we’re suddenly shocked.
If you look back over several
hundreds of years, I think there has
been a paradoxical decline in our
ability to understand interdependence.
Never before in history have day-today
choices made by individuals
been so affected by people on the
other side of the world. I think that
when we lived in an agrarian culture,
we had to be much more aware of our
interdependence with the soil, rain,
wind, weather and all that stuff.
Probably if you go back even further,
into tribal cultures, before the
agricultural revolution, that sense of
interdependency was even greater.
I read not too long ago that many
American kids think their food comes
from the grocery store, and the
concept of seasonality in fruits and
vegetables has no meaning. We’ve so
cut off our sense of even the most
obvious dependence on the natural
world to create our food. So we’ve
got this extraordinary irony: the web
gets thicker and our awareness of it
gets less.
Do you get different reactions when
you travel around the world? Could
you see that in a country like China,
where the emphasis is on harmony,
interdependence is more easily
understood than it is in California?
Yes, there’s no doubt about it; the
Oriental cultures have this heritage.
I think in part it’s because there’s
more direct lineage to their native
peoples. If you look at our history in
the West, there has been so much
cultural change, one culture after
another wiping out the other. But in
China, India, Tibet, much of Asia,
you have more continuity culturally.
As a result, there’s more of a systems
world view. It’s much easier for the
Oriental mindset to grasp the idea of
interdependence and continual change.
I spend about a month a year on
average in China. Actually, I would
like to spend more, because I think
it’s important for our collective
future. For a whole bunch of reasons,
I would characterize the contemporary
Chinese culture as extraordinarily
non-collaborative, very low trust,
and in some part that’s due to the
Cultural Revolution. A whole
generation grew up in an atmosphere
with a lack of trust. We’re doing a lot
of projects there, and we’re trying to
get all kinds of collaboration going.
It’s really tough there, whereas the
Japanese, as an island culture, have
an extraordinarily strong history of
working together.
How do you spend your time?
I work mainly on projects. I don’t do
consulting in the traditional sense;
I really haven’t for 15 to 20 years.
What I do is work on big projects,
most of them collaborative. Since the
Sustainability Consortium got started,
I’ve had the opportunity to work in all
these food, water and energy kinds of
projects. In China, the main project
that we’re struggling with is getting
a bunch of organizations to work
together to quickly come to worldclass
levels in energy efficiency. Part
of China’s problem could be addressed
in three to five years: they literally
build and operate manufacturing
facilities at 1950 levels, in terms of
energy usage. So we’re trying to get
a group of organizations working
together, becoming more and more
sophisticated, so they can lead
a transition to alternative sources
of energy.
How do you describe yourself? You’re
not a consultant – are you an
academic?
Obviously I’ve been associated with
MIT forever, but MIT is also very
eclectic; I always call myself a
hanger-on. Academic institutions can
→
Special report
We’ve created this incredible web around the world, and yet
we’re mostly blind to it.
© 2008 The Author | Journal compilation © 2008 London Business School
Business Strategy Review Winter 2008 73
be extraordinarily political, and I was
just not interested in that, so the best
term I could use would be something
like “community organizer”.
I remember reading a book that had
a huge influence on me when I was
in college and trying to do some
community projects, Reveille for
Radicals by Saul Alinsky. It’s quite a
famous book in the US in the history
of community organizing, and a lot of
what I learned from that book has
really worked well. When all is said
and done, the work of good
community organizing comes down to
people having a high level of
responsibility for their own efforts;
and, while the
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