RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

On building learning organizations

Personal mastery: Continually clarifying and refining our personal visions, and seeing reality objectively.

Building shared vision: The capacity to translate individual visions into collective visions that galvanize a group of people based on what they’ll really like to create together.

Mental models: Learning to unearth our own personal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface so that we see how they impact our actions.

Team learning: Spending time together to suspend assumptions and come up with new ideas.

Systems thinking: What causes patterns of behavior? It is a framework for seeing the whole picture instead of individual things. The purpose is to make the full picture clearer, to see patterns between components or subsystems.

Feedback: Any reciprocal flow of influence. Think of circles of influence in order to get things done, rather than linear processes.

In building learning organizations there is no ultimate destination or end state, only a lifelong journey. “This work requires great reservoirs of patience… but I believe the results we achieve are more sustainable because the people involved have really grown. It also prepares people for the ongoing journey. As we learn, grow, and tackle more systemic challenges, things do not get easier.”

— The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. I bet you’ve heard the saying “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” This saying stays true in the so-called “forest thinking” as well. When we analyze the intensive boundaries of a problem, considering every single aspect—or tree—of it, we can lose our focus on what matters. Instead of trying to narrow down if a particular dishwasher stopped working on Sunday afternoon, it’s more useful to see how often the dishwasher breaks down in general, how big the load is when it breaks down compared to the load when it works well, and so on. Forest thinking shows […]
  2. If you have a strong vision, you are the catalyst for the change. You are the spark for the fire. And hopefully at this point, people are bought into the vision, because then it’s bigger than you. A good vision takes off on its own, and is bigger than your own ego, bigger than your own fear. — Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner Source: Amazon Kindle […]
  3. Open systems have no boundaries. All systems are connected. There are no separate individual systems. This is a difficult concept to wrap our heads around. Boundaries are artificially created by people to help them separate and clearly examine one problem at a time. There is no such thing as one correct boundary of a system. The boundaries we decide to draw around systems are based on the questions we are trying to answer and the problems we are trying to solve. The boundaries we draw can lead to problems if we fail to keep in mind that they are […]
  4. When studying events, we look at them through analytical, logical lenses. We break them down into small, understandable chunks, and we fish for scapegoats while looking for cause-and-effect relationships. Is the economy going south? It must be the result of the poor decisions of a politician. Is the newspaper arriving late? That lazy mailman. For sure, he stopped to chat with the neighbor. Is your wife cold and distant lately? It must be her job. We seek linear, immediate, sensible explanations for problems surrounding us. But by doing so, we run the risk of seeing issues as being inflicted […]
  5. Iterate Live long and prosper, said Sojuku as he stepped out of the meeting room. Peace and long life, I replied. Sojuku is a big fan of Star Trek. I could care less about Star Trek, but anything to make the man smile and continue feeling good about the work he puts in to enable our customers to share data about their lives and commerce. “Another shot of whiskey before you hit the streets?” “Yeah, why not!” I like the view from here. Our office overlooks the ocean, and we were fortunate to get a beautiful view of it right […]

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