Quotes from Peter M. Senge

Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people's thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create.

A special case of shifting the burden, which recurs with alarming frequency, is eroding goals. Whenever there is a gap between our goals and our current situation there are two sets of pressures: to improve the situation and to lower our goals. How these pressures are dealt with is central to the discipline of personal mastery

We say, "That's a very interesting idea," when we have no intention of taking the idea seriously.

If I learned anything … it is the notion that we need to be working on all different parts of the system in order to successfully change the whole system

To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive. If people do not share a common vision, and do not share common mental models about the business reality within which they operate, empowering people will only increase organizational stress and the burden of management to maintain coherence and direction.

The artistry of dialogue lies in experiencing the flow of meaning and seeing the one thing that needs to be said now. Like the Quakers, who enjoin members to say not simply whatever pops into their heads but only those thoughts that are compelling (and which cause the speaker to quake from the need to speak them)

The Japanese believe building a great organization is like growing a tree; it takes twenty-five to fifty years.

I would suggest that the fundamental "information problem" faced by managers is not too little information but too much information. What we most need are ways to know what is important and what is not important, what variables to focus on and which to pay less attention to—and we need ways to do this that can help groups or teams develop shared understanding.

Several years ago, Debashish Chatterjee, a good friend and well-known author on leadership1 opened a seminar on leadership at MIT by saying, 'I've been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it's been submitted to many tests—which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We're fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance.

The earth is an indivisible whole, just as each of us is an indivisible whole.

You cannot have a learning organization without shared vision. Without a pull toward some goal which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming.

Thought denies that it is participative." Thought stops tracking reality and "just goes, like a program." And thought establishes its own standard of reference for fixing problems, problems which it contributed to creating in the first place.

The purpose of dialogue," Bohm suggests, "is to reveal the incoherence in our thought." There are three types of incoherence.

The prejudiced person can't see how his prejudice shapes what he "sees" and how he acts. In some sense, if he did, he would no longer be prejudiced. To operate, the "thought" of prejudice must remain hidden to its holder.

A shared vision is the first step in allowing people who mistrusted each other to begin to work together. It creates a common identity.

Thought presents itself (stands in front) of us and pretends that it does not represent.

How can we stop going faster while our ability to see further ahead is decreasing?

You cannot have a learning organization without shared vision. Without a pull toward some goal which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming. Vision establishes an overarching goal. The loftiness of the target compels new ways of thinking and acting.

For example,when a conflict surfaces in a dialogue people are likely to realize that there is a tension, but the tension arises, literally, from our thoughts. People will say, "It is our thoughts and the way we hold on to them that are in conflict, not us.

Once people see the participatory nature of their thought, they begin to separate themselves from their thought. They begin to take a more creative, less reactive, stance toward their thought.

Shared vision fosters risk taking and experimentation. When people are immersed in a vision, they often don't know how to do it. They run an experiment. They change direction and run another experiment. Everything is an experiment, but there is no ambiguity.

Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.

Nature (and that includes us) is not made up of parts within wholes. It is made up of wholes within wholes. All boundaries, national boundaries included, are fundamentally arbitrary. We invent them and then, ironically, we find ourselves trapped within them. But

Organizations intent on building shared visions continually encourage members to develop their personal visions.