Peter Senge Quotes
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Trusting people to be creative and constructive when given more freedom does not imply an overly optimistic belief in the perfectibility of human nature. It is, rather, belief that the inevitable errors and sins of the human condition are far better overcome by individuals working together in an environment of trust and freedom and mutual respect than by individuals working under a multitude of rules, regulations, and restraints imposed upon them by another group of imperfect individuals.
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New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
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When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.
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Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’
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How has the world of the child changed in the last 150 years?" The answer is. "It's hard to imagine any way in which it hasn't changed.They're immersed in all kinds of stuff that was unheard of 150 years ago, and yet if you look at schools today versus 100 years ago, they are more similar than dissimilar.
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People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them-in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. The do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.
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When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results, but the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.
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Yet, most every corporate effort to graft this truly innovative practices into their culture has failed because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of AAR's to a sterile technique.
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The systems perspective tells us that we must look beyond individual mistakes or bad luck to understand important problems.
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In dialogue, individuals gain insights that simply could not be achieved individually.
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We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry.
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By using the systems archetypes we can learn how to “structure” the details into a coherent picture of the forces at play.
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Theres a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.
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When you ask people what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest.
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The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.
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When there is genuine vision(as opposed to the all-too-familiar vision statement), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.
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We tend to think that, in a traditional organisation, people are producing results because management wants results, but the essence of a high-quality organisation is people producing results because they want the results. It's puzzling we find that hard to understand, that if people are really enjoying, they'll innovate, they'll take risks, they'll have trust with one another because they are really committed to what they're doing and it's fun
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Many in positions of authority lack the capabilities to truly lead. They are not credible. They do not command genuine respect. They are not committed to serve. They are not continually learning and growing. They are not wise.
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It takes courage and skill to be unambiguous and clear.
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The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence .
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Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.
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To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning.
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Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.
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The easy way out usually leads back in.
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Small changes can produce big results - but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
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Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
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A shared vision is not an idea...it is rather, a force in people's hearts...at its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question 'What do we want to create?
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Learning organizations organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.
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A learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.
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If there is genuine potential for growth, build capacity in advance of demand, as a strategy for creating demand. Hold the vision, especially as regards assessing key performance and evaluating whether capacity to meet potential demand is adequate.
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