When companies evolve: the power of continuous learning

Published onnumber 187, August/September of People&Knowledge

The termlearning organizationhas more or less become common jargon. Rediscovering its genesis and above all its value can be very useful. It was coined by Bob Garratt in 1987, in a period of crisis and transformation of traditional organizational models; it was thoughPeter Sengethe true animator and theoretician of this organizational model based oncontinuous learning,lashared vision,thesystemic thinkingand theenhancement of people.

Peter Michael Senge, born in California in 1947, was a professor atMIT Sloan School of Management,co-teacher at the New England Complex Systems Institute and founder of the Society for Organizational Learning. A space engineer with studies in philosophy at Stanford, he holds a master's degree in social systems modeling from MIT and a doctorate in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He emerged in the 1990s as a leading figure in theorganizational developmentwith the bookThe fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. To the first edition of 1990 I suggest the second of 2006, which adds, in addition to a splendid preface in which Senge talks about William Edwards Deming (to whom I will dedicate one of the next columns), an entire fourth chapter resulting from interviews held in the previous 15 years, with 20 prominent personalities who had applied organizational learning with commitment.

Senge identifiesfive disciplinesessential for building a learning organization: thepersonal mastery,which concerns the individual commitment to continuous learning, the clarity of one's personal vision, the focusing of energies and the ability to see reality objectively;mental models,that is, the ingrained beliefs, assumptions and images that influence the way we understand the world and act; theshared vision,which consists in creating a common vision of the future that inspires commitment and authentic involvement, instead of simple formal membership; thegroup learning,that is, the ability of team members to suspend their assumptions and think together; finally,systemic thinking,which is the 'fifth discipline' that integrates all the others. It consists of seeing the organization as a complex system of interconnected parts, recognizing patterns and interdependencies, and identifying leverage points where small changes can produce big results.

The relevance of Senge's thought is in my opinion extraordinary, at least for three reasons. First of all, because, in a moment of often uncritical infatuation with so-called Artificial Intelligence, we risk fueling the myth of machines that learn within organizations too, forgetting to train and stimulatehuman learning.

Secondly, not just the transition from traditionalcontrolling organizationhas not yet happened on a large scale, but some signs tell us that new forms seem to be emerging; the disciplines oflearning organizationproposed by Senge are more fundamental than ever. With a further stimulus, recalled by the interview with Thomas Johnson, author of the bookProfit beyond measure, for which, for example, the extraordinary long-term success of Toyota is due not so much to a limited use of performance parameters traditionally assigned to managers, but rather to the fact that managerial performance incorporates the essence of vital systems existing in nature. Senge reports a very clear example: we do not have an idea of how we walk, but once we dobody knowledgeis developed, the body responds to our conscious directives. Without this knowledge any central directive would be ineffective.

Finally, Senge questioned a paradigm now accepted as dogma: Darwinian companies die because they don'tadaptto the changing context – and the level of mortality has risen exponentially in recent decades – and especially in the Western context this is not only accepted, but somehow stimulated (think of the startup movement and the underlying ideology). “But what if the high mortality rate of companies is a symptom of deeper problems that affect all companies, not just those that die?”: the so-calledlearning disabilitiesI am the truthbrakeof company growth, are pervasive and generated by dysfunctional systems and practices. I invite you to read them, including the famous parable of the boiled frog.

Senge's rich text does not fail to provide us with pearls of wisdom onleadership.I would like to use the same quote from Lao-Tze (father of Taoism) made by Senge and used by Alberto Galgano in his preface to the Italian edition: "The bad leader is the one who people despise. The good leader is the one who people respect. The great leader is the one who makes people say: 'We did it'".