The Fifth Discipline: Understanding Systems Thinking and Learning Organizations
Chapter 4: The Laws of the Fifth Discipline
1. Today’s Problems Stem from Yesterday’s Solutions
Several examples illustrate this point. A rug merchant sees his best carpet has a bulge in the center. He plants his foot on that bump to flatten it and succeeds, but the lump is found elsewhere and flattened again. Again and again, he repeats the same shuffling, ruining the carpet in frustration, until finally, he lifts the corner of the mat where a snake comes out.
Police officers who arrest drug dealers on 30th Street soon discover that the offense has simply moved to 40th Street.
The most serious issue is that the solutions that displace the problems sometimes go unnoticed, since in some cases, the person who solved the first problem is different from the one who inherits the new problem.
2. The More You Push, the More the System Pushes Back
This is what is called balancing feedback, which occurs when well-intentioned intervention in a system generates responses that offset or worsen the outcome of the intervention.
The horse Boxer from Animal Farm answered any difficulty with: “I will work harder.” At first, his attitude inspired everyone, but eventually turned against him because the more he worked, the more work there was, and this was rewarded by the pigs.
Other examples include: affordable housing and improving working conditions in depressed areas attract more low-income people, overflowing the possibilities and creating more problems.
Sometimes it takes more than lowered prices to recover a product. This can temporarily regain customers, but the company’s increased spending will impact other aspects (and thus, service delivery, quality, etc., will fall).
3. Behavior Worsens Before Improving
Systemic problems are difficult to recognize. In certain cases, it takes a long time before they are detected. A graphic example of this point: A person sitting in a chair is pushing against a gigantic domino threatening to fall on top of him from the left. He decides to push and relax, thinking that the problem went away without identifying who was behind that domino and others circled the first, creating a domino effect that pushed the next and so on until finally, the last card ends up falling right on him.
4. The Easy Road Leads to the Same Place
An example: a person sees a drunk crawling under a streetlight and offers his help, finding out that the drunk was looking for the keys to his house. After a while, and after a fruitless search, he asks him where his keys fell. The drunk responds that they fell outside the door of his house. The man asks why he’s then looking for them under the streetlight, to which the drunk replied that he’s looking there because there is no light at his door.
We all feel comfortable applying simple solutions, but sometimes the emphasis on known solutions while the problems persist or get worse is a clear sign of non-systemic thinking.
5. The Cure May Be Worse Than the Disease
Sometimes the easy solution is not only ineffective but additive and dangerous. The principal implication of a non-systemic solution is that these solutions will increasingly need to become additive, increasing dependency. This is called shifting the burden. For example, in business, delegating the burden to consultants or assistants creates a dependency that is difficult to escape instead of training our people.
6. The Fastest Is the Slowest
The tortoise is slow but wins the race. The fastest way is not necessarily the optimal performance.
7. Cause and Effect Are Not Close in Time and Space
The first step to correct this disparity is to abandon the idea that cause and effect are close in time and space. If there is a problem in the production line, we seek the cause in production. If vendors do not meet their objectives, we need new sales incentives or promotions. If housing is inadequate, we build more houses. Often the difficulties are not on the same side.
8. Small Changes Can Produce Big Results, but the Areas of Greatest Leverage Are Often Less Obvious
Some speak of systems thinking as the new science of grief because it teaches that the most obvious solutions do not work. But it also teaches that small, well-targeted acts usually produce significant and lasting effects if done in the most appropriate site. They call this the principle of the lever. The clearest example is the trim tab on a boat.
The trim tab is a kind of steering wheel. It is a small device that allows movement of the rudder so that this, in turn, moves the boat. If we knew nothing of hydrodynamics and we see a tanker plying the sea, “Where would we move the rudder if we want to turn left?” We would probably turn the bow left. This is impossible. The lever is applied in the stern of the vessel by pushing the tail to the right so that the front turns left. This is done with the wheel, but if we want the stern to move right, the rudder should move counterclockwise.
The ship bends because the back is pulled by suction. The rudder, turning toward the flow of water, compresses it to generate a pressure differential. The pressure differential drives the stern in the direction opposite the direction you turn the wheel. This also makes the appendix change orientation with the rudder. But if we turn the rudder left, the addendum must be turned right on the same principle as explained before.
The whole system: ship, rudder, trim tab, is designed under the principle of the lever. However, its operation is not obvious for anyone who does not understand the force of hydrodynamics.
9. You Can Achieve Two Seemingly Contradictory Goals
Example: Some manufacturers believe that they must choose between low cost and high quality. Analyzing certain basic improvements in work processes could prevent the recurrence of tasks, eliminate inspectors, reduce customer complaints, reduce warranty costs, increase customer loyalty, and lower costs of advertising and sales promotion.
Consider that both goals can be achieved if one is willing to wait for a while, concentrating efforts on the other.
Many apparent dilemmas: happy employees vs. competitive labor costs, centralized vs. decentralized control are products of static thinking.
10. Dividing an Elephant in Half Does Not Produce Two Small Elephants
Organizations, as living systems, possess integrity. Understanding most administrative problems requires viewing the whole system that generates these problems.
A Sufi story: Three blind men find an elephant. The first takes one ear and says it is something big and rough, broad and extensive as a carpet. The second takes the trunk and says it’s a straight, hollow tube. The third takes a leg and says it is powerful and strong as a column.
These three blind men are not so different from the heads of manufacturing, marketing, and research. Each one sees the problems of the company clearly, but neither understands the interaction of their sector’s policies with others. The story ends saying, given the way of knowing of these men, they will never know an elephant.
Sometimes people decide to divide an elephant in two. In that case, you get two elephants but a mess.
Certain problems can be understood by mere observation of the sector from which they originate, but most are detected by analyzing globally.
11. No Guilt
We tend to blame external factors for our problems. The competitors, the press, the government, etc., are the ones who harm us. Systems thinking shows that there is nothing external. We and the cause of our problems are part of one system. The cure lies in the relationship with our “enemy.”
Checkland and Luhmann provided powerful theoretical and methodological conceptions for the study of social systems, now the subject of so-called social science research. What they did was take up new methodologies, and here lies their great contribution to systems theory, as they applied tools from other disciplines to study social phenomena.
Compensating Feedback
A system seeking stability, balance. This balance allows the reinforcing loop to not be infinite, i.e., it reaches an end expectation or goal; if not, change the goal or weaken its influence. It can be linked to homeostasis. It always works to reduce the gap between the desired and the existing.
How Does the General Systems Theory Relate to Scientific Theory from the Perspective of Paradigm Shift?
One of the barriers posed by Senge when designing a learning organization is “fixing the facts”: one is accustomed to seeing life as a series of facts, such that for every fact, there is an obvious cause. These are explained by factual explanations of scientific theory but have no place systemically. This is the effect generated by TGS: a paradigm shift as to how those who carried out the organizational learning see the facts of danger as a slow and gradual process, not looking at the facts.
5 Disciplines of a Learning Organization
Personal Mastery
It is the discipline that helps clarify and deepen our personal vision, focusing energy, developing patience, and seeing reality objectively. We say that the desire and ability to learn of an organization cannot be greater than that of its members.
Mental Models
They are deeply ingrained assumptions that influence our actions and understanding of the world. Mental models of business conduct are also deeply rooted. Some companies succeeded (like Shell) when they could challenge the mental models of their managers.
Arie de Geus spoke of institutional learning as the process by which management teams change shared mental models about the company, the market, and competition.
Shared Vision
It’s hard to imagine a successful organization without goals, shared values, and missions within the organization. IBM was characterized by service, Polaroid by instant photography, and Ford by public transport.
Often the shared vision of a business revolves around the leader’s charisma, but it can be counterproductive to try to impose a personal vision. It is desirable that the shared vision emerge from a genuine commitment rather than mere compliance.
Team Learning
Team learning paradox: why does a management team with an intellectual coefficient greater than 120 have a collective IQ of 63? The discipline of team learning starts with dialogue, which is not the same as discussion (a rally of ideas where there is a winner). For the Greeks, dialogue was the free flow of meaning through the group.
Systems Thinking
Systems thinking (ST) reminds us that the whole can exceed the sum of the parts. ST is the fifth discipline.
ST requires each of the other disciplines. Building a shared vision encourages a long-term commitment. Mental models emphasize the openness needed to lay bare the limitations of our current way of seeing the world. Learning in a team develops the skills of groups of people to seek a broader understanding that transcends individual perspectives. And it encourages personal mastery and motivates staff to continually learn how our actions affect the world. Not proficient in themselves, people are putting down roots in both a reactive mindset (someone/something is creating my problems) that are deeply threatened by the systemic prospect.
The most accurate word to describe what happens in a learning organization is metanoia, which is the transition from one perspective to another; this is somehow the sense of learning. For the Greeks, it meant “beyond the mind.”
This is the basic meaning of a learning organization: an organization that learns and continually expands its ability to create its future.
A learning organization combines adaptive learning with generative learning.
Most organizations learn poorly, and the first step to remedy this is to identify barriers to learning.
Barriers to Learning
I Am My Position
We are taught to be loyal to our task so far as to confuse this task with our identity. When asked how they make a living, staff often refer to their work but not to the purpose of the enterprise. Most were seen within a system over which they had no effect whatsoever. Example: the 3 bolts of a Japanese car equate to various functions versus the 3 bolts in an American car (the irony is that each engineer responsible for their own component considered their work was good because their bolt and assembly worked perfectly).
When people concentrate on their job, they do not feel responsible for the general outcome. If it is bad, they only assume that someone else committed a fault.
The Enemy Is Out There
There is always an outsider to blame. This is very common among different departments of a company. But in general, the outside and the inside are part of the same system.
The Illusion of Taking Charge
Managers sometimes act proactively to address the problems, rather than having a reactive approach (i.e., waiting for something to come to a crisis point before taking action). This, in some cases, becomes disguised reactivity.
The Fixation on Events
Concern for the specific events of the business dominates the discussion. The irony is that threats come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes (e.g., the arms race, ecological degradation, erosion of the public education system, increasingly obsolete physical capital, and so on).
The Parable of the Boiled Frog
If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will try to get out. But if we gradually increase the temperature, it will do nothing. As the temperature increases, it will be stunned, prepared for sudden changes in the environment but not for slow and gradual change. The same example applies to the automotive industry in Detroit regarding Japanese penetration.
The moral is that we are used to reacting to large and obvious changes, but not to small changes.
The Illusion That You Learn With Experience
You learn best from experience, and this is true when we speak of acts whose consequences are immediate and allow us to compare the results instantly (learning to walk, drive, etc.). But the most important decisions have distant consequences that we never experience because memory is short. The cycles are very difficult to see and therefore difficult to learn from them.
The Myth of the Management Team
Often, business teams spend time fighting in defense of their territory by avoiding anything that might leave them looking weak and pretending that all support the team’s collective strategy to maintain the appearance of a cohesive team. To preserve this image, seeking to silence their disagreements, people who have large reserves prevent public demonstrations, and joint decisions are watered-down compromises that reflect what is acceptable or the predominance of one person over the group. If there are disagreements, they are usually expressed through accusations that polarize the views and fail to reveal the differences in assumptions and enriching experiences in a way that benefits the whole team. Most administrative teams buckle under the pressure. (Chris Argyris – Harvard) The computer may be very helpful with routine problems, but when faced with complex problems that can be embarrassing or threatening, the team spirit goes to waste.
Lessons of the Beer Game
The Structure Influences Behavior
Persons belonging to the same structure tend to produce qualitatively similar results. When problems arise or performance does not meet expectations, it is easy to blame someone or something. But systems often cause their own crises, not external forces or due to individual mistakes.
The Structure of Human Systems Is Subtle
The systemic structure refers to the key interrelationships that influence behavior over time. These are not relationships between people but between key variables such as population, natural resources, and food production in a developing country.
The Point of Leverage Is Often Discovered Through New Ways of Thinking
People often focus on their own decisions and ignore how they affect others.
A similar example to the beer game came in 1989 with General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler producing more cars than they could sell to increase the inventory of dealers. The companies ended up with idle plants and laying off workers in amounts larger than those of other years. This is what is known as the accelerator theory.
Once they understand they cannot blame each other or blame the client, players of the beer game blame the system, saying it is unmanageable.
Learning Problems and Ways of Thinking Operate in the Game
- As certain actions agree with their position, people do not see how they affect other positions. Consequently, when problems arise, they are quick to blame each other. Players in other positions, and even customers, become the enemy.
- As they gradually increase over-ordering, they do not notice the seriousness of the situation until it is too late.
- There is widespread failure to learn from experience because the most important consequences of their actions occur elsewhere in the system and eventually return to create the same problems they attributed to others.
- The teams that occupy the various positions are focused on blaming other players for their problems, ruining any chance to learn from the experience of others.