The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization

Front Cover
Crown, Jun 20, 1994 - Business & Economics - 608 pages
Create your own guide to mastering the disciplines of organizational learning with this invaluable guide based on the national bestseller The Fifth Discipline.

“The Fieldbook is a must read for anyone serious about building communities of common purpose, collective action, and continuous learning.”—H. Thomas Johnson, author of Relevance Lost and Relevance Regained
 
Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline revolutionized the practice of management by introducing the theory of learning organizations. Now Dr. Senge moves from the philosophical to the practical by answering the first question all lovers of the learning organization ask: What do they do on Monday morning?

The Fieldbook is an intensely pragmatic guide. It shows how to create an organization of learners where memories are brought to life, where collaboration is the lifeblood of every endeavor, and where the tough questions are fearlessly asked. The stories here show that companies, businesses, schools, agencies, and even communities can undo their “learning issues” and achieve superior performance. If ever a work gave meaning to the phrase hands-on, this is it. Senge and his four co-authors cover it all, including:

• Reinventing relationships
• Being loyal to the truth
• Strategies for developing personal mastery
• Building a shared vision
• Systems thinking in an organization
• Designing a dialogue session
• Strategies for team learning
• Organizations as communities
• Designing an organization’s governing ideas
 
The Fieldbook is designed to be referred to in meetings, planning sessions, during reflections, or anytime a conflict or challenge arises. Open it up anywhere and icons and cross-references will lead you from defining the problem to thinking about how to solve it. Mark up the pages, write in the margins, draw, scribble, and daydream—and watch your own guide to mastering the disciplines of organizational learning evolve.
 

Contents

I See You
3
An Exchange of Lore and Learning
4
How to Read This Book
7
Why Bother?
9
Why Bother? A CEOs Perspective
13
Moving Forward
15
Core Concepts About Learning in Organizations
48
The Wheel of Learning
59
Letter to the CEOs Partner
333
Strategic Priorities
344
Where to Go from Here
346
Team Learning 52 Strategies for Team Learning
351
What You Can Expect from Team Learning
355
Dialogue
357
The Cauldron
364
Designing a Dialogue Session
374

Leadership Fields
65
Reinventing Relationships
69
Finding a Partner
74
Opening Moves
77
Systems Thinking 13 Strategies for Systems Thinking
87
What You Can Expect As You Practice Systems Thinking
91
Learning to See the World Systemically
94
Starting with Storytelling
97
Links and Loops
113
The Archetype Family Tree
149
Systems Sleuth
151
Enriching the Archetype
161
Seven Steps for Breaking Through Organizational Gridlock
169
Moving into Computer Modeling
173
A Natural Combination
184
Where to Go from Here
189
Personal Mastery 25 Strategies for Developing Personal Mastery
193
What You Can Expect from the Practice of Personal Mastery
198
Loyalty to the Truth
213
The Power of Choice
218
Innovations in Infrastructure for Encouraging Personal Mastery
220
Instilling Personal Mastery at Beckman Instruments
224
Intrapersonal Mastery
226
Where to Go from Here
232
Mental Models 33 Strategies for Working with Mental Models
235
What You Can Expect in Working with Mental Models
239
The Ladder of Inference
242
Balancing Inquiry and Advocacy
253
Conversational Recipes
260
Opening Lines
263
Bootstrapping Yourself into Reflection and Inquiry Skills
264
Creating Scenarios
275
Shells Internal Consultancy
279
Doubleloop Accounting
286
Where to Go from Here
293
Shared Vision
295
Strategies for Building Shared Vision
297
What You Can Expect As You Build Shared Vision
304
Designing an Organizations Governing Ideas
306
How to Begin
312
Letter to the CEO
328
Skillful Discussion
385
Skillful Discussion at Intel
392
Popular Postmortems
400
Silence
401
Reframing Team Relationships
407
Building an Organization that Recognizes Everyones Uniqueness
417
Tools for Discovering Learning Styles
421
Bringing Diverse People to Common Purpose
424
Designing a Companywide Strategy for Team Learning
429
Executive Team Leadership
435
Where to Go from Here
441
Arenas of Practice
443
Our Quality Program Isnt Working
445
Springing Ourselves from the Measurement Trap
454
Corporate Environmentalism
458
Training As Learning
463
Workplace Design
469
The Tricky Dynamics of Learning in a Familyowned Business
471
Creating a Learning Newspaper
474
Health Care
479
Education
484
Can Large Government Learn?
493
A Letter to an Aspiring Policymaker
499
The Local Community as a Learning Organization
502
Frontiers
505
Organizations as Communities
507
Merging the Best of Two Worlds
508
Bean Suppers
518
Free Agency Employment Stability and Community Boundaries
520
Operating Principles for Building Community
525
Microworlds and Learning Laboratories
529
Where the Organization Develops a Theory About Itself
532
Using Microworlds to Promote Inquiry
534
A Buyers Guide to OfftheShelf Microworlds
536
Creating Your Own Management Flight Simulator
543
The Du Pont Manufacturing Game
550
Creating a Learning Laband Making It Work
554
Coda
563
How to Stay in Touch with
571
Index
577

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1994)

Peter M. Senge, senior lecturer at MIT and the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), is the author or coauthor of several bestselling books, including The Fifth Discipline, Schools That Learn, and Presence. He was named as one of the 24 people who had “the greatest influence on business strategy over the last 100 years” by the Journal of Business Strategy.

Bibliographic information