The Fifth Discipline

If an organization is already established and wants to become an “effective learning organization” they have to take into account their relationship with their employees at the time they make this decision. If the employees who currently work for management are not “self-energized, committed, responsible and creative beings” (Kinicki, 2012) (or any combination thereof) like McGregor assumes, they will not be able to jump in to some of the activities that leading organizations are doing. Managers will need to understand that if they developed an environment where management is superior and the employees are workers, any part of the human relations theory will not benefit them quickly. Managers will need to gain the trust of their employees and actually listen to their emotions.

1. System Thinking: System thinking is nothing but instead of focusing on only one particular issue, we have to analyze and try to understand the entire system on the whole. With this kind of analyzation, we can easily find a solution to the problem as the problems are not confined to only a particular area or time. We might find a solution for a particular issue, somewhere in the whole system by analyzing the entire system completely. We should try to relate the actions and the consequences on the whole as the issues occur at different time levels, not confined to only one particular time level. We have to have knowledge of the relation between different departments of an organization and the relation between them and the functionality between the departments as to how they are related in an organization. We generally focus on only one particular issue rather than seeing the bug picture and that shouldn’t be done. In system thinking we analyze the big picture.

Cummings, T. G.; and Worley, C. G. (2015). Organization Development and Change, (10th Ed). Mason, OH. Cengage Learning.

For most companies, identifying what a learning organization should be and actually becoming one is tricky at best, impossible at worst. One way that manager's and companies can promote the concept of being a learning organization is to assess whether the company is in need of a short-term fix or whether it is more focused on long-term results. Organizational learning is a long-term activity that will build competitive advantage over time and requires sustained management attention, commitment, and effort. Learning organizations maximize their competitive positions during strong economic times and they prudently train their employees and prepare for change even in turbulent times. As a result, learning organizations and learning

This course covered many important topics helpful in understanding learning organizations. This paper will incorporate real-life situations from my organization, The American Red Cross. It will focus on three areas I found to be most helpful and relevant to my experience which is the understanding of systems thinking, growth, and the need to practice reflection.

1. What are the main themes of the Fifth Discipline? What are these five disciplines? How you describe and explain these disciplines.

Organizational learning promotes: adaptability, participation and information openness. Consequently, not only employee performance will be enhanced, but also the increase of organizations effectiveness and efficiency.

Throughout our final semester of study at Maryville, our cohort has studied Peter Senge’s, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Rather than set of management practices, the book describes how organizations, especially those that are sustainably competitive, know how to learn. These “learning organizations” are continuously learning how to work together, where the norm is producing their best. In the book, Senge identifies five essential elements, that when practiced together, create perfect conditions for an effective learning organization. These five practices are Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision,

     In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge emphasizes his model of a "learning organization," which he defines as "an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future." A learning organization excels at both adaptive learning and generative learning.

Personal Mastery – It begins "by getting the opportunity to be centered around enduring learning," and is the significant establishment of a learning affiliation. Singular Mastery incorporates being more viable, focusing on transforming into the best individual, and trying a sentiment obligation and enthusiasm in our jobs to support the affirmation of potential.

Organizations that strive to excel in aspects of innovation, competitiveness, and performance must have clearly defined core values that are executed by specific learning disciplines (Senge, 2010). Giesecke and McNeil (2004) stated, "A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights" (p. 55). In the pursuit of defining specific practices that would produce an ideal learning organization, Senge (2008) proposes five disciplines that include, "...systems thinking, mental models, personal mastery, shared vision, and dialogue" (p. 1). In this application paper I will analyze each of the five disciplines discussed by Senge (2008) and discuss how they can be applied in an organization such as the high school where I am currently teaching to address specific areas in need of improvement.

An organization’s capability to learn and convey that learning into action quickly, is the supreme competitive advantage. The learning organization is the structure that eases the realization of such competitive advantage, it empowers employees, it deepens and enhances the customer experience and cooperation with main business partners and eventually improves business performance. Organizational learning is considered as the suitable process to develop knowledge resources and capabilities/core competencies (human capital, social capital and organizational capital) that engender ongoing values; which in turn yield persistence superior performance; which lead to sustainable competitive advantage within the context of the strategic management.

However I have learned that goals and objectives of an organization are in continuous change and they suffer from a lack of adaptation, “our problems” evolve and we fail to perceive the subtle and not so subtle changes as well as not adjusting accordingly to the drift in direction (inertia).

Organization development grew out of the human relations traditions of the 1940s and 1950s, and it has had enormous influence on management practices and thinking about how organizational effectiveness can be achieved. Critical manpower and resource shortages faced by all organizations, public and private, during World War II and in the immediate post-war years stimulated a search by social scientist and managers, separately and in cooperation with one another, for effective means to maximize the utilization of existing individual and organizational resources. (Ritcher, I 2007). Organization Development was by tradition about planned change efforts, instituted to enhance organization effectiveness within the context of the traditional, hierarchical, management-as-experts, top-down era. The legacy of leaders and organizations developed in this context remain. Organizational Development is about how organizations and people function and how to get them to function better. Organization transformation signals the need to transform mindsets, engage people and make the deep shift to the ongoing mutual learning environment needed for the long-lasting change characteristic of our world today.

Peter Senge argues that not only we humans learn, but organizations also. However, learning itself may not be enough for the organization to survive in this ever-challenging era. In his book, The Fifth Discipline, Senge introduced five ‘disciplines’, namely systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning, that characterizes an organization as a learning organization.