Book review
The Fifth Discipline
Currency Doubleday, 1990
Author: Peter Senge
Review by Donald Clark, Epic
The Fifth Discipline was a book that promised not to predict, but
shape the future. I’m with Glenn Hoddle, when he famously
said, “I don’t make predictions, and I never will.”
Of course, reviewing a book 14 years after it has been published
(1990) gives the reviewer the advantage of hindsight. One can assess
whether the ideas actually took root, or not. In the case of the
‘learning organisation’ we’d be hard pressed to
name organisations that lived up to the promise. Way back then the
‘learning organisation’ was on the lips of every training
manager. Conferences were full of it and gurus like Arie de Geus,
from Shell, took up the idea with fervour. The phrase and the dream
have now faded. Such is the faddish nature of management theory.
Do you know what the ‘fifth’ discipline is? Do you
know any of the other four? I’ve asked several people this
recently and not one could remember anything about this, other than
the phrase ‘learning organisation’. Here’s a reminder.
- Building shared vision
- Mental models
- Team learning
- Personal mastery
- Systems thinking (the fifth discipline)
Senge is not without his critics. Thomas frank in One Market Under
God says that Senge has embraced ‘just about every bit of
daft pop liberationism to cross the national consciousness since
the sixties’. He has a point. Senge at one point blames the
English language for our authoritarian ills, an old ploy, declaring
that “all causal attributions made in English are highly suspect”.
The wisdom of the east is dragged in at every possible opportunity.
Spirituality was to be the new watchword, old business structures
and habits were to be swept aside as a new culture of loose, non
hierarchical practices would result in people driven organisations
that would succeed in the market. At one point he suggest that we
abandon contracts of employment for non-binding ‘covenants’
which ‘reflect unity and grace and poise’. Then came
the late nineties, the dot.com boom, where some of this stuff was
applied in practice, with disastrous results. The bottom-up ‘spiritual’
approach to management disappeared fast.
Any book starting these days with a story about an epiphany during
a morning meditation session, would be treated with immediate suspicion.
In those days, it was normal. The founder of the Center for Organizational
Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management is a great lover of
aboriginal art and other second rate spiritual sources of management
theory so the book is suffused with homilies and hippy-like sayings.
In the first chapter a sensible discussion around dialogue gets
bogged down in a discussion about language. “Most people’s
eyes glaze over if you talk to them about ‘learning or ‘learning
organisations’, claims Senge. He has a point, so he introduces
a deeper term ‘metanoia’. If you haven’t forgotten
this key word in his theory when you read the book all those years
ago, you can be sure that the rest of the world has. It is this
type of homespun theory that has consigned much of the text to history.
Where the book does hit home is in his examination of systems and
his diagnosis of obstacles that influence management. His focus
on feedback loops, although not original, coming as they do from
post-war TQM theory and systems theory (not originally developed
by Senge but by another MIT academic, Forester) are useful. However,
in essence, what he’s done is simply cull bits of management
theory, titbits of best practice, some systems theory and put them
into the context of learning.
The book certainly springs into life when he discusses systems
theory. He lifts management theory beyond the old paradigm of individual
managers and their behaviours into organisations and systems. To
understand management (and learning) one must understand the system
and its inter-dependencies. He’s good on structures, limiting
factors and ways of unlocking systemic blockages in organisations.
Putting the aboriginal drawing at the start of the book to one side,
the system diagrams are simple, clear and helpful. In this respect,
it’s not about learning at all. Indeed, the best chapters
are those that deal with simple management techniques, not learning.
These theories have probably had a slow burn, almost subliminal
effect, on the world of learning. He
certainly didn’t change the nature of many organisations towards
his vision of learning organisations.
The Fifth Discipline turned out not to be a discipline at all, but
a general management book clustered under a simple but appealing
concept. It’s certainly a book one must read if one wants
to be serious about organisational learning, but the parts are better
than the whole. It’s packed with great stories, aphorisms
and examples around systems and management theory, but with hindsight,
low on ‘learning’.
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