I'm in a 2 week intensive course at Fuller Seminary as part of the MAGL (M.A. in Global Leadership) degree. The first week is a course called Understanding Organizational Dynamics, so I'll be blogging about the highlights from this course this week.

The Fifth Discipline, a book by Peter Senge, is a book about how organizations can grow and develop through learning. He asserts that an organization achieves its goals by providing an environment conducive to the CONTINUOUS LEARNING and development of individuals,teams, and the organization. He says that a learning organization is one in which people at all levels individually and collectively are continually increasing their capacity to produce the results they really care about. It is an organization that, when a mistake is made, notices the mistake, fixes it, figures out what caused the problem and corrects the root cause, with an emphasis on the root and not the symptom.

He goes on to list the core of learning organization work is based on five "learning disciplines"—lifelong programs of study and practice:

Personal Mastery--learning to expand our PERSONAL CAPACITY to create results we most desire and creating an ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENT which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.

Mental Models--reflecting upon, continually clarifying and improving our internal pictures of the world and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions. Knowing the paradigms out of which we operate.

Shared Vision--building a sense of commitment in a group, developing SHARED IMAGES OF THE FUTURE we seek to create, and developing the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.

Team Learning--transforming conversational and collective thinking skills so that groups of people can develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members' talents.

Systems Thinking--a way of thinking about and a language for describing and understanding forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems.

Labels: leadership, organizational dynamics