INSTRUCTOR: Peter Senge's 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline, remains one of the most influential management books on organizational learning and systems thinking. Rather than a set of management practices, Senge offers a way to view, understand, and manage the influences and interactions in organizations. This makes his message widely applicable and still very relevant. The Fifth Discipline describes how organizations that are competitive, sustainably competitive, are those that know how to learn. And the learning organization, he says, understands how everything is interconnected, people, the ideas, the context, history, goals, and so on. A change in one area will cause ripples of change and reaction elsewhere, often in unexpected ways. The book's title points to five practices or disciplines that, when practiced together, create the conditions needed to be an effective learning organization. One is personal mastery. This is our own practice of honest reflection and evaluation that identifies both personal and organizational needs that contribute to achievement of organizational goals, as well as our own personal and professional development. Awareness of our own biases and assumptions is the second discipline. Understanding our own mental models helps us be more honest about what we are experiencing and accurate in identifying underlying issues. Having a common understanding of a desired future or a shared vision is another discipline and a powerful motivator for individuals in an organization, particularly when the personal and organizational visions align. Team learning is the fourth discipline. This is the practice of collaboration and support in developing capacity in everyone in the organization. Individuals learn more quickly and effectively as a focused group than they would on their own. The fifth of the disciplines is systems thinking. This is the discipline of appreciating that individuals, policies, organizations, decisions, relationships, et cetera, are all interconnected elements in a larger context. The book also describes how to shift our own thinking toward systems thinking. Senge uses familiar organizational experiences and settings or systems archetypes to illustrate how decision making is improved with a perceptive recognition and understanding of feedback signals. He describes how feedback loops are not really loops. We have to consider the many balancing and reinforcing influences that continually affect the system. Focusing on relationships and interconnectedness, the book was an early voice in prompt and collaborative approaches to learning, as well as the growth of learning communities. Senge's work promotes a vision of organization as dynamic systems that can grow and respond and lead change. It's the individuals in the organizations that learn and contribute to a body of knowledge and wisdom and collectively function as a learning organization.