Senge's learning disciplines and systems thinking for organizational change

Facilitating Organizational Change

Change in Organizations

Change is often resisted at both the individual and organizational levels despite the potential for positive outcomes. The reasons for this are varied and the process of identifying them can be difficult. Robbins and Judge (2010) note that most organizations have developed practices and procedures over an extended period and being based on behaviors to which employees are strongly committed are by and large stable. In order for an organization to keep up in an ever evolving world it must learn and change accordingly. This paper examines the characteristics of a learning organization, barriers to change, and some of the elements that must be present in order to bring about organizational change.

Characteristics of a Learning Organization

A "big picture" organizational point-of-view, a supportive organizational culture and a common understanding and agreement of organizational goals are elements necessary for the creation and maintenance of a learning organization. Additionally, leadership must be decentralized in order to enhance the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals.

Peter Senge asserts that members of the organization must have a "systems perspective" in order to understand the cause and effect ramifications of their decisions (Smith, 2001). Ron Brandt (1998) notes that learning organizations need members who can identify the organization's stages of development. Richard DuFour (2004) feels that for a learning organization to endure, its members must embrace the "big ideas" that represent core principles. These perspectives are necessary in order to cultivate mutual accountability for achieving organizational goals.

Senge, Brandt and DuFour identify a supportive organizational culture as essential to sustaining the tenets of a learning organization. Brandt (1998) says that the culture should be humane, psychologically comfortable, and professionally supportive. A place where people have the tools and the training they need, and where they have opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other. DuFour (2004) says that members of a learning organization recognize that they must work together to achieve their collective purpose.

Learning organizations develop mutually agreed upon common goals in order to focus their problem solving energy. Brandt (1998) says that the organization must have challenging but achievable goals. Peter Senge (1990) frames this idea as building a shared vision. Such a vision has the capacity to be uplifting, encourage experimentation and innovation, and foster a sense of the future "we seek to create."

According to Stinson, Pearson, and Lucas (2006) a learning organization moves past simple employee training and into the realm of organizational problem-solving, innovation and learning. The creation of a learning organization necessitates shifting the organizations basic culture. Peter Senge (1990) describes a learning organization as place where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and extensive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free and where people are continually learning how to learn together. An analogous concept to the learning organization is the professional learning community. Richard DuFour (2004) defines these as communities that focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively, and hold themselves accountable for results.

Successful learning organizations have common characteristics. Foremost is the ability of the organization to change behaviors and mind-sets as a result of experience. Though this may seem obvious, many organizations refuse to recognize certain truths or facts and repeat dysfunctional behaviors over and again. Another attribute of such environments is that they tend to promote learning and leadership at all levels, establishing a culture of distributed leadership. Organizations that have adopted this approach find that individual responsibility increases significantly and accountability becomes clearer and stronger.

Furthermore learning organizations have a high tolerance for failure. It is essential that members of a learning organization have permission to fail from organizational leadership as well as their peers. If an organization's members are preoccupied with "playing it safe" opportunities for innovations and the development of new ideas will be lost. Organizational learning is more than individual learning and arises through the interaction of individuals in groups and teams of different sizes. The right environment is needed, one that allows time for reflection on past actions and outcomes and is prepared to accept some unpalatable truths. The culture needs to be focused on fixing problems, not fixing blame. Such an environment makes a distinction between mistakes that are the result of irresponsibility and lack of forethought and those that are genuine explorations of a new idea or a new way of working. Organizations that learn to embrace their failures profit from the knowledge gained. Learning organizations judge their effectiveness on results. The focus of goals shifts as the results are analyzed.

Barriers to Organizational Change

Senge identifies seven learning disabilities that affect organizations. They are 1) I am my position, 2) The enemy is out there, 3) The illusion of taking charge, 4) The fixation of events, 5) The parable of the boiling frog, 6) The delusion of learning from experience, and 7) The myth of the management team. Senge (1990, p. 18) asserts that the way organizations are designed and managed, the way people's job are defined, and the way people are taught to think and interact facilitates poor learning. What follows is a brief description and analysis of these disabilities.

I am my Position

This disability is the result of employees identifying more with the tasks they perform than with the purpose of their job. When employees are more concerned with their duties they have little concern for the responsibilities of the results produced when all positions interact. Furthermore, when the results are poor it becomes difficult to know why. The typical explanation is "someone screwed up" (Senge 1990, p. 18-19).

The Enemy is Out There

This disability has to do with people's inclination to fix blame instead of fixing problems. According to Senge there are some organizations that "…elevate this propensity to a commandment: Thou shall always find an external agent to blame" (Senge 1990, p. 19). This disability is a result of "I am my position" and the way it promotes looking at the world from a nonsystematic viewpoint. This perspective blinds one to seeing how their individual actions affect things outside of their position.

This syndrome is not limited to assigning blame within the organization. Typically organizations will find reasons to blame outside influences with their failure such as labor unions, cheap foreign wages, government regulations, or disloyal customers. This perspective makes it difficult for organizations to see the leverage they can employ on issues that overlap the boundary of in house and out there.

The Illusion of Taking Charge

This is a disability of misdirected proactive behavior. It occurs when organizations choose to attack difficult problems without fully understanding the systemic ramifications. Senge notes that being proactive is often seen as an "antidote for being reactive" (Senge 1990, p. 20). However, in many instances proactiveness is really reactiveness in disguise. If one simply becomes more aggressive fighting the "enemy out there" without situational understanding of the roots of the issue it is for all intents and purposes reacting. True proactive behavior comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems and is a product of thoughtful consideration, not emotion.

The Fixation of Events

According to Senge (1990, p. 21) conversations in organizations typically revolve around concerns generated by events such as last month's sales, personnel changes, product innovations, budgets issues and so forth. Focusing on events leads to "event" explanations. This perspective is part of our evolutionary background, necessitated to ensure survival. However, this view is not conducive to understanding slow gradual processes. Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people's thinking is dominated by short-term events. Focusing on events leads to at best predicting the next event so you can prepare an appropriate response. This focus does not support creativity in dealing with issues on a big picture level.

The Parable of the Boiled Frog

The parable of the boiled frog recounts the circumstances created when a frog is placed into a pot of boiling water as opposed to when it is placed into a pot of room temperature water and the temperature of the water is gradually increased until the water boils. In the first instance the frog will immediately jump from the water. In the second instance the frog will remain in the water until it is boiled alive. Senge relates this to an organization's ability to recognize issues that threaten it. He says that learning to see slow gradual processes requires slowing down and analyzing the subtle as well as the dramatic. In other words, it is easy to notice dramatic shifts in the environment; however the subtle changes that are always gradually occurring in the environment are not so easily recognized. This is because people are geared to perceive immediate dangers. If an organization fails to slow down and see the gradual processes that often pose the greatest danger the organization is doomed to the fate of the frog (Senge 1990, p.22-23).

The Delusion of the Management Team

Senge presents this disability in the context of a person's learning horizon. People learn from direct experience, through taking action and seeing the consequences of that action. However, the consequences of many of the important decisions made by organizations are not readily apparent. They are either too distant in the future, or in a distant part of the system from which they are generated. In these cases it is impossible to learn from direct experience, the results are beyond the learning horizon. The most critical decisions made in organizations have system wide consequences that stretch over years (Senge 1990, p.23).

Organizations are traditionally broken up into compartments in order to deal with the difficulty of coping with the breath and impact of the consequences of these long-term decisions. They institute functional hierarchies that are easier for people to comprehend. One result of organizing in this manner is that the functional components of the organization grow into little fiefdoms and what was intended to be a convenient division of labor turns into separate entities that all but cut off contact between organizational functions. Because of this, analysis of the most important problems a company faces, the complex issues that cross functional lines, becomes difficult if not impossible (Senge 1990, p. 24).

The Myth of the Management Team

The management team represents the organizations different functions and areas of expertise. They are charged with sorting out and resolving the complex cross-functional problems that are crucial to the organization. Senge characterizes management teams as a group of individuals that spends most of their time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team's collective strategy. Members of this group avoid disagreements, preferring to keep up images and evade stating serious reservations about an issue publicly. This behavior tends to result in watered down decisions that are compromises reflecting what everybody can live with, or one person's judgment that has been imposed on the group. Disagreements are usually presented in a way that "lays blame, polarizes opinion, and fails to reveal the underlying differences in assumptions and experience in a way that the team as a whole could learn from" (Senge 1990, p.25).

Collective inquiry is painful for management teams. Early in life people learn never to admit that they do not know the answer. This posture is reinforced by most organizations that reward people who excel in advocating their views rather than inquiring into complex issues. Because individuals in management teams fear being viewed as either incompetent or ignorant they become extremely proficient as covering up their incompetence and ignorance. The result is a management team that is also extremely proficient at keeping themselves from learning (Senge 1990, p. 25).

Factors Affecting the Change Process

A number of factors contribute to the perpetuation of an organization's culture. These include written statements about the organization's mission and philosophy, the design of physical spaces and buildings, dominant leadership style, hiring criteria, past promotion practices, entrenched rituals, popular stories about key people and events, the organization's historic performance evaluation criteria, and the organization's formal structure (Robbins & Judge, 2010).

Fear is one of the major forms of resistance to change. News of change can invoke apprehension among employees who may feel unable to fulfill the newly proposed changes to work practices that are being imposed and may feel their jobs are threatened. People resist change due to anxiety, pessimism, and different personal ambitions. Employees will also resist change if they are kept out of the decision process that initiates the change. A lack of information can cause a rift between management and staff.

Furthermore there are a number of other barriers that can work to impede attempts to change an organization's culture. If an organization has undefined or fuzzy goals and objectives with respect to the change, or a lack of working capital or resources to implement the change this will work against success. An organization that follows a traditional hieratical structure will also tend to resist change because of an inherent lack of trust between management and employees. All of these factors, absent of a major crisis, tend to preclude the possibility of changing organizational culture (Individual and Organizational Barriers to Change, 2011).

According to Robbins and Judge (2010) although changing an organizational culture may be difficult, it can be done under the proper circumstances and conditions. These include a dramatic crisis that undermines the status quo and undermines the foundation of the current culture, a turnover in leadership which provides an alternative set of key values to which the organization may embrace, a young and/or small organization which lends itself more easily to accepting change, or an organization that has a weak culture to begin with which is more likely to be amenable to change.

Robbins and Judge (2010) suggest that if all or most of these conditions exist, then initiating new stories and rituals, selecting and promoting employees who espouse the new values, changing the reward system to support the new values, and undermining current subcultures through transfers, job rotation, and terminations may lead to cultural reform.

Susan Heathfield (2011) notes that culture's form for a reason. They usually reflect the prevailing management style due to the fact that managers tend to hire people like themselves as thus reinforce the established organizational culture. However, when people in an organization realize and recognize that their current organizational culture needs to transform to support the organization's success and progress, change can occur.

Changing the culture of an existing organization is more difficult than to create a culture in a brand new organization. When an organizational culture is already established, people must unlearn the old values, assumptions, and behaviors before they can learn the new ones. The two most important elements for creating organizational cultural change are executive support and training. Leadership in the organization must support the cultural change with both verbal and behavioral support. Members of the organization must clearly understand what is expected of them, and must know how to actually do the new behaviors, once they have been defined. Training can be key in both communicating expectations, teaching new behaviors and facilitating success.

Traits of Learning Organizational Leadership

Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs postulates that all humans must have certain requirements met in order to achieve their full potential. Maslow framed his theory in the form of a triangle, basic needs being the foundation and the higher needs forming the top levels. The theory holds that if the needs of the foundation are not met, the higher levels may not develop. Maslow believes we all have four basic needs that need to be fulfilled before we can even begin to realize our potential. The first are physiological needs such as hunger, thirst, and bodily comforts. The second is safety and security; the individual must feel out of danger. The third is belongingness and love; individuals must associate with others and be accepted. The fourth is self-esteem. This is derived from accomplishments, competence, approval and recognition.

With these basic needs met it is then possible for an individual to tackle their higher level needs. Maslow believes we all have the need to know, understand and explore. He calls these cognitive needs. Aesthetic needs include the appreciation, development and exploration of patterns, symmetry, order, and beauty. An individual's need to self-actualize, that is find self-fulfillment in the realization of striving to reach their potential is another higher level need. At the top of the triangle is self-transcendence that is the establishment of a connection to something beyond the ego, to assist others in finding their self-fulfillment and realize their potential (Simmons, Irwin & Drinnien 1987). Individuals are motivated by different stimuli depending on which level of they are functioning on. Each level produces different emotions which act to motivate certain behaviors. With this in mind now let us examine leadership in learning organizations.