Systems Thinking and \'Pushing Back\'

Systems Thinking and 'Pushing Back'

Organizational systems and individual human beings can become calcified and thus naturally resistant to change. Pushing upon the existing structures of an organizational system or simply the structures of individual thought can cause a natural sense of friction and arose a natural tendency for the system's organizational structures to push back. The process of exploring personal and organizational performance, personality and fundamental aims in life states Peter Senge is proposing is a daunting task for most people. To do so requires considerable outside and organizational support, and the motivation to carry the task through some very uncomfortable periods.

But through learning, this tendency towards stagnancy can be overcome. Senge's theory of compensating feedback stresses that by giving people continual and constructive feedback about their performance and what works and what they can do better in an organization, a learning environment and a learning organization or system as a whole can become a living reality, rather than an idealized conception of an Ivory Tower business school theorist.

Thus despite the centrality of the theory of 'pushing back' to his theory of organizational systems, Peter Senge takes a far from a negative view of organizational potential to learn, to grow, and evolve. Despite the occasionally inherent resistance to the learning process in some systems and within certain individuals, Senge stresses a manager must have a vision of a learning organization as a group of people who are continually enhancing their capabilities to create what they want to create. He calls his own view as that of an idealistic pragmatist, seeing organizations as places "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together." (Senge, 1990, p.3) "When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative."(Senge, 1990, p.13) Thus learning is innate to the human animal and to the adaptive, survival process, according to Senge's essential principles.