Great Throughts Treasury

"The most powerful learning comes from direct experience... But, what happens when we can no longer observe the consequences of our actions? What happens if the primary consequences of our actions are in the distant future or in the distant part of the larger system within which we operate? We each have a "learning horizon," a breadth of vision in time and space within which we assess our effectiveness. When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon, it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience."

"The rate at which organizations learn may soon become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage."

"The problem is that usually it's [visioning] not a process; it's an event. We all go off and write a vision statement and then go back to work. It's absolutely pointless; it can even be counterproductive because people think, ?we've done the vision stuff, and it didn't make any difference.? For anybody really serious in this work, you'll spend 20 to 40 percent of your time?forever?continually working on getting people to reflect on and articulate what it is they're really trying to create. It's never ending."

"The tools and ideas presented in this book are for destroying the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this illusion - we can then build "learning organizations", organizations 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 how to learn together."

"The systems perspective tells us that we must look beyond individual mistakes or bad luck to understand important problems... We must look into the underlying structures which shape individual actions and create the conditions where types of events become likely."

"There is always a huge difference between individual capability and collective capability and individual learning and collective learning. But this is rarely reflected in how schools are organized, because education is so highly individualistic. Many people are advocating cooperative learning for kids, but the idea that teachers and administrators ought to learn together really hasn't gone too far."

"There's a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever."

"These learning disabilities have been with us for a long time. In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman traces the history of devastating large-scale policies "pursued contrary to ultimate self-interest," from the fall of the Trojans through the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In story after story, leaders could not see the consequences of their own policies, even when they were warned in advance that their own survival was at stake."

"The traditional approach to helping educators learn has been to develop the skills of individuals to do their work better. I'm talking about enhancing the collective capacity of people to create and pursue overall visions. Obviously, the educational enterprise is ultimately about kids learning. But we must also give systematic attention to how teachers learn. And by learning, I don't mean sending them away to off-site conferences. I'm not saying they shouldn't ever do that, but learning is always an on-the-job phenomenon. Learning always occurs in a context where you are taking action. So we need to find ways to get teachers really working together; we need to create an environment where they can continually reflect on what they are doing and learn more and more what it takes to work as teams."

"The patterns of defensiveness are often deeply engrained in how a team operates. If unrecognized, they undermine learning."

"The smartness we need is collective. We need cities that work differently. We need industrial sectors that work differently. We need value change and supply change that are managed from the beginning until the end to purely produce social, ecological and economic well-being. That is the concept of intelligence we need, and it will never be achieved by a handful of smart individuals."

"The value of systems thinking also goes beyond that derived by any institution. To explain, let me take a step back. There is a certain irony to mankind's present situation, viewed from an evolutionary perspective. The human being is exquisitely adapted to recognize and respond to threats to survival that come in the form of sudden, dramatic events. Clap your hands and people jump, calling forth some genetically encoded memory of saber-toothed tigers springing from the bush. Yet today the primary threats to our collective survival are slow, gradual developments arising from processes that are complex both in detail and in dynamics. The spread of nuclear arms is not an event, nor is the "greenhouse effect", the depletion of the ozone layer, malnutrition and underdevelopment in the Third World, the economic cycles that determine our quality of life, and most of the other large-scale problems in our world."

"The very first thing I'd do would be to find ways to start to get those who are committed to doing things differently talking to one another. Then the next step is to start to design a process that would be inclusive. You have to start with the people who are ready to start, but your goal is always to create the most inclusive process possible, to involve people at all levels, including the kids, in envisioning where they really want the school to go. That's the cornerstone. But it's also very challenging to start an ongoing visioning process, which is very different from some group of people going off and writing a ?vision statement.? You see, the education field has a huge asset. A large percentage of people enter this profession with a high sense of personal purpose. It is converted into a liability, because within a few years they become extraordinarily cynical."

"There are no simple rules for finding high-leverage changes, but there are ways of thinking that make it more likely. Learning to see underlying "structures" rather than "events" is a starting point... Thinking in terms of processes of change rather than "snapshots" is another."

"There are two fundamental sources of energy that can motivate organizations: fear and aspiration. The power of fear underlies negative visions. The power of aspiration drives positive visions. Fear can produce extraordinary changes in short periods, but aspiration endures as a continuing source of learning and growth."

"Today, systems thinking is needed more than ever because we are becoming overwhelmed by complexity. Perhaps for the first time in history, humankind has the capacity to create far more information than anyone can absorb, to foster far greater interdependency than anyone can manage, and to accelerate change far faster than anyone's ability to keep pace."

"To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive. My thought: this is obvious but overlooked--empowering people with conflicting agendas is a recipe for disaster!"

"Three Characteristics Of A Systems Thinking Approach: 1. A very deep and persistent commitment to ?real learning.? 2. I have to be prepared to be wrong. If it was pretty obvious what we ought to be doing, then we?d be already doing it. So I?m part of the problem, my own way of seeing things, my own sense of where there?s leverage, is probably part of the problem. This is the domain we?ve always called ?mental models.? If I?m not prepared to challenge my own mental models, then the likelihood of finding non-obvious areas of leverage are very low. 3. The need to triangulate. You need to get different people, from different points of view, who are seeing different parts of the system to come together and collectively start to see something that individually none of them see.?"

"We are like actors who forget they are playing a role. We become trapped in the theater of our thoughts. This is when thought starts, in [David] Bohm's words, to become 'incoherent.'"

"Though the tools are new, the underlying worldview is extremely intuitive; experiments with young children show that they learn systems thinking very quickly."

"To practice a discipline is to be a life-long learner."

"To bind people together around a common identity and sense of destiny [build a shared vision]... When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar "vision statement"), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to... given a choice, most people opt for pursuing a lofty goal"

"We all have probably spent too much time thinking about ?smart individuals.? That?s one of the problems with schools. They are very individualistic, very much about ?the smart kids and the dumb kids.? That?s not the kind of smartness we need."

"We are conditioned to see life as a series of events, and for every event, we think there is one obvious cause... Focusing on events leads to "event" explanations... they distract us from seeing the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the events and from understanding the causes of those patterns."

"We are taught to break apart problems... we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole."

"We believe that, ultimately, the most important learning occurs in the context of our day-to-day life, the aspirations we pursue, the challenges we face, and the responses we bring forth."

"We say school is about learning, but by and large schooling has traditionally been about people memorizing a lot of stuff that they don't really care too much about, and the whole approach is quite fragmented. Really deep learning is a process that inevitably is driven by the learner, not by someone else. And it always involves moving back and forth between a domain of thinking and a domain of action. So having a student sit passively taking in information is hardly a very good model for learning; it's just what we're used to."

"What Is The Fundamental Rationale Of Systems Thinking? [The fundamental rationale of systems thinking] is to understand how it is that the problems that we all deal with, which are the most vexing, difficult and intransigent, come about, and to give us some perspective on those problems [in order to] give us some leverage and insight as to what we might do differently."

"When any of us acts in a state of fear or anxiety, our actions are likely to revert to what is most habitual: our most instinctual behaviors dominate, ultimately reducing us to our ?fight ? or ? flight? programming of the reptilian brain stem. Collective actions are no different. Even as conditions in the world change dramatically, most businesses, governments, schools, and other large organizations continue to take the same kinds of institutional actions that they always have. This does not mean that no learning occurs. But it is a limited type of learning: learning how best to react to circumstances we see ourselves as having no hand in creating. Reacting learning is governed by ?downloading? habitual ways of thinking, of continuing to see the world within the familiar categories we are comfortable with. We discount interpretations and options for action that are different than ones we know and trust. We act to defend our interests. In reactive learning, our actions are actually re-enacted habits, and we invariably end up reinforcing pre-established mental models. Regardless of the outcome, we end up being ?right.? At best, we get better at what we have always done. We remain secure in the cocoon of our own world view, isolated from the larger world."

"When executives lead as teachers, stewards, and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle and long-term than those of power-wielding hierarchical leaders."

"When I entered graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, I was already convinced that most of the problems faced by humankind concerned our inability to grasp and manage the increasingly complex systems of our world. Little has happened since to change my view."

"When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results."

"Where then is the leverage in dealing with structural conflict? If structural conflict arises from deep underlying beliefs, then it can be changed only by changing the beliefs. But psychologists are virtually unanimous that fundamental beliefs such as powerlessness or unworthiness cannot be changed readily. They are developed early in life (remember all those "can'ts" and "don'ts" that started when you were two?) For most of us, beliefs change gradually as we accumulate new experiences - as we develop our personal mastery. But if mastery will not develop so long as we hold un-empowering beliefs, and the beliefs will change only as we experience our mastery, how may we begin to alter the deeper structures of our lives?"

"World problems are becomingly increasingly complex and interconnected."

"Whenever I?m trying to help people understand what this word ?system? means, I usually start by asking: ?Are you a part of a family?? Everybody is a part of a family. ?Have you ever seen in a family, people producing consequences in the family, how people act, how people feel, that aren?t what anybody intends?? Yes. ?How does that happen?? Well? then people tell their stories and think about it. But that then grounds people in not the jargon of ?system? or ?systems thinking? but the reality ? that we live in webs of interdependence.?"

"You cannot have a learning organization without a shared vision...A shared vision provides a compass to keep learning on course when stress develops."

"You look down there and you can't imagine how many borders and boundaries you crossed again and again and again. And you don't even see 'em. At that wake-up scene - the Middle East - you know there are hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you can't see. From where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it's so beautiful. And you wish you could take one from each side in hand and say, "Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What's important?"