198 Reviews

are part of the population of American taxpayers that finance business

failures.

REVIEWED BY
SAM J. YARGER
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MILWAUKEE

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, by
Peter M. Senge. (1990). New York: Doubleday Currency. 424 pp., $19.95
cloth.

This is not so much a book review as an initial test of a books validity at

the application level-not to entertain, to provoke, to stimulate, or to teach,
but to cause learning in the pursuit of change. For this is a book that
claims to be about learning-not about teaching, or education, or educa-
tional systems as such, but about the creation of both skills and the envi-
ronment in which the skills are learned and used such that long-term
results are achieved.
If you have read the two preceding reviews and if the reviewers have
influenced you sufficiently, you are now possibly in a state somewhere
between confusion and outrage. Educators attack business people who
attack academicians who attack educators. Pots condemn kettles who con-
demn pressure cookers. Things seem to be broken both in business and
education, and fixes seem to be fads or at least ineffective. Clearly, the skill
sets taught and the environments in which they are applied seem incapable
of producing anticipated long-term results.
An ancient troubadour said, “There’s something happening here and
you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” and later hinted at an
answer with, “He who’s not busy being born is busy dying.” What’s hap-
pening here? What‘s busy being born? What‘s busy dying?
I don’t know. Don’t look to me for solutions. I’m just a book reviewer. I
acknowledge that I spent eight years inside the U S . Department of Educa-
tion in a futile attempt to save American education and have spent another
eight years working with American business in an attempt to improve both
productivity and culture. But still, I’m as confused as you are about what to
d o to save American education and fix American productivity. A book that
claims to be about learning should be able to point to solutions.
And point it tries. The solution may lie in applying the teaching and
techniques of an erratically brilliant book by Peter M. Senge, director of the
Systems Thinking and Organizational Learning Program at MIT’s Sloan
School of Management. The solution to our confusion, says Senge, is en-
Lebby 199

crypted within our individual perceptions of the overall system encom-

passing both schools and business. The keys to its decoding are the five
skills sets of The F$h Discipline, the cornerstones of a learning organization.
Organizations, Senge suggests, suffer from a set of learning disabilities
that distort judgment, cripple long-term growth, and subvert productivity,
morale, and success. Test yourself. Do you believe that you learn from
experience or are doomed to repeat it? Grow from trial and error? That you
must, by definition, respond to events as they occur? That in teamwork lies
success? If so, you are learning disabled. Senge argues that facing the future
by relying on the lessons of the past forces us to repeat our mistakes over
and over, that fixating on events causes us to be blind to 90 percent of the
processes that truly affect our condition, and that most teams operate in a
“skilled incompetence” far below that of the lowest IQ in the group.
In short, we are prisoners of the way we think, unable to see the forest
for the fish, combining our learning disabilities into pooled ignorance.
What is necessary then is the creation of learning organizations, “organiza-
tions where people continually expand their capacities to create the results
they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nur-
tured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are contin-
ually learning how to learn together” (p. 3). Senge is talking about business,
but that sure sounds like a viable definition of a school to me. And while
the term school is never used, the definition speaks eloquently to the core
issues facing education, training, schools, and business. If you accept the
premise that a school system is a special purpose business whose product
is either knowledgeable or skilled students (a distinction never debated in
the history of American education), then Senge provides a starting point
for intervention.
At the heart of this school or system lies a synthesis of the five disci-
plines or “bodies of theory and technique that must be studied and mas-
tered to be put into practice” (p. lo): personal mastery, mental models,
shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. First among equals is
systems thinking, for it is the integration of systems thinking with each of
the other four disciplines that allows each of the five to flower and form an
indivisible whole.
Imagine the possibilities of a school or system that operates under the
following “laws”:

Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.

The harder you push the harder the sysrem pushes back.
Behavior grows better before it gets worse.
The easy way out usually leads back in.
The cure can be worse than the disease.
Faster is slower.
Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
200 Reviews

Small changes can produce big results, but the areas of highest leverage
are often the least obvious.
You can have your cake and eat it too, but not all at once.
Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
There is no blame.

The solutions proposed by the authors of the articles and books

reviewed above violate each and every one of these assumptions. Unfortu-
nately, so d o nearly all of the critiques offered by the reviewers. If Senge is
correct and these assumptions are valid, then we have indeed met Walt
Kelly’s enemy, and “he is us.” There is no question that neither education
nor business is grounded in these assumptions. In fact, it is only a mild
exaggeration to argue that schools teach and business practices the reverse
of each axiom. To teach and practice these laws requires standing current
notions of form and function on their ends.
Applying the skills of the other four disciplines causes equal stress. The
pursuit of personal mastery includes a lifelong quest for proficiency where
the reward lies in the journey, an application of the belief that there need
be no fundamental tradeoff between the higher virtues of life and economic
success. Its skills are those of clarifying a personal vision, holding creative
tension, finding power in powerlessness, and committing to truth. Few
schools foster a commitment to personal mastery. Most foster a commitment
to getting out with diploma or not, getting a job, and getting on with life.
Many of us who do pursue a slice of personal mastery label our preoccupa-
tion as “hobby” or “avocation.”
I’m aware that 50 percent of you have stopped reading, convinced that
this book (and probably this review) results from association with some
form of strange personal awareness cult committed to the collection of
watches and enforced proscriptions against bathroom breaks. That‘s one of
the problems with this book. The use of language in the description of the
four disciplines besides systems thinking assumes the previous conversion
of the choir. Those offended by new age language will depart far before the
fat lady sings and in leaving will miss a series of highly compelling argu-
ments and examples. Give it a chance. At least finish reading the review.
Those who gave up and are no longer reading this need skills at varying
their mental models-surfacing, testing, and improving the internal pictures
of how the world works that each of us carries. (Yes, I’m talking about
paradigms for all of you now able to distinguish black hearts while playing
poker.) Most of us know that we hold a mental model, but we are sadly
lacking in the skills necessary to use multiple models or explicate the
model held by another and create a mutually agreeable one. Virtually all
schools are in the business of teaching a single mental model, although not
necessarily the same one. Such models are often positioned as truth rather
than as one of a number of models, each of which provides varymg degrees
Lebbv 201

of effective action or explanatory power. Business as well has seemed

incapable of dropping one set of assumptions (say, cheap oil) in order to
forecast the future.
Without the ability to share and examine mental models, it is impossi-
ble to create a shared vision, a common caring. Shared vision does not
eliminate organizational stress and pain but rather has the potential to
reduce individual consciousness and perception of it. Shared vision is
created from the synergy of personal visions. It provides people with the
power to do whatever is necessary to succeed rather than the minimum
necessary to avoid negative comment. It is the difference between enroll-
ment, commitment, and compliance.
Those with a shared vision are enrolled in the process of creating team
learning. At its core, team learning involves practice in mastering the dis-
tinction between and the skills of dialogue and discussion. The former
involves the “free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues”
(p. 247), while the latter requires the explication, defense, and ultimate
selection of one of a number of opposing viewpoints. Acquiring skills in
each allows a team to uncover and test assumptions, challenge mental
models without the challenge being perceived as a threat, and select from
among alternative actions with high degrees of organizational commitment
and success.
While enrollment in schools is increasing, that is not the kind of enroll-
ment Senge means. How many of you who were enrolled were committed
to school? Did your classmates share a common vision of school other
than getting ahead or getting out? How about your kids? Were you, are
they, taught to collaborate in pursuit of the shared vision, or was the
personal vision one of competition? How about your enrollment in, com-
mitment to, your work? Do you function as an individual, a collection of
individuals, or as a team?
When the four disciplines of personal mastery, mental models, shared
vision, and team learning are combined with the fifth discipline of systems
thinking, a learning organization has evolved. It seems to me that the
problems facing both education and business cannot be adequately defined
and explained, much less solved, except by such an organization.

REWEWED BY
ANDREW M. LEBBY
THE PERFORMANCE GROUP
WASHINGTON, D.C.