The Learning Organisation and how we get there, wherever there is.

More and more in today’s business we need people to be free to be able to offer their creativity. But do we provide that environment which encourages true dialogue? Or do we just play lip service to it? It is a brave manager who is prepared to accept disagreement and work to a better understanding and possibly a different solution that where they originally thought.

We spend most of our lives working to achieve higher goals and aspirations. In that endeavour we reach position of authority and some respect control. But have we forgotten that boss we did not like? Or get on with? or had no respect? Was that important to the way we did our job and interacted with our environment? Are we that boss?

We all hope that through our experiences we learn and take the good and the things we liked about our leaders, and hopefully emulate them when we are in that position. Many times this is not the case and our attitude changes and sometimes becomes coloured with our experience. We end up becoming what we disliked and did not value.

The time has come to take your pulse and see are you the manager you want to be? Are you doing the things you said you would in the past?

The biggest thing to remember is that you never stop learning and everyone has something to offer you in that lesson. The moment we forget this and try to pretend that we have all the answers it cam be to late. But that is only if you are not prepared to look in the mirror.

One of the biggest things that has had a major impact in the way I think and work is my recent study on the topic of Systemic Thinking. Peter Senge "The Fifth Discipline" has had a big impact in the way I look and think about many aspects of my work and personal life.

The five disciplines are Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, Team Learning and Systems Thinking. These are the notes from "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook":

Personal Mastery - learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire, and creating an organsational environment which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.

Mental Models - reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions.

Shared Vision - building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared images of the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.

Team Learning - transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that goups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members' talents.

System Thinking - a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. This dicipline helps us see how to change systems more effectiviely, and to act more in tune with the larger processes of the natural and economic world.