Why this Book:  I had read most of this book about 10 years ago, and it really appealed to me – it’s easy to read, but it’s long and entailed.  I was invited to participate in a reading group discussion of the book with the Cleveland Indians, and agreed – which meant reading it again – just a couple of chapters at a time and then discussing.  Very worthwhile.

Summary in 3 sentences: In The Fifth Discipline Peter Senge describes a vision of what he calls a “learning organization” and offers a number of steps for how leaders and managers can move their organization toward that ideal. First he describes some of the many dysfunctions he’s found in many if not most of today’s organizations and explains why these dysfunctions inhibit productivity and performance.  Then he describes the “fifth discipline” itself – “systems thinking” – and then offers descriptions of four other essential personal and organizational disciplines which together, when integrated lead to systems thinking and a learning organization.

My impressions: This is the most impactful book of the many I’ve read on organizational culture and how leaders can positively shape it to the benefit of the people in it, as well as the purpose/mission of the organization or business.  It is not a difficult read at all – in fact I found it fascinating and engrossing – but it is not a quick, easy read. Weighing in at close to 400 pages, it is so rich in content that I recommend to others that it be read in small chunks with other thoughtful readers – and digested and discussed along the way. In the first chapter, Senge says “this book is for the learners, especially those of us interested in the heart and practice of collective learning. “ p16

The Fifth Discipline was first published in 1990, in paperback in 1994 and a second edition came out in 2006.  In 1997, Harvard Business Review named The Fifth Discipline as “one of the seminal management books for the previous 75 years.”  The idea of a “Learning Organization” certainly comes from this book, and I and many others aspire to be in, and ideally to lead such a “learning organization.”  I wish I had spent some time with this book absorbing its lessons and insights before leading commands I had in the Navy.  The page numbers cited in this review are from the 1994 paperback printing.

The Fifth Discipline is Systems Thinking.  Senge describes the learning organization as embodying five fundamental disciplines  – but the fifth of these – “systems thinking” – is the most important, and cannot be fully realized without the first four.  In fact the Fifth discipline of systems thinking is the integration of the other four.

The first section of the book “How our actions create our reality… and how we can change it”  introduces the concept of the “Learning Organization,” and he introduces the five disciplines and then how people and organizations can change or have a “shift of mind.”  He is careful to distinguish “learning” from “taking in information.” He also describes all-too-common problems in organizations in his chapter “Does your organization have a learning disability” and he describes the seven most common organizational “learning disabilities,” such as “I am my position,” or “The enemy is out there,” or “The illusion of taking charge.” His chapter “Nature’s Templates: Identifying the Patterns that Control Events” discusses positive and negative organizational archetypes, patterns of behavior, leverage within an organization and how to achieve it. Numerous examples from business case studies help him make his points.

The second section of the book is entitled “The Fifth Discipline: The Cornerstone of the Learning Organization,” and in it, he dives into  “systems thinking,” the Fifth Discipline itself.  He discusses the laws of systems thinking and makes the case that an organization is a complex “system,” and nothing happens in a system that doesn’t impact other parts of the system, and when something happens, its impacts, large and small, are systemic and are often subtle, hard to foresee, and separated from the initial incident in space and time. This section has a fascinating discussion of “feedback” in its various forms, and how it can be productive, and counter-productive.

Systems thinking is the ability to look beyond immediate cause and effect and understand that in sometimes obvious, but often very subtle ways, everything that happens in a system is connected to, and impacted by everything else.  He thoroughly explores the idea of systems thinking, seeing events not as isolated snap shots, and seeing relationships between events not as simply linear cause-effect chains, but rather as part of larger processes of change.  This is the fundamental insight of the book, but to get to it, and to create an organization that reflects this wisdom, the reader and the organization must develop and refine four other disciplines, to each of which he devotes an entire chapter in the next section of the book, entitled “The Core Disciplines: Building the Learning Organization.

The Four Core Disciplines  which together and when integrated, result in systems thinking. They are:

1. Personal Mastery “Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.”  P.7  “….people with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them – in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.” p. 7     In The Fifth Discipline, Senge is mostly focussing on the inter-relationships between personal life-long learning and organizational learning.  He delves deeply into this in his chapter on personal mastery.  

2. Mental Models.  These  are “deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.” p8  The discipline is to “unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny. “ p9  I found this to be one of the most powerful discussions in the book – emphasizing how awareness of and understanding one’s own, and one’s culture’s often unacknowledged mental models can accelerate growth, and how lack of such awareness can cripple growth.

3. Building Shared Vision – This chapter was very reminiscent of the shared vision idea  which 2+ decades later Stan McChrystal describes in Team of Teams.  It is the capacity of a team to hold a shared picture of the future.  It “involves the skills of unearthing shared ‘pictures of the future’ that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counter-productiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.” p. 9   The idea of the leader helping the team develop and realize its shared vision, rather than the leader dictating his vision and commander’s intent, is contrary to the predominant practice in military culture.  

4. Team Learning I loved this concept and this chapter.  It is about how not only individuals learn, but how teams learn – through open dialogue, in which people feel free to share thoughts ideas and opinions, regardless of position or rank.  It demands an openness to and respecting ideas that may be different from one’s own ideas or beliefs, and avoiding defensiveness.  He distinguishes “dialogue” from “discussion,” which he says is often a battle of ideas, an effort to convince or persuade, rather than seeking to understand different ideas, and learn.  “Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations…unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.” p 10

After discussing the four core disciplines, Senge offers us Part IV which he calls “Prototypes” and in it he explores common challenges within most organizations. Part IV includes chapters such as “The manager’s time,” “War between work and Family,” “Technology of the learning organization” (which certainly needs to be updated) and “The Leader’s New Work.”

The Fifth Discipline concludes with Part V which is short and which he calls “Coda.” He suggests the possibility of a “Sixth Discipline” which might emerge as organizations better understand the five he has proposed and as organizations evolve.  I found his final chapter entitled “The Indivisible Whole” especially powerful.  He expands the idea of organizational systems thinking to systems thinking about life and the universe itself, almost in a spiritual way, pointing to the subtle connections between all things, noting that cause and effect are complex – often too complex to fully understand. We are seeing that now, in how small man-made adjustments to an ecosystem can have profound unforeseen and unintended consequences, separated in time and space from the initial adjustment.

A lot has changed since The Fifth Discipline was written in 1990.  Reading it, one sees a lot of ideas that have since become part of any discussion of organizational change, but were not then part of the vocabulary and discussion of organizational leadership  – such as growth and fixed mindset, popularized by Carol Dweck in her classic Mindset. The impact of social media, remote working, distributed work forces are not explored in this book, but I believe that the sociology and principles of a great learning organization apply today, though some of these more recent developments will certainly impact their implementation.

My copy of The Fifth Discipline is so full of highlights, underlines, and marginalia that to simply go through these in reviewing the book would take me several hours.  It is so rich in insight and wisdom, I could read it again and again, and each time, walk away richer and with new insights.  It is hard to summarize in this review, but I’ve encouraged many people to read it, but to read it as a group – and to practice “dialogue” to practice “team learning” – to learn how a TEAM can learn so much more from this book than any individual reading it.

The best and most impactful book I’ve read on organizational culture and leadership, and I’ve read quite a few.

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