Peter M. Senge Quotes & Sayings

It took a scenario that he was going to die for Fred to wake up. It took that kind of shock for his life to be transformed. Maybe that's what needs to happen for all of us, for everyone who lives on Earth. That could be what a requiem scenario offers us. — Peter M. Senge

Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) has brought me in touch with hundreds more such practitioners. — Peter M. Senge

Then, if you bring a certain kind of open, moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness to what you're attending to, you'll begin to develop a more penetrative awareness that sees beyond the surface of what's going on in your field of awareness. This is mindfulness. Mindfulness makes it possible to see connections that may not have been visible before. But seeing these connections doesn't happen as a result of trying - it simply comes out of the stillness. — Peter M. Senge

In a heated debate, the novice at working with mental models will have to make an effort to identify the assumptions he is making and why. Often the beginner's efforts in a discipline are characterized by time displacement: only after the debate, does one see one's assumptions clearly and distinguish them from the "data" and reasoning upon which they are based. — Peter M. Senge

Several years ago, Debashish Chatterjee, a good friend and well-known author on leadership1 opened a seminar on leadership at MIT by saying, 'I've been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it's been submitted to many tests - which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We're fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance. — Peter M. Senge

If we cannot express our
assumptions explicitly in ways that
others can understand and build
upon, there can be no larger process
of testing those assumptions and
building public knowledge. — Peter M. Senge

You cannot have a learning organization without shared vision. Without a pull toward some goal which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming. — Peter M. Senge

By the time they are 30, a few are on the fast track and the rest 'put in their time' to do what matters to them on the weekend. They lose the commitment, the sense of mission, and the excitement with which they started their careers. We get damn little of their energy and almost none of their spirit. — Peter M. Senge

Great teachers create space for learning and invite people into that space. — Peter M. Senge

Business and human endeavors are systems ... we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved. — Peter M. Senge

Nature (and that includes us) is not made up of parts within wholes. It is made up of wholes within wholes. All boundaries, national boundaries included, are fundamentally arbitrary. We invent them and then, ironically, we find ourselves trapped within them. But — Peter M. Senge

alignment is the necessary condition before empowering the individual will empower the whole team. Empowering the individual when there is a relatively low level of alignment worsens the chaos and makes managing the team even more difficult: — Peter M. Senge

Love is the only emotion that expands intelligence, — Peter M. Senge

Chris Argyris criticized "good communication that blocks learning," arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because "they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability. — Peter M. Senge

Mastery of creative tension brings out the capacity for perseverance and patience. Time is an ally. — Peter M. Senge

People don't resist change. They resist being changed. — Peter M. Senge

System thinking is a discipline of seeing whole. — Peter M. Senge

To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive. — Peter M. Senge

A vision not consistent with values that people live by day by day will not only fail to inspire genuine enthusiasm, it will often foster outright cynicism. These — Peter M. Senge

You cannot force commitment, what you can do ... You nudge a little here, inspire a little there, and provide a role model. Your primary influence is the environment you create. — Peter M. Senge

Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life — Peter M. Senge

reflexive loop": — Peter M. Senge

The future lay in cultivating the scientist in all of us. If science is an unfinished project, the next stage will be about reconnecting and integrating the rigor of scientific method with the richness of direct experience to produce a science that will serve to connect us to one another, ourselves, and the world. — Peter M. Senge

Advocacy without inquiry begets more advocacy. — Peter M. Senge

In fact, most of the time, things do not turn out as we expect. But the potential value of unexpected developments is rarely tapped. Instead, when things turn out contrary to our expectations, we go immediately into problem-solving mode and react, or just try harder - without taking the time to see whether this unexpected development is telling us something important about our assumptions. "This more prepared mental state is really where a lot of the longer-term payoff is," says Galloway. — Peter M. Senge

We will never transform the prevailing system of management without transforming our prevailing system of education. They are the same system. — Peter M. Senge

I believe benchmarking best practices can open people's eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up. As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, "They always say 'Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.' They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together." I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another "great person. — Peter M. Senge

When asked what they want, many adults will say what they want to get rid of. — Peter M. Senge

That's why I think that cultivation, 'becoming a real human being,' really is the primary leadership issue of our time, but on a scale never required before. It's a very old idea that may actually hold the key to a new age of 'global democracy. — Peter M. Senge

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. But many leaders have personal visions that never get translated into shared visions that galvanize an organization. All too often, a company's shared vision — Peter M. Senge

People get used to having experts who can solve their problems for them; people can then easily lose motivation to develop their own capacities. — Peter M. Senge

But how do you develop your intent? You become extremely clear about what it is you want to do. Why is it you want to do what you do? How is it a reflection of your values? How does it relate to your unique purpose in life? What is it that you want to accomplish in society? Think about all of the inherent contradictions that are there, and then, if possible, reconcile them. This could take anywhere from a week to decades. This process of refinement - thinking about your intention many, many times - is, in a sense, a broadcast of intention. When you broadcast such an intention, there's very little else you have to do. The broadcast of intention goes out and makes it happen. Your role is to remain keenly aware, patiently expectant, and open to all possibilities. — Peter M. Senge

leaders' work as teachers often starts with their recognition of an important capacity that is lacking in an organization. — Peter M. Senge

Intuition eludes the grasp of linear thinking, with its exclusive emphasis on cause and effect that are close in time and space. The result is that most of our intuitions don't make sense - that is, they can't be explained in terms of linear logic. Very — Peter M. Senge

When young people develop basic leadership and collaborative learning skills, they can be a formidable force for change. — Peter M. Senge

[ ... ] most of the problems faced by humankind concerns [concerned] our inability to grasp and manage the increasingly complex systems of our world. — Peter M. Senge

The committed person doesn't play by the rules of the game. He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving the vision, he will find ways to change the rules. — Peter M. Senge

A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people's hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further - if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person - then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision. At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, "What do we want to create?" Just as personal visions are pictures or images people carry in their heads and hearts, so too are shared visions pictures that people throughout an organization carry. — Peter M. Senge

The world is made of Circles
And we think in straight Lines — Peter M. Senge

Individual learning, at some level, is irrelevant for organizational learning. Individuals learn all the time and yet there is no organizational learning. But if teams learn, they become a microcosm for learning throughout the organization. Insights gained are put into action. Skills developed can propagate to other individuals and to other teams (although there is no guarantee that they will propagate). The team's accomplishments can set the tone and establish a standard for learning together for the larger organization. Within — Peter M. Senge

The core leadership strategy is simple: be a model. — Peter M. Senge

The bad leader is he who the people despise; the good leader is he who the people praise; the great leader is he who the people say, We did it ourselves — Peter M. Senge

Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist - someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations. — Peter M. Senge

The practice of shared vision 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 counterproductiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt. — Peter M. Senge

The most effective people are those who can "hold" their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly — Peter M. Senge

One forceful CEO recently lamented to me about the absence of "real leaders" in his organization. He felt his company was full of compliant people, not committed visionaries. This was especially frustrating to a man who regards himself as a skilled communicator and risk taker. In fact, he is so brilliant at articulating his vision that he intimidates everyone around him. Consequently, his views rarely get challenged publicly. People have learned not to express their own views and visions around him. While he would not see his own forcefulness as a defensive strategy, if he looked carefully, he would see that it functions in exactly that way. — Peter M. Senge

We need to learn the disciplines that will help cultivate the wisdom of the group and larger social systems. — Peter M. Senge

Vision is an idle dream at best and a cynical delusion at worst - but not an achievable end — Peter M. Senge

But it does imply that the search for scapegoats - a particularly alluring pastime in individualistic cultures such as ours in the United States - is a blind alley. — Peter M. Senge

How can we stop going faster while our ability to see further ahead is decreasing? — Peter M. Senge

Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers - a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars - and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable. — Peter M. Senge

Second, I ran across an article by John H. Johnson, the late publisher of Ebony magazine. In the '50s when he tried to start the magazine, the white establishment said he wouldn't have anybody to put in the magazine - there were no middle- or upper-class African Americans, no black celebrities. He couldn't get any money to publish it. But he said, 'There is no defense against an excellence that meets a pressing public need,' and proved them wrong. I have the quote on my wall, and that became my strategy. — Peter M. Senge

Learning organizations are possible because, deep down, we are all learners. No one has to teach an infant to learn. In fact, no one has to teach infants anything. They are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learners who learn to walk, speak, and pretty much run their households all on their own. — Peter M. Senge

People with high levels of personal mastery ... cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye. — Peter M. Senge

The discipline of seeing interrelationships gradually undermines older attitudes of blame and guilt. We begin to see that all of us are trapped in structures, structures embedded both in our ways of thinking and in the interpersonal and social milieus in which we live. Our knee-jerk tendencies to find fault with one another gradually fade, leaving a much deeper appreciation of the forces within which we all operate. This does not imply that people are simply victims of systems that dictate their behavior. Often, the structures are of our own creation. But this has little meaning until those structures are seen. For most of us, the structures within which we operate are invisible. We are neither victims nor culprits but human beings controlled by forces we have not yet learned how to perceive. We — Peter M. Senge

I believe that, the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best. Deming saw this clearly, — Peter M. Senge

We say, "That's a very interesting idea," when we have no intention of taking the idea seriously. — Peter M. Senge

Until you do the inner work of learning how to see with "your eyes and your heart open," as Kabat-Zinn puts it, deep problems will persist. — Peter M. Senge

Conflict manipulation is the favored strategy of people who incessantly worry about failure, of managers who excel at motivational chats that point out the highly unpleasant consequences if the company's goals are not achieved, and of social movements that attempt to mobilize people through fear. — Peter M. Senge

Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision — Peter M. Senge

Collaboration is vital to sustain what we call profound or really deep change, because without it, organizations are just overwhelmed by the forces of the status quo. — Peter M. Senge

Breakthroughs come when people learn how to take the time to stop and examine their assumptions. — Peter M. Senge

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. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit. — Peter M. Senge

The earth is an indivisible whole, just as each of us is an indivisible whole. — Peter M. Senge

[ ... ] vision without systems thinking ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there. — Peter M. Senge

The basic metaphor of prototypes still seems apt to me. There are no answers or magic pills. There is no alternative to learning through experimentation. Benchmarking and studying "best practices" will not suffice - because the prototyping process does not involve just incremental changes in established ways of doing things, but radical new ideas and practices that together create a new way of managing. — Peter M. Senge

It's just not possible any longer to figure it out from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the "grand strategist." The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization. — Peter M. Senge

Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines. — Peter M. Senge

The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than the competition. — Peter M. Senge

When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that someone screwed up. — Peter M. Senge

It is not the absence of defensiveness that characterizes learning teams but the way defensiveness is faced — Peter M. Senge

In the presence of greatness, pettiness disappears. In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails. — Peter M. Senge

That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for building learning organizations. — Peter M. Senge