Peter Senge Quotes & Sayings

The problems with willpower are many, but they may hardly be noticed by the person focused narrowly on success. First, there is little economy of means; in systems thinking terms, we act without leverage. We attain our goals, but the effort is enormous and we may find ourselves exhausted and wondering if it was worth it when we have succeeded. Ironically, people hooked on willpower may actually look for obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, and enemies to vanquish
to remind themselves and others of their own prowess. — Peter Senge

Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner. — Peter Senge

A well-managed business will have a high return on invested capital. But that's a consequence. It's not a way to manage a business. — Peter Senge

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. — Peter Senge

Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior learning. — Peter Senge

We need to be the authors of our own life. — Peter Senge

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. — Peter Senge

I'm really interested in how you create a whole new economy of recycling. It's literally the 'underground economy.' All this stuff that on the surface creates growth and profit, ends up with waste, junk, and CO2. So how do you make it economic to bring new players into the ball game? — Peter Senge

An accurate, insightful view of current reality is as important as a clear vision. — Peter Senge

Trusting people to be creative and constructive when given more freedom does not imply an overly optimistic belief in the perfectibility of human nature. It is, rather, belief that the inevitable errors and sins of the human condition are far better overcome by individuals working together in an environment of trust and freedom and mutual respect than by individuals working under a multitude of rules, regulations, and restraints imposed upon them by another group of imperfect individuals. — Peter Senge

Innovation requires resources to invest, and you can see many companies pulling back and going into an intense protective mode in a major extended period of financial distress. — Peter Senge

The care leadership strategy is simple: be a model. Commit yourself to your own personal mastery. Talking about personal mastery may open people's minds somewhat, but actions always speak louder than words. There is nothing more powerful you can do to encourage others in their quest for personal mastery than to be serious in your own quest. — Peter Senge

Small changes can produce big results - but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious. — Peter Senge

Willpower is so common among highly successful people that many see its characteristics as synonymous with success. — Peter Senge

Knowledge is constructed, not transferred — Peter Senge

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best. — Peter Senge

How has the world of the child changed in the last 150 years?" The answer is. "It's hard to imagine any way in which it hasn't changed.They're immersed in all kinds of stuff that was unheard of 150 years ago, and yet if you look at schools today versus 100 years ago, they are more similar than dissimilar. — Peter Senge

The systems perspective tells us that we must look beyond individual mistakes or bad luck to understand important problems. — Peter Senge

The difference between a healthy group or organization and an unhealthy one lies in its members' awareness and ability to acknowledge their felt needs to conform. — Peter Senge

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. The do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning. — Peter Senge

Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants. — Peter Senge

The faster we go, the slower we need to be. — Peter Senge

Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. — Peter Senge

Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision. — Peter Senge

The key to success isn't just thinking about what we are doing but doing something about what we are thinking. — Peter Senge

Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see. — Peter Senge

When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results, but the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise. — Peter Senge

The capacity of a human community to shape it's future. — Peter Senge

The easy way out usually leads back in. — Peter Senge

Governments, especially democratic ones, are short-term and nationalistic. — Peter Senge

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms. — Peter Senge

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works ... images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. 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 learning organizations. — Peter Senge

You go to any MBA program, and you will be taught the theory of the firm, that the purpose of the firm is the maximization of return on invested capital. I always thought this was a kind of lunacy. — Peter Senge

Commitment to the truth ... means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events. — Peter Senge

In the absence of a great dream pettiness prevails. Shred visions foster risk taking, courage and innovation. Keeping the end in mind creates the confidence to make decisions even in moments of crisis. — Peter Senge

You cannot have a learning organisation without a shared vision ... A shared vision provides a compass to keep learning on course when stress develops. — Peter Senge

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. — Peter Senge

In dialogue, individuals gain insights that simply could not be achieved individually. — Peter Senge

We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry. — Peter Senge

Personal mastery teaches us to choose. Choosing is a courageous act: picking the results and actions which you will make into your destiny. — Peter Senge

Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes. — Peter Senge

If you are realistic about how our present society works, the economic clout - and a lot of the political clout, frankly - is in the business sector. And it's the locus of innovation. — Peter Senge

Consider prejudice. Once a person begins to accept a stereotype of a particular group, that "thought" becomes an active agent, "participating" in shaping how he or she interacts with another person who falls in that stereotyped class. In turn, the tone of their interaction influences the other person's behaviour. The prejudiced person can't see how his prejudice shapes what he "sees" and how he acts. In some sense, if he did, he would no longer be prejudiced. To operate, the "thought" of prejudice must remain hidden to its holder — Peter Senge

In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money. — Peter Senge

If you want to see the future of management education you should go to see Team Academy. — Peter Senge

A shared vision is not an idea ... it is rather, a force in people's hearts ... at its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question 'What do we want to create? — Peter Senge

Teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. This is where the "rubber stamp meets the road"; unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn. — Peter Senge

Many in positions of authority lack the capabilities to truly lead. They are not credible. They do not command genuine respect. They are not committed to serve. They are not continually learning and growing. They are not wise. — Peter Senge

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

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it. — Peter Senge

Learning cannot be disassociated from action. — Peter Senge

How do you know what people value? Well, you watch what they buy. How do we know what products to create? Well, it's based on what they value. — Peter Senge

In our ordinary experiences with other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way gets us into trouble. — Peter Senge

We often spend so much time coping with problems along our path that we forget why we are on that path in the first place. The result is that we only have a dim, or even inaccurate, view of what's really important to us. — Peter Senge

One industrial age belief is that GDP or GNP is a measure of progress. I don't care if you're the President of China or the U.S., if your country doesn't grow, you're in trouble. But we all know that beyond a certain level of material need, further material acquisition doesn't make people happier. — Peter Senge

It's common to say that trees come from seeds. But how can a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources need to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial : a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges. — Peter Senge

When all is said and done, the only change that will make a difference is the transformation of the human heart. — Peter Senge

Most of us at one time or another have been part of a great 'team', a group of people who functioned together in an extraordinary way-who trusted one another, who complemented each other's strengths and compensated for each other's limitations, who had common goals that were larger than an individual's goals, and who produced extraordinary results ... the team that became great didn't start off great-it learned how to produce extraordinary results. — Peter Senge

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence. — Peter Senge

Yet, most every corporate effort to graft this truly innovative practices into their culture has failed because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of AAR's to a sterile technique. — Peter Senge

[Seeds Are Small.] Becoming a force of nature doesn't mean that all of our aspirations must be "grand." First steps are often small, and initial visions that focus energy effectively often address immediate problems. What matters is engagement in the service of a larger purpose rather than lofty aspirations that paralyze action. Indeed, it's a dangerous trap to believe that we can pursue onlhy "great visions." — Peter Senge

I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That's a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace. — Peter Senge

The discipline of personal mastery ... starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us (and) living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations. — Peter Senge

All human beings are born with unique gifts. The healthy functioning community depends on realizing the capacity to develop each gift. — Peter Senge

To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning. — Peter Senge

Dialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking, to recognize that any certainty we have is, at best, a hypothesis about the world. — Peter Senge

In a sluggish system, aggressiveness produces instability. Either be patient or make the system more responsive. — Peter Senge

We tend to think that, in a traditional organisation, people are producing results because management wants results, but the essence of a high-quality organisation is people producing results because they want the results. It's puzzling we find that hard to understand, that if people are really enjoying, they'll innovate, they'll take risks, they'll have trust with one another because they are really committed to what they're doing and it's fun — Peter Senge

I think the terminology I would use is 'a continuous process of reflection'. I've always thought of only two questions that have mattered to me personally. One is what is really needed in the world and the second is what's really important to me and how these two intersect. It's always been a reflective process - spiraling around these two poles. — Peter Senge

Team learning is the Process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members desire. It builds on the discipline of developing a shared vision. It also builds on personal mastery, for talented teams are made up of talented individuals. — Peter Senge

When you ask people 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. — Peter Senge

Business has a way of talking about how to create value, which is in some way isn't bad ... We just need to start thinking about if the value we want to create is consistent with all social and environmental well being. — Peter Senge

The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension. — Peter Senge

Don't push growth; remove the factors limiting growth. — Peter Senge

A unique relationship develops among team members who enter into dialogue regularly. They develop a deep trust that cannot help but carry over to discussions. They develop a richer understanding of the uniqueness of each person's point of view. — Peter Senge

Many children struggle in schools ... because the way they are being taught is incompatible with the way they learn. — Peter Senge

In great teams, conflict becomes productive. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own. — Peter Senge

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. — Peter Senge

When there is 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. — Peter Senge

When I look at efforts to create change in big companies over the past 10 years, I have to say that there's enough evidence of success to say that change is possible - and enough evidence of failure to say that it isn't likely. Both of those lessons are important. — Peter Senge

If people don't have their own vision, all they can do is 'sign-up' for someone else's. — Peter Senge

It takes courage and skill to be unambiguous and clear. — Peter Senge

A learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future. — Peter Senge

Nobody likes to throw stuff away. It's just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we're all habituated to that way of living today. — Peter Senge

If you want real, significant, sustainable change, you need talented, committed local line leaders. If the line manager is not innovating, then innovation is not going to occur. — Peter Senge

Businesses and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get resolved. — Peter Senge

In some ways clarifying a vision is easy. A more difficult challenge comes in facing current reality. — Peter Senge

If there is genuine potential for growth, build capacity in advance of demand, as a strategy for creating demand. Hold the vision, especially as regards assessing key performance and evaluating whether capacity to meet potential demand is adequate. — Peter Senge

The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature. — Peter Senge

Perhaps for the first time in history, human-kind 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. — Peter Senge

Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them. — Peter Senge