Senge Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization BY PETER M. SENGE — Daniel H. Pink

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

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

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

Knowledge is constructed, not transferred — Peter 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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

The easy way out usually leads back in. — 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

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

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

Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision — 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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ ... ] 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 key to success isn't just thinking about what we are doing but doing something about what we are thinking. — 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

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

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

Learning cannot be disassociated from action. — Peter Senge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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