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

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.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

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.

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.

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.

In great teams conflict becomes productive.