Peter Senge Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

Learning cannot be disassociated from action.

One possibility for difficulties innovating is that most people really donÕt care about innovation.

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.

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.

[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."

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'.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

We need to be the authors of our own life.

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

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

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

Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines.

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.

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.

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.

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior learning.

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.

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.

Theres a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.

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.

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.

In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models - that is, they are responsible for learning.

By using the systems archetypes we can learn how to “structure” the details into a coherent picture of the forces at play.

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.

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

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.