| History of The Dance of Change | |
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The Dance of Change represents the natural evolution of a synthesis of management thinking that has been taking place for 35 years. In the early 1970s, Peter Senge was a graduate student in the system dynamics program at MIT's Sloan School of Management, which focused on understanding all "systems" as entities with consistent patterns of behavior. Systems are characterized by virtuous and vicious cycles, and oscillating movement towards a goal, that could take place in ecological niches, in human cells, in governments, in cities, in the growth of children ... and in corporations. |
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In the mid-1970s, Peter Senge (then in his late 20s) and two other leading thinkers (Charles Kiefer and Robert Fritz) joined forces to build a new kind of consulting practice, based on applying systems understanding to business. Their approach, fostered through Kiefer's consulting firm Innovation Associates, combined systems thinking, techniques of personal awareness-building, and approaches to organizational change. By the mid-1980s, Innovation Associates had developed a set of "system archetypes:" diagrams of replicable situations that business people could use as starting points for talking through the far-flung patterns of cause and effect in their businesses. |
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At the same time, Senge (as a faculty member at MIT) began meeting regularly with a group of senior corporate executives to talk about the interplay of systems thinking and corporate practice. The group realized that the common thread in all their experience was the role of organizational learning — the continued development of capabilities, not just in individuals but in the organization as a whole, that would enable companies and other organizations to achieve the results they wanted. |
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| It was clear by now to Senge and many of his colleagues that, for effective improvement of organizational practices, managers would need to embed a variety of "lifelong bodies of study and practice" into their day-to-day work. These "disciplines" embodied principles that he had seen used successfully in practice, incorporating theories, tools and methods for instilling learning not just for individuals, but in groups and teams. Senge settled upon five disciplines as particularly applicable to long-term organizational improvement. These five disciplines became the core of his first book, THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE: | |
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| Senge labeled systems thinking the "fifth" discipline because a better understanding of the systems of an organization would show managers how to effectively integrate all of these new learning practices with their existing work methods. | |
| Each of these disciplines embodied a new way of looking at the world, and in practice, the disciplines reinforced each others' effectiveness. Putting all five disciplines into practice at once required some skill and coordination in itself, not unlike the old vaudeville trick of spinning five plates on sticks simultaneously. But if a management team could keep all five plates "going" for a year or two - continually building a sense of personal aspiration and shared vision, practicing team learning and mental models skills, and developing capabilities for systems thinking among its members &hibar; then it could move into a qualitatively more effective dimension of activity. | |
| The Fifth Discipline was a runaway business best-seller that continues to sell more than 40,000 copies per year with more than 750,000 copies in print in the United States. Why this wave of enthusiasm for a book that some considered difficult to read? Because, for the first time, a management book showed a valid-seeming, practical way for companies to do better by fostering and drawing forth the aspirations of their managers and employees, thus breaking through the stultifying gamesmanship and fragmentation of conventional companies. | |
| At the same time, Senge and some of his colleagues were interested in moving beyond a conventional academic and consulting approach, to testing and researching the concepts of "the learning organization" in depth. Thus, in 1990, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Organizational Learning opened, with Senge as its director. Twenty companies joined the consortium. Through the next few years, at a variety of locations - MIT-COL member companies, Innovation Associates clients, and at other organizations around the world - people began to put the ideas of the learning organization into practice, often with spectacular results. These included landmark business performance, but also unprecedented "personal results," in which people went through life-changing experiences of individual fulfillment, and found themselves part of new, supportive networks of committed people. | |
| In 1992, Peter Sengeassembled a team of consultants Rick Ross, Charlotte Roberts and Bryan Smith, along with editor/writer Art Kleiner (who had helped him develop The Fifth Discipline) to create a new book, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994, Doubleday/Currency). This book was meant to answer the question: "What should we do differently when we go into work Monday morning?" It clearly described how to get started in the practice of the principles of the learning organization, reflecting not just one person's theory, but the experience and reflection of an entire community of practitioners. | |
| The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook assembled practice guides, exercises, stories, resource reviews, and short essays, all aimed at helping people implement the disciplines on a day-to-day basis in a wide variety of settings. It was organized as "notes" in the words of dozens of leading practitioners, edited to fit carefully together as an interactive whole; people could browse among bodies of practice for each of the five disciplines. It was not intended primarily as a book of theory, but it embodied a key theoretical argument: | |
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| The book contained many success stories, but while nearly every project achieved remarkable results, none of them were easy or smooth. Indeed, many of them faltered or led to disappointment after the first flush of success. At one, the project leaders were not rewarded with promotions that they had expected; at another project, a groundbreaking dialogue effort between management and labor, the labor leaders who took part were voted out of office, and subsequent purchasers of the company closed down the initiative. These unexpected snags and challenges came not from outside, but clearly from some missing capabilities with the organizational change initiative itself. | |
| This itself was the kind of complex problem that called for a systems approach. By 1995, a concerted effort was underway to see if it could be better understood. In a series of working groups, Peter Senge and key managers from MIT-COL member companies plotted out a set of countervailing challenges to any learning initiative. The working groups continued under SoL's auspices, continually reflecting on the question: "What forces, common in organizational life, seem to propel organizational learning efforts forward? What forces block learning efforts, or cause them to slow down?" | |
| Senge brought the results of these sessions to the rest of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook authors (along with George Roth, the former research director of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, whom they invited to join them). Now working to create The Dance of Change, these authors critiqued and expanded upon the earlier body of work, and with Senge ultimately developed a list of ten challenges. | |
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The book's informal, candid tone exists because most of it was generated
through conversation. The authors traveled around the world, interviewing
people who understood the dynamics of large-scale change firsthand, and
capturing their words. The authors worked through many of the stickiest
questions and problems posed by the book in no-holds-barred meetings where
the authors flew from their various homes (in Massachusetts, New York,
North Carolina, Southern California, Southern Maine, and Ontario). |
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| As the book was coming into its next-to-final stages, the authors attended a Society of Organizational Learning conference, where the keynote speaker was Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana, coauthor of The Tree of Knowledge. Describing the cognitive relationship between thinking and action, Maturana said, "Every movement is being inhibited as it occurs." That statement became the thematic cornerstone of the new work. This would not just be another book about the five learning disciplines; the "challenges of profound change" were symptoms of a natural process of growth and inhibition, a "dance of change" that every organization would live through hundreds of times during the course of its existence. Hence the title. | |
| Next on the group's agenda is the Education Fieldbook; after that, they are interested in exploring possible international Fieldbooks, or a collaborative Fieldbook on leapfrogging into another technological wave, using the insights of the learning organization to make new levels of innovation feasible. Meanwhile, The Dance of Change readers will be able to stay connected with new developments, tools, and resources as they emerge through the "Owner Registration Form." | |