Learning for a Change

It's been almost 10 years since Peter Senge, 51, published "The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization" (Doubleday/Currency, 1990). The book was more than a business best-seller; it was a breakthrough. It propelled Senge into the front ranks of management thinkers, it created a language of change that people in all kinds of companies could embrace, and it offered a vision of workplaces that were humane and of companies that were built around learning. Along the way, the book sold more than 650,000 copies, spawned a sequel -- "The Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization" (Doubleday/Currency, 1994) -- and gave birth to a worldwide movement.

But that movement hit a few speed bumps. People who adopted the themes and practices of "The Fifth Discipline" sometimes found themselves frustrated by the challenge of bringing about effective change -- and sometimes found themselves out of work for trying. Now Senge and his colleagues have published "The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations" (Doubleday/Currency, March 1999). According to Senge, who is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) -- a global consortium of companies and researchers who are examining learning and change -- the new book presents "what we've learned about learning." The book begins with two key lessons: First, initiating and sustaining change is more daunting than the optimistic presentation that was offered in "The Fifth Discipline" had suggested. And second, the task of making change happen requires businesspeople to change the way they think about organizations: "We need to think less like managers and more like biologists," Senge argues.

To learn more about the evolving landscape of organizational learning, Fast Company interviewed Peter Senge in his office on the campus of MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What's your assessment of the performance of large-scale change efforts over the past decade?

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. Corporate reorganizations are even more common than new strategies, but how many reorganizations actually produce companies that are dramatically more effective than they were before? Throw in mergers and acquisitions: Look at all of those that have failed. The traditional model of change -- change that is led from the top -- has a less-than-impressive track record.

And that's just the public track record. My own experience at MIT and at SoL has mostly been with big companies. How much change have they actually accomplished? If I stand back a considerable distance and ask, "What's the score?" I have to conclude that inertia is winning by a large margin. Of course, there have been enough exceptions to that conclusion to indicate that change is possible. I can identify 20 to 30 examples of significant sustained change efforts in the SoL community. On the other side of the ledger, there are many organizations that haven't gotten to first base when it comes to real change, and many others that have given up trying.

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.

Why haven't there been more successful change efforts?

If it were simply a matter of more resources, people would have figured out how to get more resources. If it were a matter of more time, more money, more consultants, or just more effort, we probably would have been able to fill those needs by now. Or if the problem were intelligence -- and you could simply assert that most bosses are pretty dumb, or that most CEOs are just not very bright -- then presumably the intelligent ones would succeed, their companies would rise to the top, and that would solve the problem. The marketplace would reward the bright ones who could change, and it would punish the dumb ones who couldn't.

But it doesn't seem as if any of those things are happening -- which suggests that it's not a matter of resources or intelligence. In fact, I can tell you from firsthand experience that a lot of very competent executives fail at producing and sustaining momentum around change. That suggests to me that something more universal is at work here.