But even if the pilot has potential to grow, there is no guarantee that growth will occur. All pilot groups encounter "challenges to initiating" -- initial limiting processes that can keep growth from ever really starting. For example, it doesn't matter how promising a team is if its members don't have time to commit to the change effort, if they can't reorganize their schedules to accommodate weekly meetings, if they don't have time during which they can get together to reflect. Learning takes time. Invariably, you will get that time back -- and then some -- because most teams today waste lots of time, and therefore better learning capabilities will make them much more productive than they were before. But first you have to be able to make an investment of time.

Another example of an important potential limiting factor: A change effort has to have some relevance to people. It has to have some connection to them. It has to matter. Why should an engineer need to learn how to conduct a dialogue? Why should she care about that skill? The answer may be that the organization trips over certain technical issues that aren't really technical issues; rather, they're problems with internal conversations that lead to fights instead of creative resolutions. The point isn't to learn how to conduct a dialogue. The point is to invest some time and to get some help to change how people work together.

In your new book, you identify the 10 challenges of change. Why focus on challenges?

The short answer: to produce effective leadership. In a natural system, the way to sustain growth is by paying attention to the interplay between reinforcing processes and limiting processes -- and by paying special attention to the limiting processes. The limiting processes represent 90% to 98% of the real leverage in sustaining deep change. These 10 challenges are the limiting processes that we've seen again and again. They include processes that operate from the outset of a pilot -- such as time and relevance -- and they include processes that come into play once a pilot begins to succeed. After an initial success, things tend to get harder, not easier. So, if we want to have effective leadership, if we want to have humane communities that can sustain significant change, we need to learn how to focus on these types of challenges

Are these the only 10 challenges? This is just the first cut; undoubtedly there are others. But if the discourse about change starts to focus on challenges and on strategies for dealing with those challenges, we may be able to build a body of knowledge that will allow for effective leadership and sustainable change.

Back to the first question: A decade after "The Fifth Discipline" appeared, do you think that big companies can change?

Ultimately, organizational learning is about growing something new. Where does new growth take place? Often it happens in the midst of the old. Indeed, often the new grows out of the old. How will the old react? The only realistic expectation is that the traditional system of management, as [W. Edwards] Deming used to label it, will work harder and harder to maintain itself. But growing something new doesn't have to be a battle against the old. It doesn't need to be a fight between believers and nonbelievers. In any case, our Industrial Age management, our Industrial Age organization, and our Industrial Age way of living will not continue. The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

It will change. The only question is how. Once we get out of our machine mind-set, we may discover new aptitudes for growth and change. Until then, change won't come easily.

Sidebar: The 10 Challenges of Change

In "The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations," Peter Senge and his colleagues identify 10 challenges of change. Grouped into three categories -- challenges of initiating change, challenges of sustaining momentum, and challenges of systemwide redesign and rethinking -- these 10 items amount to what the authors call "the conditions of the environment that regulate growth."

Challenges of Initiating Change

"We don't have time for this stuff!" People who are involved in a pilot group to initiate a change effort need enough control over their schedules to give their work the time that it needs.

"We have no help!" Members of a pilot group need enough support, coaching, and resources to be able to learn and to do their work effectively.

"This stuff isn't relevant." There need to be people who can make the case for change -- who can connect the development of new skills to the real work of the business.

"They're not walking the talk!" A critical test for any change effort: the correlation between espoused values and actual behavior.