Senge: Discipline 1 - Systems Thinking

14th January 2014
These brief notes on Senge's use of systems thinking are not intended to be comprehensive. For those of you interested in the organisational aspects of your team or service, we would recommend reading 'The Fifth Discipline'. The intention here is to illustrate some of the main themes so that you can judge whether further reading would be useful.

'Laws' or principles of the Fifth Discipline

Senge lists eleven 'laws' that underpin his systems approach.
  1. Today's problems come from yesterdays solutions
  2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
  3. 'Solutions' often result in short term gain before they get worse.
  4. The easy way out of a problem often leads back into the problem
  5. The cure can be worse than the disease
  6. Faster is slower
  7. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space
  8. Small changes can produce big results but the areas of highest leverage are often not obvious.
  9. High quality and low cost may not be opposites but may be related to each other over time.
  10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants
  11. There is no blame

Processes in systems

The core process is feedback in relation to goal directed behaviour. Senge emphasises two types of feedback:- amplifying and balancing feedback. Amplifying feedback is more obvious and similar to positive feedback. Balancing feedback is often implicit and unrecognised and represents the process of adaptation to the goal behaviour (e.g. new initiative). Balancing feedback may be experienced by managers as 'resistance' but often represents the adaptation of systems to the wider implications of whatever new developments are taking place.

Common system 'archetypes'

Senge suggests that there are several repeated system patterns that are helpful to be able to recognise.
  1. Limits to growth- 'running out of steam'
  2. 'Shifting the burden - moving the problem to somewhere else
For organisations (and leaders) the challenge is to try to gain leverage on systems that may be behaving in unintended or unstable ways.

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