Peter M. Senge - The Dance of Change: The challenges to sustaining momentum in a learning organization

A CURRENCY BOOK

P UBLISHED BY D OUBLEDAY
a division of Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

Doubleday/Currency is a trademark of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The dance of change: the challenges of sustaining momentum in
learning organizations / Peter M. Senge [et al.].
p. cm.
1. Organizational learning.2. Organizational change.I. Senge, Peter M.
HD58.82.D361999
658.406DC21

98-39789
CIP

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5317-1
ISBN 0-385-493223

Copyright 1999 by Peter Senge, Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith, George Roth, and Art Kleiner

All Rights Reserved

v3.1

L ook ahead twenty or thirty years. Does anyone expect the next twenty years to be less tumultuous than the last twenty years? Given the changes expected in technology, biology, medicine, social values, demography, the environment, and international relations, what kind of world might humanity face? No one can say for sure, but one thing is reasonably certain: Continuing challenges will tax our collective abilities to deal with them. Failure to rethink our enterprises will leave us little relief from our current predicaments: rising turbulence causing rising stress; increasing disconnection and internal competitiveness; people working harder, rather than learning how to work smarter; and increasingly intractable problems beyond the reach of any individual or organization. If you are an organizational leader, someone at any level concerned deeply about these challenges, then you face a daunting task. In effect, you are engaged in a great venture of exploration, risk, discovery, and change, without any comprehensive maps for guidance.

Actually, for most of human history, intrepid explorers have set out on their journeys of discovery without comprehensive maps. The portolans and rutters of the European Renaissance, for example, were hand-drawn charts describing specific routes along byways and coastlines, often derived from the hasty notes of previous travelers. No one expected them to provide more than rough guidance. Sea and land alike were turbulent, ever-changing environments. Currents and wind patterns shifted. Vegetation evident in August might be gone the following March. Storms altered the contours of sandbars and shoals.

Yet, however imperfect, maps and guides have been among humankinds most treasured artifactsjealously guarded, often worth more than gold. The sixteenth-century explorer Ferdinand Magellan quashed an on-board mutiny because he kept his maps hidden, and thus made himself indispensable; only he knew where to pilot the ships. Even today, in an age of satellite positioning and cellular telephony, sailors and fishing fleets still regard hand-drawn rutters passed on among family and friends as their most precious cargo.

Not surprisingly, the first atlas makers, who gathered and collected those charts and notes into books and portfolios, changed history. Some, like the sixteenth-century Spanish royal court-appointed pilot major, Amerigo Vespucci, were former explorers themselves. In Seville, Vespucci hung a giant wall chart where navigators sailing into port traced their discoveries. (Less favored map publishers had to bribe sailors and courtiers, or ply them with drink.) Vespuccis efforts did not go unrewarded: He was credited, for a time, with discovering the Americas, and the Western Hemisphere still bears his name.

Ultimately, however, the most significant atlas maker of his time contributed something more important than just a name to history. Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish mathematician, created a medium for systematically organizing diverse data into a coherent image of the Earth as a whole. He drew the first map of the world on a grid of uniform north-south, east-west parallels. Not just Europe and the Indies, but all of the inhabited continents could fit. To be sure, Mercators world map was distorted: Greenland appeared almost as big as Africa (due to projecting a three-dimensional surface onto a two-dimensional map), and he placed almost two thirds of the globe above the equator, an unabashedly Eurocentric view. But Mercators framework enabled cartographers to gradually assemble the tales of many journeys onto one global picture. The grid framework ushered in a new era of scientific mapmaking.

We, the authors of this book, likewise aspire to establish a simple and systematic way to organize the diverse tales recounted by organizational change explorers into a coherent whole.

S ee the fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, by Peter Senge (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1990), and The Filth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, by Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, and Bryan Smith (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1994).

At first glance, it appears that people seeking change in organizations have very different goals in mind. Some seek the accelerating, visionary, or intelligent organization; others, the innovative, living, adaptive, or transformational company. They try total quality, reengineering business processes, boundarylessness, strategic alliances, or scenario planning. Drawing upon the predecessors to this book (The Fifth Discipline and The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook), many seek to build learning organizations. But despite the different labels, common aspirations guide most of their efforts. They are trying to respond quickly to external changes and think more imaginatively about the future. They want better relationships, with less games-playing and more trust and openness. They want to unleash employees natural talents and enthusiasm. They hope to move genuinely closer to their customers. Through all of this, they are striving to shape their destiny, and thereby achieve long-term financial success.

O ur sources on the history of mapmaking and exploration included: The Story of Maps by Lloyd A. Brown (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949); History of Cartography by Leo Bagrow (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985); and A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992).

Current management literature is full of practical advice and suggestions; but it lacks a way to effectively organize diverse insights. Like the portolans and rutters of yore, it can only orient people relative to a predetermined path and destination, not relative to a broader terrain. The framework developed in the following pages represents an alternativea simple grid. Undoubtedly, there are flaws. Like Mercators Eurocentrism, some of these imperfections may only become evident years from now, as we see the flaws in our assumptions. Other flaws may be inherent limitations of the framework itself, like the distortion of Greenland. And it is impossible to say what measure of success will meet this new mapmaking endeavor. But without better maps, it is extremely unlikely that organizational change efforts will ever sustain themselves. Each new adventure will be the first.

We thus hope that, over time, the framework of the dance of change will provide a starting point, enabling all of us who care deeply about building new types of organizations to become part of a common knowledge-building process, leading gradually to better maps and healthier organizations.