The Fifth Discipline— a book review
A book recommendation for Systems Thinking that ended up as a completely new perspective of Agile
I love reading. For me, reading is freedom. I think reading gives people access to the tools to achieve their wildest dreams. In our age, anything you want to know is available at the click of a mouse.
Also, I am very aware of my own growth, especially when it comes to my work: I’m a Scrum Master. So when a fellow Agilist suggested the Fifth Discipline as a great introduction to Systems Thinking, a subject I had been coming across more often lately, I quickly logged into bol.com, read some reviews, and ordered the book.
The book is thick. Rough paper, not a lot of images. It is divided into 5 parts. It starts with an introduction of the main theme of the book which is not systems thinking as I expected, but instead, the concept of The Learning Organisation.
The Learning Organisation
The definition of The Learning Organisation I liked best was towards the end of the book, in which an organisation is compared to a complex living system:
… sensing and acting locally is exactly how complex living systems work… No one is “in charge” of a forest... Whatever “centralized” control does exist in nature is possible precisely because of complex networks of local control. We have no idea how we walk, but once this “body knowledge” is developed, the body responds to our conscious directives; without that body knowledge, all the central directives in the world would be ineffectual… Toyota’s approach to performance management embodied the essence of living systems: company managers were engaged in continually building and deploying locally embedded know-how and then trusting frontline workers to manage and improve performance. In effect, Toyota’s approach to localized performance management amounted to discovering and embodying nature’s patterns, and that is why Toyota’s team were superior learners.
In other words, in complex systems, you cannot possibly expect to be able to control the whole system, let alone direct it towards a goal, like learning. So the only way to have a learning organisation is through distributed control. Self-managing teams do the learning and management coordinate that which is learnt.
And what’s more, the best place to find information about the phenomenon of distributed control is nature itself!
Having studied ecology at university, this resonates profoundly with me. It also answers a question about Agile I have been struggling with for quite some time — how to proceed beyond the Team? Scrum is team-focused and bottom-up, leaving the role of the rest of the organisation unclear. Managers often end up feeling confused or worse, threatened.
With this fabulous idea of a Learning Organisation, Systems Thinking rather takes a back seat in the rest of the book for me. It is handled in the second part, concisely and to the point. It is indeed a fine introduction to Systems Thinking, presenting some interesting techniques to work with it. But there is nothing terribly new to me, having googled around enough to have created a rough overview for myself already. In fact, for me, it is mostly a confirmation of the work we do as Scrum Masters, with an extrapolation to the organisation level.
Summarising, Systems Thinking is a holistic approach that looks at a system as a whole. Patterns observed in the system result from the effects of reinforcing and balancing processes. A reinforcing process leads to the increase of some system component. If reinforcement is unchecked by a balancing process, it eventually leads to collapse. Feedback is thereby an essential part of system thinking.
In this sense, Systems Thinking focuses very much on circular thinking, as opposed to linear thinking. This incidentally opens the door to Eduard de Bono’s ideas about Lateral Thinking, which focus on non-linear thinking at the personal or team level. But that is another book, for another time.
Systems Thinking is presented as the discipline to coordinate and integrate the other four disciplines: Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision and Team Learning. These are dealt with in the third part.
The Other Four Disciplines
Personal Mastery handles your own personal development, combining aspects of the growth mindset with spirituality and motivational ideas. It is very much an exploration of the Mastery Daniel Pink refers to in his elements of intrinsic motivation.
Mental Models deal with the way we all create models in our heads as an abstraction of reality.Being aware of these models is essential as it allows us to continuously test them against reality, and within a team or organisation, against each other, to ensure we all share the same perspective.
Shared Vision goes a step further and deals with creating a picture of that that we seek to achieve in the heads and hearts of everyone in an organisation.
And last but not least, Team Learning handles the synergy in a group of people that leads to high levels of learning. It discusses techniques for improved communication, such as the difference between discussion and dialogue, which for me ties well into techniques I use as a Scrum Master, such as Liberating Structures.
It is in the handling of these four disciplines that Peter Senge’s passion really comes to the fore. Where the previous part on Systems Thinking is rather dry and technical, this part at times ventures surprisingly far towards spirituality and mindfulness, even including Zen Buddhism quotes. It is often inspiring and captivating.
But in other parts, it is rather verbose, with Peter Senge taking ample room for reminiscence. His insights are buried in lots of ramblings about his experiences and the experiences of various organisational leaders. At times it gets tedious.
Still, you feel the heartfelt effort he is making. To me, it feels like he is so consumed by the subject that he piles examples on examples to leave no room for doubt why humanity needs the five disciplines. Especially the last four. It kept me going, but I’m not sure everyone will have the stamina to get through the whole thing.
The structure of the book doesn’t help either, as it often feels unclear. There are lots of titles, but these are vague — you will not get a strong sense of the message of the book from the contents. The different sections do not flow clearly into each other, making it hard to keep track of the larger picture.
The fourth part is a good example of this. It consists of 6 chapters with dramatic titles, but it just feels like one long collection of examples. Some are quite impressive, based again on interviews with important organisational leaders, and that does help to keep it interesting.
Conclusion
I ended up with two strong conclusions.
First, probably the reason only Systems Thinking seems to have stuck in the common understanding of the book is the almost spiritual, new age handling of the other four disciplines. I can very much imagine people getting thoroughly lost by that, especially after the way Systems Thinking is handled so effectively first. By “effectively” I mean in a way that is very accessible to the target audience.
Second, I would recommend the book to my wife, who is a Reiki master (a kind of spiritual healer).
But seriously, I was amazed at the focus on people and spirituality. Here is a guy who writes from experience at the highest corporate levels, but also from the heart. And also includes heartfelt thoughts from top minds in corporate leadership. And his message is about the need for a change towards more humanity.
As a Scrum Master, my focus has always been bottom-up, working from the team level up towards management. The downside of this approach is that you often end up running against resistance somewhere in management. And that is difficult to overcome.
For me, The Fifth Discipline is a revelation, presenting a completely different and complementary perspective, a change catalysed from the top down.
I would suggest that it is an essential companion to any Scrum Master. Systems Thinking provides a very effective language to visualise and to communicate with management about the complex environment surrounding self-organising teams. It goes beyond techniques like Root Case Analysis, which though effective, are usually very localised and difficult to tie to a bigger picture.
The four disciplines provide new ways to broaden our horizons beyond the mechanics of Scrum to harness more of the human factor. Each discipline offers a perspective on psychological aspects that are essential to our work.
personal mastery: how do we help team members, and for that matter, everyone in the company, to achieve the Growth mindset?
mental models: how do we align the ways in which we see reality, especially in the light of huge personal differences? For example a manager and a developer? Or an Australian and a Chinese?
shared vision: how to create a purpose that leads to intrinsic motivation?
team learning: how do we help the team to become an efficient learning system?
But the greatest gift is for Scrum Masters aiming further than the Scrum Team. As teams mature and we gravitate more towards the rest of the company to solve problems, this book offers a completely different perspective of Agile and how to achieve it at an organisational level.
It covers the emptiness left by Scrum for everything outside the Scrum Team. And isn’t this precisely the biggest challenge we face with Agile? We approach the conversation from the Team perspective and try to sell that to management using a language they recognise. We end up with SAFe and wonder why the Agile mindset, that which it is all about, ends up forgotten?
The Learning Organisation offers a holistic approach in which even the name makes it clear we are at an entirely different level. And it shows us a way to create Agile from the top down, which maybe we should accept is the most effective way to achieve change?
As I give the finishing touches to this article, I must share an amazing discovery that I made only yesterday — I have met a “Learning Officer”. Someone versed in nonviolent communication and meditation who:
create[s] and host[s] space for dialogue, exploration, insight and action to create more (work)happiness, productivity, flow and a learning organisation.
Maybe this is the way forward?
What a thoughtful review. I was somewhat put off by the spiritual aspects in the book. We are trained to trust empiricism, that A=A, that reality exists and is measurable, and manageable but at the same we acknowledge the emergent, bottom-up process that teamwork and innovation almost always is. It's like the Yin and the Yang. Speaking of symbols, that one included was facinating but pentacles always remind me of the occult.