Rethinking the Fifth Discipline

Learning Within the Unknowable

Robert Louis Flood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134667130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

'Fifth Discipline' is one of the very few approaches to management that has attained position on the International Hall of Fame. Professor Flood's book explains and critiques the ideas in straight forward terms. This book makes significant and fundamental improvements to the core discipline - systemic thinking. It establishes crucial developments in systemic thinking in the context of the learning organisation, including creativity and organisational transformation. It is therefore a very important text for strategic planners, organisational change agents and consultants.
The main features of the book include:
* a review and critique of 'Fifth Discipline' and systemic thinking
* an introduction to the gurus of systemic thinking - Senge, Bertalanffy, Beer, Ackoff, Checkland, and Churchman
*a redefinition of management through systemic thinking
*a guide to choosing, implementing and evaluating improvement strategies
*Practical illustrations.
Robert Flood is a renowned and authoritative expert in the field of management. He has implemented systemic management in a wide range of organisations in many continents and lectured by invitation in 25 countries, including Japan and the USA. Professor Flood has featured on many radio and TV programs. His book Beyond TQM was nominated for the 'IMC Management Book of the Year 1993'.

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203028551-1

Effective and meaningful operation of any organisational set up nowadays is a tough occupation. For commercial enterprises competition has become a global phenomenon. For Governmental agencies the belt has tightened with an increase in public accountability and fiscal control. For non-profit making organisations purpose and identity often have become increasingly elusive. For all organisational set-ups the information matrix within which they operate has taken on a mind-blowing sophistication. Furthermore, consumers have become acutely aware of their rights. And wide-ranging social issues such as gender, race and disability, are found on many organisational agendas. All of these things and many more have contributed to an organisational upheaval that has changed what counts as relevant management, from organisational management to the operations that it ultimately supports.

As Brenda Gourley states on the back cover, the world has become far more complex and far less certain. Traditional management strategies that seemed sufficient as recently as a generation ago are found wanting today. To survive and/or to improve in the current era requires up-to-date knowledge of contemporary management strategies as well as skills and competencies needed to work with them. Failure to perform in this way will have a detrimental impact on organisational viability. Commercial organisations might as well hand over business to their competitors. Governmental agencies might well grind to a halt. Non-profit making organisations might quietly disappear. It is in the interest of all organisational set ups and indeed us as individuals, to seek guidance from contemporary management strategies in the struggle for effective and meaningful practice. One potentially important strategy is the application of systemic thinking.

Systemic thinking hit the headlines in the 1990s with Peter Senge’s book about learning organisations called The Fifth Discipline. The learning organisation is said by Peter Drucker to be the organisational concept of the future. A learning organisation in fact is one that continually expands its capacity to create its own future. Senge argues that five disciplines underpin learning organisations. The fifth discipline is systemic thinking that provides substance to the other four disciplines and hence to the learning organisation as a whole. Systemic thinking helps us sense as well as appreciate our connection to a wider whole. We can only meaningfully understand ourselves by contemplating the whole of which we are an integral part. Systemic thinking is the discipline which makes visible that our actions are interrelated to other people’s actions in patterns of behaviour and are not merely isolated events.

Senge, however, stuck close to a narrow, albeit important, strand of systemic thinking called system dynamics. There exist many more accounts about the systemic character of the natural and social worlds – e.g. complexity theory, open systems theory, organisational cybernetics, interactive planning, soft systems approach, and critical systemic thinking. Each one yields different and potentially valuable insights. Together, they offer a diversity and strength vital to our ability to cope within an exceedingly complex world.

Of particular additional interest to this book is complexity theory that, like Senge’s work, also came to the fore in the 1990s. It promises exciting new possibilities for the way that the natural and social worlds might be understood. Complexity theory begins, as does Senge’s work, by acknowledging the interrelated nature of things as well as emergence, where the whole is experienced as greater than the sum of its parts. However, it recognises a special form of emergence called spontaneous self-organisation. What exactly gives rise to spontaneous self-organisation is difficult if not impossible to know, at least by the human mind.

Complexity theory appreciates the world as a whole, comprising many, many interrelationships expressed in endless occurrences of spontaneous self-organisation. The great extent and dynamic nature of the interrelationships and spontaneous self-organisation means that it is only possible for us to get to grips with some things and only those that are local to us in space and time. Local in space and time refers respectively to ‘things that we are immediately involved in’ (it is not a geographic concept) and ‘not very far into the future’. In straightforward terms, we have a restricted understanding about what is going on around us, and a limited capability to know what will happen next.

Systemic thinking thus takes issue with grand narratives of strategic planners who think globally and believe that with intention they can create a better future. In their reports they innocently indulge in fictional script writing. There is no more chance of their long-term plans coming true than a Star Trek movie – it could happen for all we know, but it seems most unlikely. A refreshing and far more in touch conceptualisation of ‘management and organisation’ based on systemic thinking is desperately needed.

Both Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and complexity theory suggest if not fully explain a hidden order, or simplicity, in the seemingly impenetrable complexity of the world. Tools of systemic thinking facilitate learning about this order. However, it is not realistic to believe that we can learn about all the things that might affect us, or what is going to happen as things unfold. We will always be faced with uncertainty.

If The Fifth Discipline and complexity theory have their say about uncertainty, then the way we think about and approach ‘management and organisation’ will change. We will operate in conscious recognition of the following three paradoxes:

• We will not struggle to manage over things – we will manage within the unmanageable.
• We will not battle to organise the totality – we will organise within the unorganisable.
• We will not simply know things – but we will know of the unknowable.

Now the title of this book comes clear. It is about rethinking The Fifth Discipline – i.e. getting to grips with systemic thinking – and, with systemic thinking, learning within the unknowable. Hence we have, Rethinking The Fifth Discipline: Learning Within The Unknowable.

This book is organised into two parts. Part I offers a state of the art account of The Fifth Discipline. Peter Senge’s work on learning organisations is reviewed and made sense of by its comparison to the concepts and approaches of five other key systemic thinkers – Bertalanffy’s open systems theory, Beer’s organisational cybernetics, Ackoff’s interactive planning, Checkland’s soft systems approach, and Churchman’s critical systemic thinking. What emerges from this review is a new order of thought. The emerging whole opens up a way to Part II and to complexity theory. Part II is presented in three sections – concepts, approach, and a detailed practical animation. A summary of chapters follows.

Part I

2 Senge's ‘The Fifth Discipline'

The book The Fifth Discipline is Peter Senge’s account of the learning organisation. For Senge, five disciplines are necessary to bring about a learning organisation – personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking (referred to as systemic thinking in this book). Systemic thinking is the discipline that makes as one all five disciplines. Each discipline is introduced in this chapter with the emphasis placed on systemic thinking, the central theme of the current book. The resulting overview establishes Senge’s framework of thought. Each of the next five chapters introduces the work of one additional key systemic thinker and makes comparisons with Senge’s learning organisation.

3 Bertalanffy's open systems theory

Ludwig von Bertalanffy was a biologist whose organismic conception of biology otherwise known as open systems theory came to pervade many disciplines, including ‘management and organisation’, the impact being vastly more than the sum of its parts. He was the first person on the European continent to develop open systems theory in biology as a working hypothesis for research. It is central to his publications from the mid-1920s. Open systems theory profoundly influenced the way organisations are conceived and consequently managed. It helped to shape management and organisation theory in the 1950s and 1960s. It pervades management practice today. Von Bertalanffy was also the prime mover of general system theory that subsequently emerged in his work in the late 1930s. General system theory aims to reveal through the open systems concept the interdisciplinary nature of systemic thinking. Von Bertalanffy from the 1950s until his death in 1972 applied open systems theory and general system theory to a wide range of social studies, the result becoming known as his systems view of people.

4 Beer's organisational cybernetics

Stafford Beer is essentially a cybernetician working in the field of operational research and management sciences (ORMS). Beer argues that techniques of ORMS have high utility only when employed in the light of a scientific description of the whole situation. Whole situation descriptions come through models built with cybernetic logic. These models must be homomorphic or isomorphic (i.e. they draw direct correspondence to reality) not metaphorical or analogical. The models are formulated using tools of rigorous science – mathematics, statistics and logic. Beer’s most famous homomorphism, the viable system model (VSM), draws correspondence between ‘management and organisation’, and human brain structure and function. The VSM stipulates rules whereby an organisation (biological or social) is ‘survival worthy’ – it is regulated, learns, adapts and evolves. Beer invented team syntegrity to complement the VSM when applied in organisational contexts, adding his statement of participatory democracy.

5 Ackoff's interactive planning

The work of Russell L. Ackoff has made and continues to make a significant impact upon many fields in ‘management and organisation’. He largely codefined with C. West Churchman operations research in its early years (the 1950s). By the 1970s, however, he concluded that operations researchers had failed to change with the times. An operational and tactical mode dominated their work, whilst corporate managers had progressed into a strategic mode. Ackoff, who admits he is market led, responded in accordance with his observations. He moved out of operations research and began a new phase of work that addressed purposeful systems of corporations and systems of interacting problems (‘the mess’) that characterise them. By the 1980s, Ackoff had consolidated his ideas in a participatory approach to planning, labelled interactive planning. Interactive planning encourages people to conceive unconstrained idealised designs and to invent ways of realising them. In the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s, Ackoff’s concern for participation surfaced in another guise, in a structural notion for a circular organisation. The circular organisation is in fact an expression of a democratic hierarchy.

6 Checkland's soft systems approach

Peter B. Checkland is an action researcher who focused attention on systemic thinking. Commitment to action research began during his initial fifteen years’ career at ICI Fibres. He consulted literature on management sciences as he assumed increasingly senior positions with management responsibility. He found that the literature failed to resonate with his experiences and needs as a manager. Subsequently, Checkland chose to research into this dilemma and took up a Professorship at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. He launched an action research programme and developed through this a soft systems approach. Three strands might represent the main output of his programme – an interpretive-based systemic theory, an original brand of action research, and principles for action that he labelled soft systems methodology (SSM).

7 Churchman's critical systemic thinking

C. West Churchman is a philosopher with an intense moral commitment to employ systemic thinking for the betterment of humanity. Along with Ack-off, he largely co-defined operations research in its early years (the 1950s). For Churchman, operations research was always a systemic activity. Employing mixed teams coupled to an interest in parts of the organisation and how they might interact, is an early expression of this. Churchman might also be considered the main founder of the critical systemic approach. After operations research he developed a caravan of critical systemic concepts and concerns. These include an anatomy of system teleology and, of particular significance, ways of exploring and bounding action areas. He argued that improvement, say in terms of efficiency and/or effectiveness, always raises questions of an ethical nature. He also stressed the importance of securing improvement. More broadly, he developed a vision of systemic wisdom – thought combined with a concern for ethics; and hope – a spiritual belief in an ethical future. Churchman’s work can be criticised as esoteric, yet he still impressed on the minds of many researchers the recurrent systemic question of whether they can justify their choices and actions.

8 Senge's ‘The Fifth Discipline' revisited

In this chapter, Senge’s The Fifth Discipline is revisited in the light of comparisons made with the works of Bertalanffy, Beer, Ackoff, Checkland 6 and Churchman. A critique is put together that points to important insights uncovered by these five systemic thinkers which Senge does not fully take into account. Bringing together their insights with Senge’s insights results in a whole with much more potential than its parts in isolation. The emerging whole opens up a way to complexity theory and to Part II of the book.

Part II Concepts

9 Towards systemic thinking

In this chapter the scene is set for a thorough reworking of systemic thinking. To start the ball rolling the conventional wisdom of reductionism and the counter-view, systemic thinking, are introduced and juxtaposed. Reductionism breaks things into parts and attempts to deal with each part in isolation. It has made and continues to make a significant contribution to traditional science and technology. The experiment of reductionism in organisational and societal settings, however, has not been plain sailing. It has struggled primarily because it misunderstands the nature of human beings (yet it remains a dominant wisdom). Social settings are different and exhibit spiritual and systemic qualities. Spiritualism appreciates the wholeness of human being. Systemic thinking builds holistic pictures of social settings. It suggests systemic ways of coping with them that challenge the very idea of problems, solutions, and normal organisational life.

10 T...