Personal Vision

Coming soon.

Personal Mastery

Personal Mastery

Peter Senge describes personal mastery as “approaching one’s life as a creative work”—“living life from a creative, as opposed to a reactive viewpoint.” This involves two “movements”:

1. Clarifying what is important to us, and
2. Learning to see current reality more clearly—and more honestly and directly.

Please do note that what Senge is saying personal mastery is. It is not dominance—as over people or things. But is can be a special level of proficiency—as demonstrated by a master craftsman who coaxes a work of art from the materials he has at hand.

Senge identifies several characteristics of those achieving personal mastery. These persons have the following:

• A special sense of purpose that lies behind their visions and goals. Their vision is “a calling,” not just a good idea.
  An inquisitive and committed nature.
• An ability to see reality more accurately.
• A sense of connectedness to life, to others and to larger creative processes, which they can influence but not unilaterally control.

These people “live in a continual learning mode. They never arrive.” Senge says that personal mastery is a process “the journey is the reward”—a life-long discipline. Perhaps paradoxically, people with a high level of personal mastery are also acutely aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, their growth areas—and yet they are deeply self-confident.

Next week, I'll talk more about Personal Vision.

The fifth discipline

The 5 disciplines of a learning organization: An overview

Peter Senge describes a learning organization as the one "that is continually expanding its
capacity to create its future.” In such organizations, people continually expand their capacity
to create the results they truly desire, new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured,
collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to learn together.
The organizations that will truly excel will be the ones that discover how to tap people's
commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.

Before looking into the 5 disciplines, lets look at the 11 laws that Peter Senge presents:

1. Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.
2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
3. Behavior grows better before it grows worse.
4. The easy way out usually leads back in.
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 the least obvious.
9. You can have your cake and eat it too–but not all at once.
10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
11. There is no blame.

Peter also lists the following 7 learning disabilities that are often the cause of organizational failure:

1. I am my position
2. The enemy is out there
3. The illusion of taking charge
4. The fixation on events
5. The parable of the boiled frog
6. The delusion of learning from experience
7. The myth of the management team

Now lets start looking at how the 5 disciplines gives us some tools, methodology to
overcome the learning disabilities and grow a learning organization.

1. Mental Models: They are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or
images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. the discipline of working
with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of
the world, to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny.

2. Personal Mastery: It is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of
focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. The discipline of personal
mastery starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us, of living our lives in the service of our
highest aspirations.

3. Shared Vision: Senge defines this discipline as the “picture of the future.” A shared vision is intuitive and
instinctive; it’s not something that’s learned by rote. A shared vision is also a collective experience -
it’s the cumulative total of each participant’s personal vision. Shared Vision foster genuine commitment and
enrollment, rather than compliance.

4. Team Learning: The discipline of team learning starts with "dialogue," the capacity of members of a
team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine "thinking together." (Dialogue differs from the
more common "discussion," which has its roots with "percussion" and "concussion," literally a heaving
of ideas back and forth in a winner-takes-all competition.) Team learning is vital because teams, not
individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. "Unless teams can learn, the
organization cannot learn."

5. Systems Thinking: The world is not created of separate unrelated forces. However, individuals
have difficulty seeing the whole pattern. Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us
see how to change things effectively and with the least amount of effort, by finding the leverage points in a system

Senge’s five components of a learning organization are all interrelated. Personal mastery, shared vision, team learning,  and mental models make up the foundation of the organization. And systems thinking is the glue that holds it all together. Building a shared vision fosters commitment to the long-term. Mental models focus on the openness needed to unearth  shortcomings in our present ways of seeing the world. Team learning develops the skills of groups of people to look for the larger picture that lies beyond individual perspectives. And personal mastery fosters the personal motivation to continually learn how our actions affect our world.

In the next post, lets look at Personal Mastery in detail.



Thank you very much,


RamP!
ramp [dot] ramp [at] gmail [dot] com

From The Emerging Future

This blog is about learning to learn, learning organizations, personal mastery and the like. It is influenced by pioneering works of Peter Senge (Fifth Discipline) and Otto Schramer (Theory U). I'd be sharing my experiences in the life long journey of learning.

RamP!
ramp [dot] ramp [at] gmail [dot] com