Incoherently systematic, and myopically optimistic…
My reading lately has been directed by my studies (towards an MSc in Library and Information Studies, since you ask); The Fifth Discipline (I keep wanting to call it The Fifth Element) by Peter Senge is one of the most influential management books around, specifically directed at the development of ‘learning organisations’. The reason it’s of relevance to Library and Information Studies is that that discipline is now largely concerned with a holistic approach to the management of information and knowledge within organisations, rather than with the management of a discrete physical library space; the last book I read, Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice, is also specifically concerned with how learning takes place within organisations, although his theorisation is broader, and encompasses all potential forms of social grouping. In fact, many of the most important differences between the two books can probably be ascribed to the fact that Wenger is a social scientist and that Senge is a ‘systems scientist’, but there is rather more to it than that.
It’s a complex book, and I won’t pretend to offer a complete or rigorous critique; this is just, as ever, my response, the thoughts that I’m having shortly after reading it. I hope that my take on it is reasonably reflective and analytical, but I’m always ready to concede that I’m wrong and adjust my views. In broad outline, the book describes an approach to management that is much more co-operative than standard practice, and which applies itself to the health and values of the organisation as a whole, rather than to the detailed prescription of procedure. Senge argues that an enterprise’s sustainability (he is largely concerned with commercial concerns, although many of the examples he uses are drawn from the third sector as well) is dependent on its capacity to learn as an organisation, to be creative in itself, rather than simply capitalising on the individuated creativity of its employees. A horizontal, non-hierarchical structure will enable an organisation to engage the whole of its staff, and to establish a set of values in which all its members have a stake, he suggests; but at the heart of his proposals lies what he refers to as ‘systems thinking’.
He makes the point that surface appearances rarely reveal the fundamental processes that bring them about, and outlines a number of ‘systems archetypes’, simple flow charts that characterise processes as varieties of cyclical reinforcing processes, in combinations of various sorts. I won’t examine this system of thought in detail, but it certainly provides some useful thinking tools. Alongside this set of analytical models he describes four disciplines of the learning organisation (systems thinking is the fifth, which ties the other four together), seven learning disabilities, and the eleven laws of the fifth discipline. Together these ideas make up a system of management which aims to cut through the entrenched attitudes and hidebound commitment to established methods which hamper so many organisations from adapting to rapidly changing conditions.
The totality of Senge’s system enables him to articulate a vision of positive change, in which the long-term viability of an organisation is contingent on its willingness to embrace much more enlightened values than are considered normal or necessary within mainstream capitalism (a word, I should point out, that is little if at all used, and does not appear in the index). He paints a picture of a world in which corporations address themselves as directly to ecological and social stewardship as they do to profit, because they understand that these are mutually dependent and reinforcing factors; a happy, healthy workforce will share their creativity with the organisation as a whole, sustaining a much longer term profitability than short term savings in staffing costs. In fact, he points out that the real values that underpin the growth of the most successful organisations are visions focussed, not on profit, but on products (or whatever other work they do, if they are not manufacturing concerns), and the value of those products to their end users. A true ‘learning organisation’ does not place profit among its aims, but considers it a means to achieving them; social and ecological goods that the organisation might bring about will be possible only if it makes a profit. This, needless to say, all seems wonderful, enlightened, optimistic and hopelessly naive.
The real differences between Senge’s model of how organisations operate, as systems that either work well or that are hampered by identifiable faults, and Wenger’s model, in which certain processes can be ascribed to certain conditions, but which functions irrespective of the valuations that are placed on it, is that Wenger offers a complete theoretical model of the relationship between individuals, communities, organisations, learning and identity, whereas Senge has, as far as I can discern, no coherent social theorisation for his system at all. The result of this is that although Senge arrives at many of the same insights as Wenger, they frequently remain tacit, or have no clear place in his system as a whole; for instance, in relation to learning he says that ’[i]t is about becoming a “bicycle rider” not just riding one time…’ (p.284), but fails to locate this close relationship between identity and learning among the other elements of the learning organisation, or even to note its broader importance.
In the introduction he quotes the quotes the management theorist W. Edwards Deming, who said to him ‘[w]e will never transform the prevailing system of management without transforming our prevailing system of education. They are the same system’. Senge goes on to note that ‘[s]o far as I know, his insight into this connection between work and school was original’ (he is discussing an exchange that took place in 1990). This is pretty much emblematic of the book’s faults, as a work of theory at any rate. How he could presume to write about the relationship between learning or education and the systems of social organisation which operate in the workplace, from a position of complete ignorance regarding the long history of critical thinking in precisely this area, I can only speculate. Clearly, he is isolated from a whole web of discourses that are directly relevant to the object of his discussion; I’m not going to make any assumptions, but it’s possibly instructive to note that most of those discourses are associated with the political left.
‘Politics’ is something Senge touches on, while discussing his ‘systems archetypes’, but not something he gets into at the level of values. On p.86 he states that ‘[t]he state-controlled economy fails because it severs the multiple self-correcting processes that operate in a free market system’ There are several obvious problems with this statement: firstly where is the free market system we can observe in order to say what processes operate there? ClearlySenge is not willing to examine this plank of capitalist ideology too closely. Secondly, although the states in which centrally planned economies operated did fail in the late 1980s, at the point of their collapse their citizens were (in most cases, other than in the most kleptocratic regimes) subject to far less pronounced economic and social inequalities than those in capitalist economies. To this day, the US (the ‘free-est’ of ‘free’ markets) remains one of the most unequal societies in the developed world, with many millions living in poverty. It seems the question of what represents success or failure in an economy is beyond Senge’s purview: is success to be seen in an economic model’s capacity to endure and proliferate, or in its capacity to provide for its citizens? But Senge does address himself to precisely this question when discussing organisational values; it is as though he has not fully taken on board many of the things he says, for all that he seems to say them sincerely and to accord them some centrality in his vision.
An entire chapter of the book (entitled ‘Mental Models’) is dedicated to saying, in some technical detail, that we should examine our own assumptions; I can’t disagree with this observation, but it seems as though Senge a) thinks this is some kind of remarkable insight which will come as a great revelation to his readership, and b) hasn’t really applied this observation to his own thinking. I frequently found myself feeling as though he was describing me when he outlined the kind of thinking which is needed to build a learning organisation, which is somewhat ironic, given the pains to which I’ve gone to avoid all kinds of organisations throughout my life; his idea of ‘Personal Mastery’ (one of the five disciplines) seems to describe someone who is reflective and analytical in their thinking. I can only guess that he was writing for an audience that he regarded as singularly unreflective, as blindly dedicated to whatever thinking it happened to have inherited. I don’t think managers are stupid, and I don’t think Senge thinks they are, but it’s instructive to reflect that poor people don’t generally need telling that there’s a system underlying the seemingly arbitrary forces to which they are subject.
Senge shows many ways that large corporations can be steered in more sustainable directions, and ways that enlightened individuals can work within them to improve their practices; but he avoids fundamental questions, such as whether it is a sensible strategy for a society to organise capital into such large concentrations, whose interests are served by such a strategy, and whether essential needs such as the production and distribution of food are better met by such huge global arrangements than by smaller local ones. He skirts issues as though he is either unable to see them, or afraid to sound too controversial.
Senge’s understanding appears to be piecemeal, and for all that he claims to see the world in terms of systems, and to take ecologies as a model, he continues to rely heavily on ‘black-box’ ideological terms like ‘human nature’ and ‘the environment’; in the latter case he certainly talks about seeing ourselves as part of a system, but his language keeps him outside and separate. There is a profound, in my view misplaced, optimism at the heart of the work, a hope that capitalism will be reformed by a movement of enlightened attitudes and practices growing to a critical mass within its managing classes; but the insight with which Senge begins, that ‘systems control behaviour’ to use his crude terminology, does not seem to lead him to an appreciation of the profound structural forces opposed to reform within any hierarchical social system, and within capitalism in particular. His naiveté is touching, and his enthusiasm infectious, but the extent to which this book has impinged on the working lives of people around the world seems mainly manifest in their having to swallow ridiculous terms like ‘visioning’ at tedious meetings in which they are encouraged to ‘take ownership’ of decisions which more senior managers have already made behind closed doors. However, I have taken away from my reading of his book an appreciation of the good will and progressive thinking that exists within commercial concerns, often at a high level; we all live within capitalism, and whether we believe in the possibility of meaningful reform or not, this is the place where we have to build our models for what comes next. As things stand, the most communitarian and non-hierarchical of social groups will still need to generate a cash income for the foreseeable future, and there are some good ideas here for the application of co-operative social thinking within the existing systems. The Fifth Discipline has certainly got me thinking, and annoying as Senge’smessianic tendencies are, I will carry many insights and a deeper understanding of capitalism away from it.