Personal mastery: Continually clarifying and refining our personal visions, and seeing reality objectively.
Building shared vision: The capacity to translate individual visions into collective visions that galvanize a group of people based on what they’ll really like to create together.
Mental models: Learning to unearth our own personal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface so that we see how they impact our actions.
Team learning: Spending time together to suspend assumptions and come up with new ideas.
Systems thinking: What causes patterns of behavior? It is a framework for seeing the whole picture instead of individual things. The purpose is to make the full picture clearer, to see patterns between components or subsystems.
Feedback: Any reciprocal flow of influence. Think of circles of influence in order to get things done, rather than linear processes.
In building learning organizations there is no ultimate destination or end state, only a lifelong journey. “This work requires great reservoirs of patience… but I believe the results we achieve are more sustainable because the people involved have really grown. It also prepares people for the ongoing journey. As we learn, grow, and tackle more systemic challenges, things do not get easier.”
— The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge