Top 54 Peter M. Senge Quotes
#1. Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines.
Peter M. Senge
#2. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for building learning organizations.
Peter M. Senge
#3. People get used to having experts who can solve their problems for them; people can then easily lose motivation to develop their own capacities.
Peter M. Senge
#5. Collaboration is vital to sustain what we call profound or really deep change, because without it, organizations are just overwhelmed by the forces of the status quo.
Peter M. Senge
#6. We need to learn the disciplines that will help cultivate the wisdom of the group and larger social systems.
Peter M. Senge
#7. The core leadership strategy is simple: be a model.
Peter M. Senge
#8. If we cannot express our
assumptions explicitly in ways that
others can understand and build
upon, there can be no larger process
of testing those assumptions and
building public knowledge.
Peter M. Senge
#9. Conflict manipulation is the favored strategy of people who incessantly worry about failure, of managers who excel at motivational chats that point out the highly unpleasant consequences if the company's goals are not achieved, and of social movements that attempt to mobilize people through fear.
Peter M. Senge
#10. When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that someone screwed up.
Peter M. Senge
#11. A vision not consistent with values that people live by day by day will not only fail to inspire genuine enthusiasm, it will often foster outright cynicism. These
Peter M. Senge
#12. The most effective people are those who can "hold" their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly
Peter M. Senge
#13. It is not the absence of defensiveness that characterizes learning teams but the way defensiveness is faced
Peter M. Senge
#14. [ ... ] most of the problems faced by humankind concerns [concerned] our inability to grasp and manage the increasingly complex systems of our world.
Peter M. Senge
#15. Nature (and that includes us) is not made up of parts within wholes. It is made up of wholes within wholes. All boundaries, national boundaries included, are fundamentally arbitrary. We invent them and then, ironically, we find ourselves trapped within them. But
Peter M. Senge
#17. Learning organizations are possible because, deep down, we are all learners. No one has to teach an infant to learn. In fact, no one has to teach infants anything. They are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learners who learn to walk, speak, and pretty much run their households all on their own.
Peter M. Senge
#18. When asked what they want, many adults will say what they want to get rid of.
Peter M. Senge
#19. Breakthroughs come when people learn how to take the time to stop and examine their assumptions.
Peter M. Senge
#20. The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared "pictures of the future" that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counterproductiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.
Peter M. Senge
#21. People with high levels of personal mastery ... cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye.
Peter M. Senge
#22. How can we stop going faster while our ability to see further ahead is decreasing?
Peter M. Senge
#23. Mastery of creative tension brings out the capacity for perseverance and patience. Time is an ally.
Peter M. Senge
#24. The bad leader is he who the people despise; the good leader is he who the people praise; the great leader is he who the people say, We did it ourselves
Peter M. Senge
#25. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life
Peter M. Senge
#26. Vision is an idle dream at best and a cynical delusion at worst - but not an achievable end
Peter M. Senge
#27. People don't resist change. They resist being changed.
Peter M. Senge
#28. The committed person doesn't play by the rules of the game. He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving the vision, he will find ways to change the rules.
Peter M. Senge
#29. leaders' work as teachers often starts with their recognition of an important capacity that is lacking in an organization.
Peter M. Senge
#30. The world is made of Circles
And we think in straight Lines
Peter M. Senge
#31. We will never transform the prevailing system of management without transforming our prevailing system of education. They are the same system.
Peter M. Senge
#32. Business and human endeavors are systems ... we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.
Peter M. Senge
#33. It took a scenario that he was going to die for Fred to wake up. It took that kind of shock for his life to be transformed. Maybe that's what needs to happen for all of us, for everyone who lives on Earth. That could be what a requiem scenario offers us.
Peter M. Senge
#34. Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) has brought me in touch with hundreds more such practitioners.
Peter M. Senge
#35. alignment is the necessary condition before empowering the individual will empower the whole team. Empowering the individual when there is a relatively low level of alignment worsens the chaos and makes managing the team even more difficult:
Peter M. Senge
#36. Great teachers create space for learning and invite people into that space.
Peter M. Senge
#37. That's why I think that cultivation, 'becoming a real human being,' really is the primary leadership issue of our time, but on a scale never required before. It's a very old idea that may actually hold the key to a new age of 'global democracy.
Peter M. Senge
#38. The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than the competition.
Peter M. Senge
#39. Intuition eludes the grasp of linear thinking, with its exclusive emphasis on cause and effect that are close in time and space. The result is that most of our intuitions don't make sense - that is, they can't be explained in terms of linear logic. Very
Peter M. Senge
#40. We say, "That's a very interesting idea," when we have no intention of taking the idea seriously.
Peter M. Senge
#41. In the presence of greatness, pettiness disappears. In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails.
Peter M. Senge
#42. [ ... ] vision without systems thinking ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there.
Peter M. Senge
#43. Love is the only emotion that expands intelligence,
Peter M. Senge
#44. Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision
Peter M. Senge
#45. You cannot have a learning organization without shared vision. Without a pull toward some goal which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming.
Peter M. Senge
#46. When young people develop basic leadership and collaborative learning skills, they can be a formidable force for change.
Peter M. Senge
#47. I believe that, the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best. Deming saw this clearly,
Peter M. Senge
#48. Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist - someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.
Peter M. Senge
#49. But it does imply that the search for scapegoats - a particularly alluring pastime in individualistic cultures such as ours in the United States - is a blind alley.
Peter M. Senge
#51. The earth is an indivisible whole, just as each of us is an indivisible whole.
Peter M. Senge
#52. You cannot force commitment, what you can do ... You nudge a little here, inspire a little there, and provide a role model. Your primary influence is the environment you create.
Peter M. Senge
#53. To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive.
Peter M. Senge
#54. Until you do the inner work of learning how to see with "your eyes and your heart open," as Kabat-Zinn puts it, deep problems will persist.
Peter M. Senge
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