Peter Senge

[Part 1 of 2]

EDITORS NOTE: The Shambhala Sun is not one of the first places I would look for a discussion of management and leadership theory. But the following interview, conducted by Sun Editor in Chief Melvin McLeod provides some great insights for managers at any level.

The Sun, a Canadian/U.S. magazine, publishes monthly from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, focusing on "Buddhism, Culture, Meditation, Life."

[This interview is republished at WorkTracks with the express permission of the Shambhala Sun. The Sun retains all copyrights. Reproduction by any means is prohibited.]
© Copyright 2001 Shambhala Sun

Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley are renowned organizational theorists. Yet their agenda is surprisingly spiritual. Anyone who cares about the quality of our lives at work will find what they say important and inspiring. 

MELVIN MCLEOD (Editor, The Shambhala Sun): Dr. Senge, you talk to managers about the importance of "disciplines" and "personal mastery." You describe organizations as "communities of practice." There seems to be a strong element of spiritual practice in your approach.

PETER SENGE: Increasingly, we’re directly incorporating into our work different practices that have been around for a long time, such as various types of meditation. It started with the work on dialogue. We found that dialogue often involved silence, and so maybe we needed to actually cultivate the capacity to sit in silence. And guess what? That started to look a lot like traditional forms of meditation or contemplation.

So we’ve become more and more out front about this, although it’s always been there. Though we had been doing the work described in The Fifth Discipline for ten or fifteen years before the book was published, we hadn’t used the word "discipline." It was only in the writing of the book that it finally hit me that what we were talking about was discipline, in the very same spirit in which the word has been used in the creative arts or in spiritual traditions for thousands of years. That people might have a potential or a talent, but they can’t cultivate it without discipline.

You know, organizations are embodiments of the human desire to affiliate and be together, and that desire brings us face to face with complex, multiple dimensions of our existence. I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That’s a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace. It does depend on them. It does depend on their convictions, their clarity, their personal commitment to their own cultivation. And on the other hand, it doesn’t depend on them. It’s an inherently collective phenomenon.

You might say that organizations are one way for us to practice what it means to live as a collective being, not just as an individual being. That’s tough, but I think that’s what the discipline of working together is ultimately about. There are issues and difficulties that only manifest when we put ourselves in a situation where we’re vulnerable to being in a collective.

MARGARET WHEATLEY: I love this paradox that Peter expresses. When I was working at Gampo Abbey, a Buddhist monastery, on their organizational processes, the principle we came up with was that everything we learned on the meditation cushion, we could take into the practice of organizing together. So much of what comes out of dialogue is actually a fairly weak imitation of skills that we learn in meditation—being aware, listening, letting go, not taking things as they appear. It was very fruitful to notice that all the characteristics of a good mediator can be brought into the collective experience of trying to run an organization.

MCLEOD: If I can summarize the view that both of you seem to present in your writings, it’s that change is the fundamental reality, that organizations suffer because they solidify the situation, that they can achieve harmony if they work successfully with openness and uncertainty, and that there’s a path of discipline and practice by which they can do that. It sounds like the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, just applied to organizations instead of individuals.

WHEATLEY: Well, you’re not the only one who’s noticed this [laughter]. I think that both Peter and I have both found there’s great depth in understanding life from a Buddhist perspective.

Speaking for myself, my awareness of change and uncertainty came through my studies in biology, and just from growing older. That awareness of the continuous change called life led me to very ancient spiritual traditions, because our present Western mindset has forgotten that life is change. Instead, it promises us relief from uncertainty and the ability to control everything. It’s like a 300-year-old case of mistaken identity: we actually thought that we could take over life and remake it according to our own needs.

Once I looked past the Western cultural tradition, it was a great comfort and teaching to understand that most other cultures—not only Buddhism but all indigenous cultures—have well understood that life is a process of continuous change. Life does not organize according to our demands. There are great elemental forces of both creation and disruption we need to understand so we can work with them.

When we encounter change, we have to be able to understand our own habitual patterns and be willing to move into a different way of being. One of the dilemmas that hits us in organizations is that we might be quite willing to change, to deal with chaos and uncertainty as part of life, but there are very few organizational beliefs to support us. I don’t find a lot of organizations where people at the senior level are comfortable with uncertainty. This is where the old Western mindset still comes in. We still want the people who lead us to save us from uncertainty. It’s not only the leaders themselves who have to change, but also our idea of what we want leaders for.

SENGE: One of the questions that has become central to my thinking is this: "Is it meaningful at this point to consider whether there is such a thing as collective cultivation?" I use the term "cultivation" in this context to mean deep development, becoming a human being. So, can a body of people working together—even the word "organization" can limit us a little, because it’s starting to sound like a thing—be committed as a collective to this cultivation?

My understanding of Buddhism points to three aspects of cultivation: a commitment to meditation practice, a commitment to study, and of course, a commitment to service, to dedicating your life to something beyond yourself. It’s a very evocative question to ask what these three dimensions of cultivation would look like in a collective situation. It’s not the same thing as saying, "Everybody meditate," because meditation is just one of three dimensions of personal cultivation. As I say, this has become a very meaningful question in the last year.

MCLEOD: Isn’t there also an effectiveness argument here? In Buddhism, it’s said that you can be skillful only when you have wisdom, which is seeing the truth that nothing is solid or permanent. Isn’t that also true for the organization, that its intelligence or skill comes from seeing change, and if it sees the world as fixed and unchanging it won’t be effective or successful?

SENGE: The only problem I have with your question is the word "seeing." You don’t get to prajna, wisdom, just because you want it. Again, cultivation is essential. Similarly, it’s not enough for organizations to want to be able to change. It’s not enough to just read the right books and adopt a new belief system that says, okay, everything is changing. The real question is, when all is said and done, can you really operate that way?

So it’s not simply a matter of good intentions. As it would be in any discipline-based religion or artistic field, it’s a matter of hard work and knowing how to do it. Do you have the tools? Do you have the methods? Do you have teachers or mentors? All the things that help a person along any developmental path.

WHEATLEY: It’s a very big leap for organizations to move from the realization that they have to cope with change, to the understanding that if you’re going to be in a continuously changing environment, then all of the ways in which you have learned to manage have to be examined. Do they give you the awareness and information and mindfulness that allows you to stay in the dance? Because as Peter said, organizations still don’t have the tools, the analytic methods, that actually support people in this process of continuous change. As much as we say we want to change our organizations to make them more adaptive, we’re still not noticing the things that would make us graceful dancers.

SENGE: I think this is a non-trivial point we’re making, and I’ll tell you why. It cuts against an awful lot of our approach in the West to learning and change. We have a tendency to think if we read it, we can do it. If we’ve got the idea, we’ve learned it. On another level, we know that’s all nonsense: nobody learns to play the violin by picking it up and saying "By golly, I’m going to be a violinist." But we think people learn to manage change by going off to the two- or three-day seminar or reading a book. We’re talking about real, 180-degree change—instead of trying to control everything, we’re learning to align our intentions with emerging realities. This is a profound shift in our way of being. You’re not going to be able to do that just by having the idea in your head that it’s something that you ought to do.

WHEATLEY: One of the important aspects of this practice is time—time to reflect, time to meditate. And time is something that has just disappeared.

Click here to go to Part Two of
Changing How We Work Together

Peter Senge, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chairman of the Society for Organizational Learning. His best-selling book, The Fifth Discipline (1990), has been called one of the most important management books of the twentieth-century. He is also co-author of The Dance of Change (1999) and Schools that Learn (2000).

Margaret Wheatley, Ed.D., is the author of Leadership and the New Science and co-author of A Simpler Way. She is president of the Berkana Institute, a non-profit foundation supporting the discovery of new organizational forms, and a principal in Kellner-Rogers & Wheatley Inc., an international consulting firm.

Click here to go to Part Two of
Changing How We Work Together

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