The Learning Organization - Systems Thinking

7 Pages 1692 Words

ion of a Learning Organization upon which the four other disciplines function. Systems thinking being the primary focus, this paper will further review some of the tools and barriers associated with systems thinking along with various characteristics that make it an essential discipline.
Systems’ thinking does not come without barriers. In fact, it is the most difficult of the five disciplines within a learning organization. Skills to analyze the world form a systems perspective do not come naturally. They must be learned. Including typical resistance to change in systems, there are three inherent inabilities to clearly perceiving systems. They are spatial blindness, temporal blindness and relationship blindness. Spatial blindness is the failure to grasp the “big picture.” Through concentration on details of the specific parts of either a system or only the whole, but never on the connectiveness of everything as a whole. Temporal blindness focuses on results from the immediate compounded by ignorance of the past and lack of the future. It prevents learning from what has occurred in the past and blocks effective future planning. The third principal is relationship blindness. People o...