The Fifth Discipline
- Excerpts
- Lessons of the Beer Game (page 40)
- Lesson 1 - Structure Influences Behavior
- Different people in the same structure tend to produce qualitatively similar results.
- When there are problems, or performance fails to live up to what is intended, it is easy to find someone or something to blame.
- But, more often than we realize, systems cause their own crises, not external forces or individuals' mistakes.
- Lesson 2 - Structure in Human Systems is Subtle
- We tend to think of "structure" as external constraints on the individual. But, structure in complex living systems, such as the "structure" of the multiple "systems" in a human body (for example, the cardiovascular and neuromuscular) means the basic interrelationships that control behavior.
- In human systems, structure includes how people make decisions—the "operating policies" whereby we translate perceptions, goals, rules, and norms into actions.
- Lesson 3 - Leverage Often Comes from New Ways of Thinking
- In human systems, people often have potential leverage that they do not exercise because they focus only on their own decisions and ignore how their decisions affect others.
- In the Beer Game, players have it in their power to eliminate the extreme instabilities that invariably occur, but they fail to do so because they do not understand how they are creating the instability in the first place.
3 linked references
March 21st, 2021
- Finally got these excerpts from the Introduction to the Paperback Edition of The Fifth Discipline with these words I find so meaningful:
- "The Congress Hall is a room designed for conversation. One hundred and fifty people can carry on a conversation as if they were seated in a living room. [...] Clearly, the designers of that room understood that conversation and self-governance are inextricably linked. If we lose our ability to talk with one another, we lose our ability to govern ourselves."
January 5th, 2021
- V > Malcolm were you the one who sent me The Fifth Discipline? y
- lots of stuff there that resonates with Friendly Ambitious Nerd
November 1st, 2020
meta-team notes › Failed #SquadGoals: Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify mode… › It seems to me there are deeply deeply 2 core questions h… › 1. what general factors make for a collaborative cultural… › a few fairly mainstream books on this would be
- The Fifth Discipline - about creating a "learning organization"