Second order change: Systemic and irreversible

OUR topic last week was on Personal Mastery, the first of Peter Senge’s five disciplines which are the tools and guiding ideas for an organization to transform itself into a learning organization. In refrain, we quote Senge’s description of a learning organization as ”organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.”

To fully appreciate the transformation process of an organization --- to keep its place under the sun --- seeking to sustain itself to grow and keep learning what it is to know, to be capable of objective distance whilst examining self so it can hinder bias and “innovate fast enough to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing environment,” let’s venture on a basic view what transforming an organization means.