The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

by Peter Senge

Doubleday/Currency
Publication Date: August 1990
Price: $19.95, Hardcover
Pages: 424 pages
ISBN: 0-385-26094-6
       

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The pivotal moment for this book came in Peter Senge's house, in the basement. He had a long blank wall, from which we had removed all the paintings. He had a manuscript of multiple hundreds of pages, which he had begun writing with Arie de Geus. He had gone through it, page by page, entering each concept onto post-it notes. I had done the same with some of his published papers. Now we put them all up on the wall, grouping and regrouping them. We ended up with five big groups.
"What are those things?" I asked Peter.
"They're - well, they're ongoing bodies of study and practice," he said.
"You mean they're disciplines," I said.
The idea that people could study and practice their way into management - and thereby create good performance - was a new idea. To his credit, Peter didn't want to use the word "Learning Organization" in the title. He was after something more fundamental (I would guess), more about the lifetimes' practice and less focused on the organization as a kind of thing.

This was my first consulting editorial job. Years later, in an article I wrote about ghostwriting for Across the Board, I tried to put to rest one of the recurring myths about this book: That I had essentially created it.

In 1989, Peter Senge hired me as a "consulting editor," after he had already completed a draft of the book that would become his bestseller The Fifth Discipline. I made suggestions, helped reframe the outline, contributed a few segments, suggested the title, and reworked the draft. Then he rewrote, on his own computer and keyboard, everything I had contributed. Peter still refers to me as his "writing coach," although I don't remember coaching him much; indeed, I think of that time as my most in-depth exposure to watching a skilled thinker think.

Ever since then, I've made part of my living as a ghostwriter, and I still get credited, from time to time, as the "real author" of the Fifth Discipline. The more I protest that it didn't happen that way, the fewer people seem to believe me. And in the end, how would anybody know, but Peter, myself, and his family (who saw him at work)?

Since then, of course, I've coauthored three other books with Peter, all part of the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook series. I've watched him start an influential research institute (the MIT Center for Organizational Learning) and then morph it into an international consortium (the Society for Organizational Learning). I've gotten to know his family a little bit, and I've seen his interest in education evolve (along with my own).

And I've wrestled, ever since knowing Peter, with his message about discipline - the value of ongoing study and practice. We don't really know how to manage, not even how to manage ourselves. We have to take it on with some humility and willingness to struggle through the early years of learning. Even the "links and loops" of the "fifth discipline," Systems Thinking, are effectively a kind of practice. Nothing more or less. Proficiency doesn't stem full-blown from parachuting in. It stems from doing and thinking -- from taking notes after meetings and pivotal conversations, from rehearsing how it might have happened differently, from asking what I could have done differently.
From taking seriously the need to be better and do better, even within the context of making a living.