xviii I believe that, the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best. Deming saw this clearly...

p.3 From an early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole... The tools and ideas presented in this book are for destroying the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces.

p.4 deep down, we are all learners... not only is it in our nature to learn but we love to learn.

p.6-9 Today, I believe, five new component technologies are gradually converging to innovate learning organizations... Systems Thinking... Personal Mastery... Mental Models... Building Shared Vision... Team Learning

p.7 Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.

p.8 Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior... Many insights into new markets or outmoded organizational practices fail to get put into practice because they conflict with powerful, tacit mental models... The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny.

p.10 To practice a discipline is to be a lifelong learner. You never arrive; you spend your life mastering disciplines.

p.11-12 systems thinking is the fifth discipline. It is the discipline that integrates the disciplines, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice. It keeps them from being separate gimmicks or the latest organization change fads... For example, vision without systems thinking ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there.

p.12 systems thinking also needs the disciplines of building shared vision, mental models, team learning, and personal mastery to realize its potential.

p.14 When I first entered graduate school at MIT I was already convinced that most of the problems faced by humankind concerned our inability to grasp and manage the increasingly complex systems of our world. Little has happened since to change my view.

p.14 Jay Forrester... maintained that the causes of many pressing public issues, from urban decay to global ecological threat, lay in the very well-intentioned policies designed to alleviate them. These problems were "actually systems" that lured policymakers into interventions that focused on obvious symptoms not underlying causes, which produced short-term benefit but long-term malaise, and fostered the need for still more symptomatic interventions.

p.19 When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that "someone screwed up." ... When we focus only on our position, we do not see how our own actions extend beyond the boundary of that position.

p.21 True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems.

p.21 We are conditioned to see life as a series of events, and for every event, we think there is one obvious cause.

p.68-69 Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots. It is a set of general principles- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management... During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility- for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character.  Today systems thinking is needed more than ever because we are becoming overwhelmed by complexity.

p.71 Conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity... When the same action has dramatically different effects in the short run and the long run, there is dynamic complexity. When an action has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in another part of the system, there is dynamic complexity. When obvious interactions produce nonobvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity.

p.72 The real leverage in most management situations lies in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity.

p.73 The essence of the discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift of mind:
seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains, and
seeing processes of change rather than snapshots
  The practice of systems thinking starts with understanding a simple concept called "feedback" that shows how actions can reinforce or counteract (balance) each other... Ultimately, it simplifies life by helping us see the deeper patterns lying behind the events and the details.

p.77 The more complete statement of causality is that my intent to fill a glass of water creates a system that causes water to flow in when the level is low, then shuts the flow off when the glass is full. In other words, the structure causes the behavior and the structure is brought into play by my intention and action. This distinction is important because seeing only individual actions and missing the structure underlying the actions... lies at the root of our powerlessness in complex situations.

p.86 To understand how an organism works we must understand its balancing processes - those that are explicit and implicit... Though simple in concept, balancing processes can generate surprising and problematic behavior if they go undetected.

  In general, balancing loops are more difficult to see than reinforcing loops because it often looks like nothing is happening."

p.101 But there is another lesson from the limits to growth structure as well. There will always be more limiting processes. When one source of limitation is removed or made weaker, growth returns until a new source of limitation is encountered. ...the fundamental lesson is that growth eventually will stop. Efforts to extend the growth by removing limits can actually be counterproductive, forestalling the eventual day of reckoning.

p.118 WonderTech's managers had fallen prey to the classic learning disability of being unable to detect cause and effect separated in time.

p.124 The art of systems thinking lies in being able to recognize increasingly (dynamically) complex and subtle structures... amid the wealth of details, pressures, and cross currents that attend all real management settings. In fact, the essence of mastering systems thinking as a management discipline lies in seeing patterns where others see only events and forces to react to. Yet few are trained to see detail and dynamic complexity... In effect, the art of systems thinking lies in seeing through the detail complexity to the underlying structures generating change... it means organizing detail complexity into a coherent story that illuminates the causes of problems and how they can be remedied in enduring ways. [JLJ - a great idea for game theory]

p.137 A subtler form of diminished vision is "focusing on the means not the result." ... The ability to focus on the ultimate intrinsic desires, not only on secondary goals, is a cornerstone of personal mastery.
  Real vision cannot be understood in isolation from the idea of purpose.

p.139-140 But the gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there was no gap, there would be no need for any action to move toward the vision. Indeed, the gap is the source of creative energy. We call this gap creative tension... creative tension doesn't feel any particular way. It is the force that comes into play at the moment when we acknowledge a vision that is at odds with current reality.

p.141 When we hold a vision that differs from current reality, a gap exists (the creative tension) which can be resolved... the "fundamental solution": taking actions to bring reality into line with the vision. But changing reality takes time.

p.170 Learning how to work with mental models was a key element in BP's [JLJ - British Petroleum's] rapid rise during the last fifteen years to number two ranked global oil company in sales and volume (after Exxon) [JLJ - too bad they cut corners on safety procedures on their drilling platforms]

p.209-210 In Chapter 8, I argued that personal vision, by itself, is not the key to releasing the energy of the creative process. The key is "creative tension," the tension between vision and reality. The most effective people are those who can "hold" their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly. This principle is no less true for organizations. The hallmark of a learning organization is not lovely visions floating in space, but a relentless willingness to examine "what is" in light of our vision.