THE ANTI-THESIS …

“Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge—as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge—is knowledge that is difficult to express or extract, and thus more difficult to transfer to others by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. This can include personal wisdom, experience, insight, and intuition.

For example, knowing that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of explicit knowledge; it can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient.

In contrast, the ability to speak a language, ride a bicycle, knead dough, play a musical instrument, or design and use complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge that is not always known explicitly, even by expert practitioners, and which is difficult or impossible to explicitly transfer to other people.”

The Fifth Discipline coming together was the product of thirty years of tacit knowledge work building up for Peter Senge, his mentors (Jay Forrestor, Chris Argyris, Donella Meadows,) and colleagues (Robert Fritz, Michael Goodman, Daniel Kim, Art Kleiner, Bill Issacs, Charlotte Roberts, Betty Sue, Bryan Smith, Richard Ross, among many more others including practitioners who grew the work in the 1970s onwards) who led and developed SoL establishing first in MIT. Each in turn invested years in developing their respective areas of their works.

It is therefore truly humbling and with gratitude when we see the immense works that have gone into it to bring them out for all of us to see and learn and yet take us by storm in the 1990s by Peter’s watershed publication, “The Fifth Discipline“.

Senge looked to future organizations to master these challenges: becoming increasingly skilled at complex problem solving, and increasingly motivated to take on harder problems, adapting to handle more complex environments and challenges. Successful organizations, he hoped, would demonstrate resilience, and an expanding, repeatable capacity for learning.

What about you? What do you want?

My take on it is to match the level and quality of work to study it as much as it took to develop it.

I have been through a day-long courses, a week-long courses and a year-long programme to assimilate the work. I know my ability to use the work dextrously grew with the time I took to commit to learning the work. It shows up in the mental agility and graceful skill in bringing the five disciplines together within us that can only be matched by not running out on to the next thing.

The book cannot spread the skill. Our willingness each to let it become a part of us, will.

Book readings, attending workshop programmes, practising the research of using systems thinking, facilitating teams with learning the use of the tools of mental models and team learning in their group discussions, working with the founding members on assimilating the works they had developed as much as possible.

This is not a 2 hour programme. We see the reality that view has presented us to where things are today.

This work demands to be a post-graduate tertiary programme at tertiary institutions. Let leaders take proper times off to deepen the work emerging as true leaders of any learning organisation. Anywhere!