(with stretch break)

SESSION BRIEF – ALTERNATIVE 1

Entering Through the Human System

1. Why This Work Exists: A Different Way of Understanding Management

Peter Senge’s work on The Fifth Discipline emerged out of a deep and troubling question:
Why do most management concepts fail in the very places where they were supposed to succeed?

Much of modern management came out of the military tradition — hierarchy, command, discipline, control, compliance.
When many who had served in the military later entered private organisations, something unexpected happened:

They could not recreate the same success.
They could not generate growth.
Many companies they led simply could not survive.

Why was that so?

This question stayed with Peter for years.
It became the focus of his research in the 1970s and 1980s.
And, simultaneously, someone else across the Atlantic was asking a similar question.

2. A Parallel Study: How Long Do Organisations Actually Live?

Arie de Geus, then at the Royal Dutch Shell Group, began studying the life span of organisations.

His findings (1980s) were startling:

Most organisations do not survive beyond the lifetime of their founder — about 40 years.
But a very small number lived much longer — 100, 200, even 700 years.
Some had persisted through monarchies, wars, depressions, technological revolutions, and were still alive.

The natural question arose:

What were these organisations doing differently?
What had they learned that others had not?

3. Exercise: Going Back in Time

What do we notice happened over centuries?

When we study organisations that lived for generations, we observe the same capability repeating itself:

They learned. They adapted. They saw. They understood.

Not in fragments.
Not through authority.
But through discipline — disciplines of learning.

These organisations had the capacity to:

• Make sense of their reality

They understood the forces shaping their environment.
In today’s language, this is Systems Thinking.

• Keep an eye on the future

They cultivated clarity of aspiration, even in turbulent times.
This is Personal Mastery.

• Shape the future together

They aligned around pictures of the future they wanted to create.
This is Shared Vision.

• Learn across perspectives

They could see through each other’s eyes, not just defend their own.
This is Team Learning.

• Reflect on their assumptions

They paid attention to the beliefs and mental images shaping their decisions.
This is Mental Models.

Together, these became the hallmark of organisations that not only survived…
but grew across centuries.

4. The Five Disciplines: A Way of Being, Not a Toolkit

Peter’s work eventually organised these capacities into what he called:

The Five Disciplines of a Learning Organisation.

They are not:

a management fad,
a change-management technique,
or a set of tools to “apply.”

A discipline is a way of being.
It becomes so practiced, so embodied, that it is done as naturally as breathing.

You do not “try” to practice Personal Mastery.
You are a person creating from aspiration.

You do not “apply” Team Learning.
You listen, you inquire, you learn — because that is how you now operate.

This is what the five disciplines do:
They turn learning from a technique into a first nature, not a second one.

5. Mapping the Work Ahead

Once participants enter through this human system — understanding why the disciplines exist and why they matter — we then offer:

• The Five Disciplines overview

Why they work together like the five fingers of a hand.

• The Sixty Tools checklist

Not as instruments, but as a way to notice the capacities that already exist in all of us.

• The transition into the Gateways and the Palm

Preparing them for deeper immersion into systems thinking, mental models, personal mastery, shared visions, team learning — and ultimately the integration point where transformation begins.

SESSION BRIEF – ALTERNATIVE 2

Entering Through the Data: Seeing Patterns Over Time

1. Begin With the Definition of Systems Thinking

We begin with a simple definition:

Systems Thinking is the discipline of seeing and understanding the pattern of an event’s behaviour over time.

On a graph,

the X-axis is always Time,
the Y-axis is the behaviour of the event.

When we view the world this way, we stop being surprised by what happens next.
Instead, we anticipate it.

(Here, I share the 9/11 story — how the behaviour leading to the event had been unfolding long before the headlines caught up to it.)

2. Shifting Attention From Events to Patterns

Most of us are trained to react to events — the “what happened.”

Systems Thinking trains our attention to something deeper:

How did this event unfold over time?
What direction was it already heading?
What is the pattern?

Patterns give us far more information than events ever will.
Patterns reveal:

how the behaviour rises or falls,
whether it accelerates or collapses,
and how it repeats across years or decades.

Once we see patterns, something becomes obvious:

None of this is random.
There is a structure underneath it.

3. Patterns Reveal the Causal Structures Beneath

Every recurrent behaviour pattern sits on top of a causal structure — feedback loops that quietly govern the way the system behaves.

Once we recognise the pattern, we can ask:

Which causal structures are at play?
Which loops are driving this behaviour?

And as soon as we see the structure, we can do something we could not do before:

Find the leverage hidden inside it.

These leverage points are rarely found where we normally focus our efforts.
They sit in parts of the structure we often pay the least attention to — yet they determine the greatest changes with the least resources.

This is the key to all major global issues:
climate change, unemployment, food systems, health systems, inflation.
The leverage never lives where the noise is.

4. Two Essential Shifts of Mind

The discipline rests on two essential shifts in how we see reality:

Shift 1: From Linear to Circular Causality

We move from thinking:

“A causes B.”

to recognising:

“A influences B,
B influences C,
C eventually comes back to influence A.”

Linear cause-effect is real — but it is only one point in a larger circle of causality.

Shift 2: From Snapshots to Movies

We stop treating reality as a collection of frozen pictures — disconnected, episodic, convenient.

Instead, we treat it as a movie — a continuous, dynamic process.

When we make this shift, something subtle but profound happens:

We begin to see order in what previously looked like noise.

We notice:

which factor moves first,
what amplifies or dampens the effect,
how long things take to change,
and the direction in which the system is already heading.

5. The Critical Role of Delays

Every change process contains a delay — the time it takes for the full effect of an action to show.

Ignoring delays leads to:

impatience,
premature judgment,
misdiagnosis,
and interventions that collapse the system further.

The mechanistic world tries to remove delays.
Nature honours them.

A caterpillar is not a butterfly waiting for permission.
It is a process unfolding in time — and any attempt to shorten that delay kills the transformation.

6. Two Ways Circles of Causality Behave

When variables interrelate in circular causality, their combined behaviour forms one of two patterns:

1. Structures that Seek Growth

The pattern expands in the same direction it has already begun moving — upward or downward.
The behaviour accelerates.

2. Structures that Seek Correction

The pattern reverses direction when it exceeds limits — it self-corrects.

These are the two fundamental behaviours of all feedback systems.

7. Assignment (For Participants)

A. Plot a variable “A” over time that seeks to grow.
Observe how it behaves:

Does it accelerate?
Does it slow down?
What drives its growth?

B. Plot a variable “A” over time that seeks to correct.
Observe the reversal:

At what point does it turn?
What boundary did it hit?

C. What would you name these two structures?
Try not to open the book.
Let the behaviour speak to you before the terminology does.

8. Bringing It Together

This alternative opens the session by training participants to see patterns, not events.
To see circularity, not linearity.
To see processes, not snapshots.

It creates the foundation needed before any deeper work with the Onion, the archetypes, or the BOT graphs can be meaningful.

This is where systems thinking begins:
Not in the diagrams —
but in how we train the mind to see.

Assignment:

Plot A over time that seeks to grow and notice its behaviour with time

Plot A over time that seeks to correct and and notice its behaviour with time

What would you names these two structures as?

Try not to open the book to look for the answers.

The two ways circles of causality can behave.

Session Brief 3: Seeing Patterns Over Time – From Archetypes to National Strategy

Focus:

Behaviour Over Time (BOT) Patterns • Systems Archetypes • The Onion • Unemployment Study Showcase

1. Entering Through the Pattern

We begin not with a policy, but with a pattern.
Every persistent issue — whether inflation, unemployment, or institutional fatigue — follows a rhythm that repeats over time. When we learn to see these behaviour-over-time (BOT) curves, we begin to sense the underlying structure that drives them.

2. The Archetype Lens: Fixes that Fail

This session introduces the archetype Fixes that Fail (FtF) as a way of reading such patterns.
Participants learn to recognise the tell-tale curve — the early improvement followed by a deeper, delayed decline.
We use the FtF archetype to see how repeated short-term fixes (e.g., subsidies, hiring freezes, or wage adjustments) can mask — but not solve — the structural roots of a system’s behaviour.

3. Real-World Illustration: The Inflation Pattern

We then look at inflation data over time.
Participants map the BOT graph and see how recurring peaks and troughs reveal that inflation is not random.
Each rise and fall corresponds to reinforcing and balancing loops within the economy — the visible expression of an unseen systemic structure.

This moment of recognition — that the data are not chaotic, but coherent — becomes the entry point into systems thinking.

4. The Unemployment Study: Seeing the Onion

Having built fluency with BOTs and archetypes, we enter the Botswana Unemployment Study.
Here, participants trace how national employment and productivity patterns mirror multiple interacting archetypes — Fixes that Fail, Shifting the Burden, Success to the Successful, and Growth and Underinvestment — layered within what we now call the Onion.

The study reveals how these archetypes reinforce one another across Human–Human, Human–Economy, and Human–World systems, producing the persistence of unemployment despite decades of interventions.

5. From Seeing to Strategy

From here, the work turns to structural leverage:

Where do these loops derive their strength?
Which mental models sustain them?
How can strategic investments and policy alignments reverse the reinforcing patterns?

Participants begin to build their own Onions — identifying persistent issues in their municipalities, mapping their behaviour over time, and surfacing the leverage points where a different national story can begin.

6. Outcome

By the end of this session, participants:

Recognise archetypes in real socio-economic data.
Understand the logic behind persistent national patterns.
Can articulate leverage-based strategies for transformation, grounded in systems insight rather than episodic fixes.

Duration:

3 hour (with bio-break) intensive (standalone or as part of the Leading the Leaders Immersion Programme)

Intended Audience:

Policy makers • Municipal managers • Economists • Development planners • Educators • Researchers

Summary Table (for your Session Briefs Page)

Alternative	Entry Point	Flow Essence	Outcome
1. Through the Human System	Lived experience	Five Disciplines seen as human capacities	Emotional anchoring + personal insight
2. Through the Data	Objective trends	Five Disciplines seen as analytical lenses	Pattern recognition + structural insight
3. Through Behaviour Over Time (BOT)	Archetype → BOT → Onion → Study	Fixes That Fail → inflation → unemployment	System leverage + strategic clarity