Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision.
The key to success isn’t just thinking about what we are doing but doing something about what we are thinking.
Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
Small changes can produce big results – but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner.
The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.
Knowledge is constructed, not transferred.
Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.
Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist – someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.
The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension.
The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.
The Industrial Age is not sustainable. Its not sustainable in ecological terms, and its not sustainable in human terms.
In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models – that is, they are responsible for learning.
When executives lead as teachers, stewards, and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle and long-term than those of power-wielding hierarchical leaders.
Leadership is about creating new realities.
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.’
Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior learning.
Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we were never able to do.
Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines.
Collaboration is vital to sustain what we call profound or really deep change, because without it, organizations are just overwhelmed by the forces of the status quo.