Transcript The Laws of the Fifth Discipline

The Laws of the Fifth Discipline
Senge: Chapter 4
THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE
Today’s problems come from
yesterday’s solutions
• IT solutions of yesterday are today’s
“problems”
– Bringing integration, complexity
– And along with complexity
• The potential for Chaos
• The potential for Catastrophe
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Today’s problems come from
yesterday’s solutions
• THE CARPET BUMP: Jump on the bump and
the bump reappears somewhere else
• Why are sales of autos so slow, nationally
this quarter?
– Because of the tremendous rebates and zero
interest promotions of the previous quarters
– Of course, this would dry up demand, as those
planning to buy in this quarter bought last
because of the extraordinarily good “deals”
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Today’s problems come from
yesterday’s solutions
• A new manager attacks chronically high
inventory problems and succeeds
• Now, market spends 20% of its time
responding to angry customers whose
orders are not fulfilled on time
• Now, the sales force must convince the
customer they can have any color they
want so long as its BLACK
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Today’s problems come from
yesterday’s solutions
• Police are able to arrest narcotics dealers
on east 34th street
• Now the drug scene has switched to north
Frankford
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The harder you push, the harder
the system pushes back
• THIS IS CALLED COMPENSATING FEEDBACK
• Low income housing projects of the 60’s
• Food and agricultural assistance in
developing countries
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MORE: The harder you push, the
harder the system pushes back
• The weakening dollar—due to some foreigners
pulling the dollar out of our equity markets—
thinking their own markets are better places to
invest
• But what happens is that domestic manufacturers
goods are now more competitive in foreign and
domestic markets
• This leads to better profits
• Which leads to better stock prices
• Which leads to foreign investors getting back into
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American
markets
+
+
-
strength of
dollar
st ock prices of for eign
m anufact
urers
+
B
profit s of foreign
st ock prices of our
m anufact urers
m anufact urers
+
+
+
price of our goods in
foreign m arket s
+
m argins of foreign
goods in our m arket s
B
profit s of our
m anufact urers
B
Bank of Japan
buys dollars
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MORE: The harder you push, the
harder the system pushes back
• Slowing sales leads to more sales people
selling the same product at lower cost with
more advertising, leading to still less
revenues needed to solve the real
problem—the competition’s better
products
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MORE: The harder you push, the
harder the system pushes back
• When your performance is sub-par, how to
you respond?
– Do you, like the respond like Boxer in Orwell’s
Animal Farm, “I will work harder..?”
– This is the wrong response—you have to look
for a more fundamental solution
– You are responding to symptoms here, not core
problems, root causes
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The harder you push, the harder
the system pushes back
• This is exhausting
• While, like Boxer, working harder we are
blinding ourselves as to how we ourselves
are contributing to the obstacles
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Behavior grows better before it
grows worse
• Compensating feedback usually involves a
delay, a time lag between the short-term
benefit and the long-term dis-benefit
• Choose carefully who you follow up the
corporate ladder—if you pick people who
are interested only in the short run, you will
get blind-sided by the negative long-term
effects of their decisions
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The easy way out usually leads
back in
• We tend to apply familiar solutions to
complex problems, applying what we know
best
• Pushing harder and harder on familiar
solutions, is a reliable indicator of nonsystemic thinking
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The easy way out usually leads
back in
• Drug companies look for drug therapies as
a cure for cancer
– Why don’t they look for nutrition therapies??
Diet Therapies??
– They can’t patent and acquire an exclusive
right to market such a therapy
• In other words, they can’t make money off these
other therapies
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The cure can be worse than the
disease
• This is sometimes true of Chemotherapy
• Short-term improvements may lead to longterm dependencies, addictions, as
expressed by the SHIFTING THE BURDEN
ARCHETYPE
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Shifting the Burden
• Consultants, often used by companies,
become addictive and prevent a company
from training its managers to solve its own
problems
• These structures reduce the ability of the
system to shoulder its own burdens
• Long-term solutions must do the opposite
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Faster is slower
• WHY?? Too many mistakes were made
– We must do it right the first time
• We try to do things fast, make a mistake
and wind up having to re-do all that we did
• This is a process issue—get the process
right and we WILL do things right the first
time
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Cause and effect are not closely
related in time and space
• The effects we see today may be
attributable to a cause that occurred years
ago
• Most of us assume most of the time that
cause and effect are closely related in time
and space
• Even Allen Greenspan can make this
mistake
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Cause and effect are not closely
related in time and space
• There is a fundamental mismatch between
the nature of reality in complex systems
and our predominant ways of thinking
about that reality
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Cause and effect are not closely
related in time and space
• If there is a problem in manufacturing, we
assume the cause is also in manufacturing
• If sales people can’t meet targets, we think we
need new sales incentives and promotions
• If there is inadequate housing, we build more
housing
• If there is insufficient food, we send more food
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Small changes can produce big
results--but the areas of highest
leverage are often the least
obvious
• Systems thinking teaches that the most
obvious solutions don’t work—at best they
improve matters in the short run, only to
make things worse in the long run.
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Small changes can produce big
results--but the areas of highest
leverage are often the least
obvious
• Trim tabs and ships rudders
• If you wanted to make a moving tanker turn
left, where would you go to push on the
ship?
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You can have your cake and eat it
too, but not at once
• Skip it
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Dividing an elephant in half does
not produce two small elephants.
• Living systems have integrity
• Three blind men each encountered an
elephant…
• Seeing whole elephants does mean
understanding how major functions such
as manufacturing, marketing and
engineering interact
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Principle of the system boundary
• Interactions that must be examined are
those most important to the issue at hand
regardless of parochial organizational
boundaries
• What makes this difficult to practice is the
way organizations are designed to keep
people from seeing important interactions
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Principle of the system
boundary, continued
• One obvious way is by enforcing rigid
internal divisions that inhibit inquiry
across divisional boundaries, such as
those that grow up between marketing,
manufacturing and engineering
• THIS IS BAD POLICY
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There is no blame
• We tend to blame outside circumstances
for our problems—the competitors, the
press, the changing mood of the
marketplace, the government
• Systems thinking teaches that there is no
outside—that you and your problems are
part of a single system
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Copyright C 2002 by James R.
Burns
• All rights reserved world-wide. CLEAR
Project Steering Committee members have
a right to use these slides in their
presentations. However, they do not have
the right to remove this copyright or to
remove the “prepared by….” footnote that
appears at the bottom of each slide.
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James
R. Burns
Prepared Prepared
by JamesbyR.
Burns
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