Chapter 2 --  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership
"Give Me a Lever Long Enough... and Single-Handed I Can Move the World"

"Give me a lever long enough... and single-handed I can move the world"

From a very early age we learn to break apart problems

We loose our intrinsic sense of connection to the larger whole.

Learning organizations are where people continually expand their capacity to create results they truly desire.

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.

Learning organizations are possible because we are all learners

The team that became great didn't start off great.  It learned how to produce extraordinary results.

The global business community is learning to learn together

Disciplines of the Learning Organization

• Learning organizations have been invented but they have not yet been innovated (replicated reliably on a scale that is meaningful at practical costs).
• When an idea moves from an invention to an innovation, diverse component technologies come together.
• Five new component technologies are converging to innovate learning organizations:

1. Systems Thinking
   Human endeavors are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions.
2. Personal Mastery
   Mastery can mean s special level of proficiency.
   Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening personal vision, focusing of energies, and development of patience and seeing objectively.
   Few organizations encourage the growth of their people in this manner.
3. Mental Models
   deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
   Many insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with powerful mental models.
   Institutional learning is the process whereby management teams change their shared mental models.
4. Building Shared Vision
   The capacity to hold a shared picture of the future we seek to create.
   When there is genuine vision, people excel and learn because they WANT to.
   What has been lacking is a discipline for translating individual vision into shared vision.
5. Team Learning
   We know that teams can learn.
   Starts with "dialogue"- the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a process of "thinking together".
   Dialogue also involves learning how to recognize patterns of interaction in teams that undermine learning.

The Fifth Discipline

• It is vital that the five disciplines develop as an ensemble.
• Systems thinking is the discipline that integrates the disciplines (The whole can exceed the sum of its parts).
• Systems thinking needs the disciplines of building shared vision, mental models, team learning, and personal mastery to realize its potential.
• Mental models focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings in or ways of seeing the world.

Metanoia-  A shift of Mind

• For many, experiences as part of a truly great team stands out as a singular period of life lived to the fullest.
• Metanoia means a shift of mind
• In everyday use, learning has come to be synonymous with "taking in information".
• Through learning we re-create ourselves

Putting the Ideas into Practice

• Today problems are becoming increasingly complex and interconnected.

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Jossey-Bass Publishers.  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Education Leadership.