LEARNING— A KEY SELF-ACTUALIZATION FACTOR

In 1990, when Peter Senge wrote The Fifth Discipline he was looking to identify a frame or key factor for effective and successful organizations. He came up with five— which he then categorized as the five disciplines: systemic thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. Like many before and after him, he knew that organizations had to change from the command-and-control model of authoritarian leadership, from the rigid, hierarchical, and controlling models of the past. And his solution was to create the learning organization. For him this meant an organization with people growing, thinking systemically, able to change their mental models, and even learn together through dialogue.

So in The Fifth Discipline when you read the term “learning” as in “learning organization” and “team learning,” this was his solution for the “learning disabilities” of organizations. He wrote, “Learning disabilities are tragic in children, but they are fatal in organizations.” And he commented that these learning disabilities (what we call cognitive distortions) are crippling in companies. Senge’s proof was that one-third of firms in the Fortune 500 group in 1970 were gone by 1983.

More recently in the world-wide recession that emerged from the housing and banking problems in 2008, we have seen a great many organizations collapse. We have seen major corporations fold; we have seen executives handcuffed and led off to jail. We have seen millions lose their jobs. We have seen millions of investors losing fortunes. Something has gone wrong. But what? And what can we do about it?

In Senge’s perspective the problem lies in how the people in the organizations are unable to learn, to learn together, to change their frames, to call forth the best in people, and to live at a higher level. He framed all of this as entirely a learning problem. For him, the “learning dilemma” (p. 23) in organizations is due because the “learning horizon” is so short; leaders don’t think long-term to the consequences of their actions. They have too short and small of a horizon for their thinking. This is especially true of top executives who move on to another firm before the consequences of their actions reach fruition.

As I have noted in the previous Meta Reflections, in my re-reading of The Fifth Discipline, Senge was talking about self-actualization and in focusing on systemic learning he identified one key facet of a self-actualizing leader and company. So as he argued that the competitive advantage in these times of accelerating change is learning faster than one’s competitors, since passionate

learning is a facet of self-actualization, self-actualizing leaders, peoples, and companies is the competitive advantage today.

Senge connects learning to personal mastery. It takes “personal mastery”—“the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively” (p. 5) to develop the learning power to keep discovering things and translating those things to reality. It takes this self-actualizing development of clarifying the things that really matter to us. Here’s a comment from Senge that indicates that when he speaks about “learning” he is speaking about self-actualization: “Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re- create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. ... this is the basic meaning of a ‘learning organization’—an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.” (p. 14)

Recently I became highly conscious of the problem with the word “learning.” It happened while I was attempting to explain the power and magic of “learning” to a group of leaders. I could sense the lack of enthusiasm for “learning.” “Learning, yes, we need to learn. Yawn. Yawn.”

Later as I reflected on the experience, it dawned on me that the problem is that the word “learning” has suffered from the inflation of being over-used. The word has lost its power, its impact, and its ummph! In contrast, when I present the Matrix-embedded-pyramid model that updates Maslow’s work with the NLP–Neuro-Semantic Matrix within the pyramid of needs, people catch a vision of the absolute uniqueness of learning. Seeing that we are instinct-less and not-knowing how to be, how to cope, how to develop ... the human instinct of learning, to wit, to construct meaning, to wit, to figure out things via meaning-making— suddenly people discover just how powerful and magical “learning” actually is. And they become excited.

Animals just know; humans learn. Animals have the knowledge inside (in-stinct); humans get the information from without. Animals have very limited ability to add to their knowledge base; humans have unlimited learning capacity. The gap of not-knowing which our lack of instincts creates simultaneously opens up a space for learning— for the creativity of defining what something is, figuring out how it works, deciding on its value to us, constructing theories of understanding, inventing new levels of knowledge, entering the semantic and symbolic world, and experiencing all of the uniquely human constructs of culture and civilization.

In Neuro-Semantics we think about “learning” in terms of creativity— creating and inventing all of the levels of meaning that are available to human beings. We call this domain The Construct and The Matrix and it is there that we live and from which we operate. It is there that our learnings construct our sense of reality as we map-out our understandings. And in this way we can create life as a heaven or hell. And it is this Constructed Matrix that can even change how we experience our fundamental physiological needs and drives. That’s why it is a Matrix- embedded-pyramid of needs. So when you read Senge, you can now read his words about

“learning” as indicating one of the key facets of the self-actualizing life and see how The Fifth Discipline has a lot to say about self-actualizing organizations.

Interested in Self-Actualizing Leaders and Companies — then meet me at one of our “Unleashing Leadership” trainings!