Peter Senge Thinking Quotations

Business has a way of talking about how to create value, which is in some way isn't bad... We just need to start thinking about if the value we want to create is consistent with all social and environmental well being.

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 world is made of Circles And we think in straight Lines

The key to success isn't just thinking about what we are doing but doing something about what we are thinking.

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.’

Learning organizations organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.

In great teams, conflict becomes productive. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own.

The problems with willpower are many, but they may hardly be noticed by the person focused narrowly on success. First, there is little economy of means; in systems thinking terms, we act without leverage. We attain our goals, but the effort is enormous and we may find ourselves exhausted and wondering if it was worth it when we have succeeded. Ironically, people hooked on willpower may actually look for obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, and enemies to vanquish--to remind themselves and others of their own prowess.

We tend to think that, in a traditional organisation, people are producing results because management wants results, but the essence of a high-quality organisation is people producing results because they want the results. It's puzzling we find that hard to understand, that if people are really enjoying, they'll innovate, they'll take risks, they'll have trust with one another because they are really committed to what they're doing and it's fun

Dialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking, to recognize that any certainty we have is, at best, a hypothesis about the world.

Theres a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

I think the terminology I would use is 'a continuous process of reflection'. I've always thought of only two questions that have mattered to me personally. One is what is really needed in the world and the second is what's really important to me and how these two intersect. It's always been a reflective process - spiraling around these two poles.