Art and Practice, Movies and Books: The Fifth Discipline

A Beautiful Mind was released in December of 2001. I did not see it in theaters. I saw it at some point during my studies as an undergraduate student. It's a great movie and you won't find any spoilers here. 

A Beautiful Mind is a biographical film based on the life of American mathematician John Nash who, among other things, made some important contributions to game theory. Prior to watching I had never heard of game theory. There is no reason I should have; I was a religious studies student. But it fascinated me. Being a university student with easy access to large libraries and a deep-set joy in learning I headed to the stacks and looked up game theory. 

Four of five books later I decided that most of what was written on game theory was far too abstract and involved mathematics I did not care to learn. But all was not lost. Some game theory books are shelved very near economics, business, and leadership books. And, if you are like me, you do indeed find yourself judging books by their covers at times (Thankfully not always. Take this one for example; great book series. Terrible covers!) 

This, then, is how I ended up reading The Fifth Discipline: I watched a movie which made me want to read some books which led me to a particular section of the library where I saw the cover of The Fifth Discipline and thought "Looks interesting; why not?" 

This is an odd path I am glad I walked.  

The Fifth Discipline introduced me to systems thinking which, unlike game theory, held my interest and proved fruitful. I've continued to delve into it ever since and I've gone so far as to include a book on systems theory in the required reading for all of the pastoral interns I've supervised (though not The Fifth Discipline; I tried that once and interns without any background in business or economics found it too difficult. In the end I used Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. If this review makes you interested in systems thinking, start there). The Fifth Discipline introduced me to the value of some business and leadership literature, another genre I have continued to read ever since. This book also started me thinking on a fundamental problem in any organization: how do we learn and grow as a group? 

In this review, unlike the previous ones in this series, I've found it natural to lay out the impact this book had on me before outlining the book itself. But I still want to give you a brief outline. 

The Fifth Discipline seeks to lay out the five disciplines that lead an organization to learn and grow over time. These disciples are: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. 

Personal Mastery - being committed to and disciplined in learning and growing as persons within the organization.

Mental models - examining, correcting, and adjusting our model of the world so that our behavior changes in ways that are consistent with our ideas and commitments.

Shared vision - having a vision that reflects the personal visions of those within the organization thus allowing for shared commitment to a goal.

Team learning - knowing the practices that allow for learning together in small groups.

Systems thinking - Recognizing the inter-connectedness of reality, the dynamic and complex systems that we are a part of, and how sets of things (people, rules, history, etc.) create their own pattern of behavior over time. This necessitates different ways of thinking about change, about leverage points, about cause and effect, and about success and failure. 

I have found that it is the last of these, systems thinking, that is the most important. The best illustration of a system I have comes from Donella Meadows - a slinky. If you lay a slinky on the palm of your hand, grasp the top with your other hand, and then remove your lower hand it will fall down and bounce up and down. Why does it do that? The answer, ultimately, is in the slinky itself. You can point to proximate cause (moving my hand away, gravity, etc.) but they don't actually explain; if I do the same actions with a box it doesn't bounce up and down. The behavior of the slinky is latent in the structure of the spring. The actions taking place around the spring suppress, allow, or exaggerate that behavior, but they do not create it. This is the central insight of systems theory. 

When you see a system acting in a certain way it is tempting to look at proximate causes, but they don't explain the system. Where this becomes very powerful is when we are interested in pursuing change. In a view focused on proximate causes we will end up with surface solutions. We will try to change the exterior forces in such a way that the system is more or less suppressed, more or less exaggerated, but not only are exterior forces very difficult to manage, they are also ineffective in making lasting change within a system. If, however, we move into a systems view of the situation then we can look for ways to change the system so that it responds differently to external stimulus. This is not only typically much easier to do, though slower and requiring more discernment, it will also produce lasting change. 

These insights have applications in our personal lives and in our communities. Individuals such as Edwin Friedman realized this and wrote some great books on the subject (in particular Generation to Generation). Friedman will appear later on in this series. For myself, the immediate impact of systems theory was a reframing of how I looked at my walk with God. I found many aspects of the Christian life difficult in ways that I think most of us understand. Reading the bible is boring, praying is hard, and I would rather have slept in than go to church. My responses to these things were fairly typical as well: try harder, find ways to make myself go, read the interesting parts of the bible. But what if the problem isn't the activities and how I respond to them, but the system of my life and identity and how that system has been formed (and formed me) over time? What if I could change that? Or, more realistically, what if I could invite God to begin to change that within me? 

Note: This post is part of a series which I began here. To see all the posts in the series click the label at the bottom of this post "20yrs40bks".