By Dennis Sparks

Journal of Staff Development, Summer, 2001 (Vol. 22, No. 3)

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2001. All rights reserved.

JSD: Your newest book, Schools That Learn, has been eagerly awaited by many educators since you published The Fifth Discipline more than a decade ago.

Senge: This fieldbook is something that all of us wanted to do for a long time, but we knew we had to have good stories and compelling examples that would be useful to practitioners. The whole point of a fieldbook is to share activities, tips, and good advice from the field. There were experiments that began spontaneously without coordination in the early 1990s in several schools. Gradually, these blossomed into a variety of small networks. A couple of years ago, it was evident that we had enough material for a fieldbook.

We also had a deeper reason for doing this book. It has been very apparent to those of us involved in this work for many years that it makes little sense to help adults in their 30s and 40s become system thinkers, be more reflective on their experience, and orient themselves around what they really care about if their earlier experiences have pushed them in the opposite direction. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a pioneer in the Total Quality revolution, said many times in the last few years of his life that we have to move upstream to transform the system of management, which means that we have to transform the system of education.

JSD: In Schools That Learn you wrote, "Behind each pattern of behavior is a systemic structure — a set of seemingly unrelated factors that interact, even though they may be widely separated in time and place and even though their relationships may be difficult to recognize. When studied, these structures reveal the points of greatest leverage: The places where the least amount of effort provides the greatest influence of change." What are these leverage points in schools?

Senge: The answer to that question is really an ongoing process of discovery. When you ask where is the point of highest leverage, the question behind that is, "For what?" If your aim is to bring schools into conformity with what they traditionally have been asked to do, that’s one set of aims. If your purpose is to transform the system of public education, as Dr. Deming believed was necessary, then you look for different types of leverage. Given that, there are two areas of leverage that come to mind — innovative educators and parents.

I believe that really profound change can’t be imposed; it has to be nurtured. No top-down solution can be imposed uniformly and simultaneously across a large numbers of schools. We must unleash the forces of innovation and the passion of individuals, and top-down solutions won’t do that.

So a place of high leverage in schools is engaging teachers, principals, and parents in creating something new. That means you have to allow lots and lots of innovation of different sorts. Over the past 30 or 40 years, there have been many examples of innovative schools that have really worked. People within them have gotten very excited and showed us what is possible. And yet, if you come back five or 10 years later, the schools are right back where they used to be. So you have to begin to wonder about the enormous forces that maintain the status quo.

Because education occurs within an overarching, monolithic, politicized institution, it’s different from innovation in the private sector where innovators are given a freer hand. This awareness leads me to a second leverage point — parents — who I believe are the greatest force preserving the status quo in education.

You see, we all went to school together. What I mean by this is that we all share strong common assumptions about how school is supposed to work. It is not only that we want our children to learn, we want them to learn in the way we think they should learn, or more correctly, in the way we learned.

People in business often look at schools and say, "Why can’t they change? After all, these are not big organizations, maybe a few hundred employees at the most. My organization has thousands of employees and we have to continually change." But the business organization is, in many ways, a simpler system. Of course, businesses have to please their investors. But if they deliver an adequate return, the investor does not really care how they do it.

To push the analogy, parents are like investors who not only want the right output ("educated kids"), they want educators to achieve it in the right way. Plus they vote. When they are fearful about schools not delivering, parents will support whatever political agenda rises to the fore as the way to get schools into line. Business is a much less politicized institution.

Standardized testing is a case in point. Separate from the merits of standardized tests (many European countries have had them for years) the tendency to see them as a panacea is a political phenomenon.

It’s critical, then, that we support the innovators who are already out there by involving a meaningful cross section of the community. If there is not community support for any particular innovation in schools, I doubt that it can be sustainable. This means parents, grandparents, local business people — a broad cross section of those living in a community — must be engaged in order to address the forces that preserve the status quo.

JSD: You observed in Schools That Learn that every organization is a product of how its members think and interact, and that the fundamental nature of reality is relationships, not things.

Senge: How we think and interact shapes the underlying structures. There is a branch of social theory called "structuration" whose basic idea is that human beings are continually creating structures by virtue of their day-to-day interactions. Carl Weick of the University of Michigan calls this "enactment" because human beings are continually enacting their social structures. In turn, these social structures shape how we interact. But most of this is hidden from our everyday awareness.

People are always blaming the system for their behavior, but with a few exceptions, when you get right down to it, the system does not make people do anything. The vast majority of the thing we call "the system" is habits and taken-for-granted assumptions.

People in senior positions within organizations are often very frustrated when their employees say they are constrained. Conversely, people down in the organization say "they" — pointing upward — will not let us do things. Well, this is basically a self-reinforcing set of beliefs. While the formal structures are often coercive, they’re not determining. I have never seen an institution that did not have enough innovators in it. Never! I have seen lots of leaders, though, who don’t believe they have innovators in their organizations and who are busily working to thwart the innovators who are right under their noses.

Now, turn this around. When I say one area of leverage is finding and supporting the innovators, the basic definition of an innovator is someone who looks at the same social reality as everyone else and says, "I believe we can do something differently here." Where many people believe that there is no freedom to do anything but what they have done in the past, the innovator sees opportunity.

Over time, social structures tend to rigidify into habits of thought and taken-for-granted assumptions. Once they rigidify in that manner, they form a kind of prison for us. Everyone knows that in organizations there are formal structures and informal structures and that the informal structures determine for the most part what gets done. This structure is always subject to change. And ultimately, the formal structure is a human creation, as well, although there may only be a small number of people who have the power to change it.

Our experience is that the informal structure is often where the leverage for basic change exists; it is very hard to legislate basic change because this requires new ways of thinking and interacting. Such change must be grown from within. As it grows, it can enable changes in formal structures that would not otherwise have been possible.

Here’s an example: Teachers see teaching as an individualistic profession. Well, there’s no rule that says that. There’s no rule that keeps teachers from collaborating. There’s no law that says teachers can’t meet for an hour every day. Maybe they have to do it at 5 o’clock in the evening, but it can be done.

While the formal structures of schools may make collaboration difficult, such structures can be changed. But changing the structures won’t amount to much if there isn’t a genuine desire on the part of teachers to do their work in a more collaborative way.

I remember a middle school principal who told me many years ago that one of the hardest things she had done in a five-year journey of pretty astounding innovation in a middle school was to teach teachers to team. Eventually, she got to the point where teachers spent on average an hour a day conferring about how their classes were going, the experiments they were trying, how their kids were doing. They had to do some very imaginative things with the classroom schedule to allow this to happen. The point is that no one is forcing teachers to work alone; it is a creation of the members of the system and it can be changed if they have the will to do so.

JSD: A moment ago you used the term "genuine desire." What conditions nurture genuine desire for continuous improvement on the part of teachers and principals?

Senge: The source of such desire is always the same — people slowing down to answer these questions: "What do I really care about?" "What do I really want to create?" These questions and others like them are the source of continually rediscovering and recommitting ourselves to our sense of purpose, to our core values, and to our particular aspirations. There is no substitute in sustaining innovation.

When people come together to deal with practical problems, it’s important for them to consider what they want to create, not just what they want to fix. This approach fosters shared aspirations. Most people in most organizations — and teachers are no exception to that — are obsessed with solving problems. They spend their lives trying to fix things that are broken. This obsession with problem solving diverts our attention from a far more important activity, which is creating the new.

What I mean by creating is directing our energies into bringing things into reality that we really care about. And this is a profound shift, not just a semantic difference. When we’re solving problems, we’re trying to get rid of things we don’t want. When we’re creating, we are bringing into reality things that are valued by us.

Most situations in life don’t have a single right answer. Instead, there are more effective and less effective actions. In my experience, the most effective actions arise when we live the question, "What do we want to create?" This is not all that matters — we also need ideas about how we can move forward. But vitality comes when we move in the direction of what we truly want to bring into reality.

The key to all this is really pretty simple — believing that every person has the capacity to create. And when you believe that, I guarantee you that you’ll have plenty of people who are continually creating new things on a larger scale.

JSD: Earlier you used the term "taken-for-granted assumptions." In something you wrote, you made the observation that mental models are usually tacit and unexamined. I’m wondering what educators can do to become more aware of their own mental models and those of others, and to help change them when appropriate.

Senge: The mental models of which we are aware are usually not a problem. Almost all the problematic ones are unexamined because we don’t even know that we hold them. We simply see the world to be a certain way and are not willing to consider the possibility that we are wrong. This is a universal human dilemma. Change occurs when we really open ourselves to the views of others to see things differently, to engage in real conversations, and to listen deeply to those who do not see the world in the way that we do.

People pay a lot of lip service to diversity, but what they really don’t understand is that the diversity that matters is diversity of thought. One of the reasons that diversity of background is important in any social system is because different people see the world in different ways. The problem in organizations is that usually there is a dominant worldview that suppresses all the others and the diversity of thought that is present in the organization is lost.

Two large implications arise from this. The first concerns the extent to which educators are truly talking together and working together to explore their differing worldviews. Practically, this means we are continually learning how to recognize our own assumptions and we are willing to challenge them. It is easy to say that we value diversity, but the rubber meets the road when we watch our own reaction to someone who sees things differently from us. If someone is doing something different in his or her classroom, am I truly interested in why they are doing this and how well it is working, particularly if it is something different than what I do?

A second implication concerns seeing students as forces for innovation. They are the only ones who see the system as a whole. Kids go from class to class, to the playground, to the streets, to the home, and to all the other places that shape how they grow up. They continually experience the larger system, which shapes what is and is not possible in school. Educators do not see this system. Parents do not see this system. Yet, the kids are seldom really listened to.

Imagine running a company which has one cardinal rule: Under no circumstances should employees listen to customers, and if you find yourself stuck in a situation in which you actually have to listen to the customer you must be absolutely certain to discount what he or she says. A company like that would not last very long.

Now, we tend to see the parents and political constituencies as the customers in education. After all, they pay the bill. Yet, there is more to a customer than someone who pays the bill. The customer is the person we serve. The customer is the person who sees firsthand the quality that is being achieved. The customer is our key partner in judging what needs to be improved. So, while there is no direct one-to-one relationship between the features of a business and those of a school, I believe in many ways the kids are the closest we have in education to an actual customer.

But we say, "They’re just kids. What do they know?" Some of the most exciting stories in Schools That Learn are about elementary and secondary students in dialogue circles. There, kids talk with one another about what concerns them, what they want to create, their problems and aspirations. Depending on the kids’ age, they talk about different subjects. The only ground rule in these dialogue circles is that there are no adults, except perhaps one or two facilitators. Eventually and invariably, kids want teachers and administrators — and often parents — to join them. Then the ground rule is that the adults must be quiet, at least for the first hour or so. Otherwise, they just take over. When the dialogue is over and the adults have a few minutes to themselves to reflect, they always say the same thing: "I can’t believe how articulate these kids are. I can’t believe how concerned they are about the ‘big issues’ in the school." The only real surprise here is that the adults are surprised. They are surprised because they do so little to create opportunities for themselves to really listen to kids as if kids had something to say about how the school as a system is functioning.

One of the reasons this is so unusual is that the problem-solving orientation in education is so deep that the whole system is focused on fixing kids. The system is designed around conformity, and every kid knows it. In the process of getting kids to conform to the rules, we also basically discount them as human beings who might have something valuable to say about the content or processes of their education.

One of the best ways to surface mental models that are impediments is to ask kids to talk about their experiences. But we must ask them in a way that they feel they are really safe to talk. After students have been in school awhile, they know darn well one of the things you never do is tell the teacher the truth about how you really feel about things. So getting the voice of the student out in the open takes some effort.

JSD: A moment ago you used the phrase "safe to talk." Sitting down to have honest, direct conversations can be very scary. What are the conditions that educational leaders can create so teachers can talk to one another and to administrators in these ways?

Senge: It takes leaders who are patient and really passionate about these kinds of discussions and who are willing to make themselves vulnerable. The only way to lead in this situation is by example. If I am a principal whose goal is to have teachers talk openly and candidly about real issues, I had better be prepared to be on the firing line. If I ask teachers about how things are going, I must be the first one willing to change.

I have a friend who is a superintendent of a medium-sized urban school district who spends a good deal of his time talking with kids. He meets them whenever and wherever they want to meet. Jim learns through these conversations that a lot of the things he is pushing are seen in a different light by students. That’s usually what it takes — putting ourselves in a situation where we can hear views that we normally do not hear.

What we’re talking about here is creating a safe environment for the free flow of information and the encouragement of innovation so that people know what’s going on. Right now, a lot of information is withheld for fear of the consequences of disclosing it.

Years ago, a principal of an innovative school told me something that really struck me. She said her primary job was creating an environment for teachers to continually learn. She said she was convinced that if teachers were continually learning, kids would be continually learning. We are not lacking for mechanisms for that learning. It simply requires principals and superintendents who are really committed to the continuous learning of everyone associated with the school.

Position: Senior lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Also, chairperson for the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants dedicated to the "interdependent development of people and their institutions."

Education: Bachelor’s degree in engineering, Stanford University; master’s degree in social systems modeling and doctorate in management from MIT.

Professional history: Author of numerous articles in academic journals and the business press on systems thinking in management. Author of The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization (1990), which has sold more than 750,000 copies and was named in 1997 Harvard Business Review as one of the seminal management books in the last 75 years. Co-author of The fifth discipline fieldbook: Strategies and tools for building a learning organization (1994), The dance of change: The challenges to sustaining momentum in learning organizations (1999), and Schools that learn: A fifth discipline fieldbook for educators, parents, and everyone who cares about education (2000).

Accomplishments: The Journal of Business Strategy (Sept./Oct. 1999) named Senge one of the 24 people who had the greatest influence on business strategy over the last 100 years. Featured in articles in Business Week, Fortune, Fast Company, and other leading business periodicals.

Dennis Sparks is executive director of the National Staff Development Council.