Peter Senge es un gurú muy recono­cido a nivel mundial por su libro “Quinta Dis­ci­plina” el cual es lec­tura oblig­a­to­ria para todos aque­l­los intere­sa­dos en el Man­age­ment o en el Pen­samiento Sistémico.  Además de los libros que ha escrito, reg­u­lar­mente dicta con­fer­en­cias a ejec­u­tivos en todo el mundo que son grabadas y luego ven­di­das en for­mato DVD.

En el año 2002, en la ciu­dad de Sao Paulo (Brasil) en el marco del Expo­Man­age­ment  dictó una con­fer­en­cia tit­u­lada “Learn­ing Orga­ni­za­tion”. Aquí pre­sen­ta­mos la tran­scrip­ción de lo que nos pare­ció más intere­sante, espero sea útil para ustedes.

Most of us who ride bicy­cles still have no idea how we do it. Why is it so dif­fi­cult to learn to ride a bicy­cle? The first rea­son is that we all learned walk­ing before we learned bicy­cle rid­ing. When we walk, if we start to lose our bal­ance, what do we do?, we move in direc­tion, if you are walk­ing and you start to stum­ble, what do you do?, you slow down and try to regain your bal­ance.  If you are rid­ing a bicy­cle, and your bicy­cle starts to tip in a direc­tion, what do you do? you actu­ally turn into that direc­tion, and if your bicy­cle starts to fall or you lose your bal­ance, you actu­ally have to speed up. It’s totally crazy from the stand point of walk­ing. Learn­ing to ride a bicy­cle is a crazy activ­ity only because we first learned to walk, because the prin­ci­ples that gov­ern bicy­cle rid­ing are actu­ally dif­fer­ent than the prin­ci­ples that gov­ern walk­ing. So there are two points, I’d like you to think about from my sim­ple example.

The first is that what appears dif­fi­cult ini­tially is dif­fi­cult because of what we have learned in the past. Many peo­ple would say that real learn­ing requires unlearn­ing. Because in essence to ride a bicy­cle you have to unlearn some of what we learned about walk­ing. But sec­ondly, almost all of us, did learn to ride bicy­cles, it becomes nat­ural, because, in fact, we have the capac­ity to ride bicy­cles, because we are prod­ucts of nature, and the laws of motion are part of nature, and of course, most impor­tantly of all, we all know how learn­ing occurs. It does not occur through lis­ten­ing to somebody’s ideas and then go and imple­ment­ing them, ever!. It occurs through tak­ing action and fail­ing. We learned to walk through falling down, we learned to ride bicy­cles through falling down. There is no sub­ti­tute, we learn through doing, all of us. Some­times ideas might be help­ful, some­times ideas can actu­ally slow the process down.

We also learn through our rela­tion­ships, learn­ing is always per­sonal. A learn­ing process is a process where a learner goes from not being able to do some­thing the learner really wants to do, to being more able to do some­thing the learner wants to do. Learn­ing is a process of enhanc­ing our capac­ity. How­ever, we learned to ride bicy­cles by enter­ing a com­mu­nity of bicy­cle rid­ers. Learn­ing is both inti­mate or per­sonal and social or col­lec­tive. Human beings learn in the con­text of large social net­works or net­works of rela­tion­ships. We learned to walk by enter­ing a com­mu­nity of walk­ers, we learned to talk by enter­ing a com­mu­nity of talk­ers. And this morn­ing we’ll learn a bit about learn­ing orga­ni­za­tions by becom­ing a com­mu­nity of learners.

Almost all of us, in one time or another, have been part of a group of peo­ple work­ing together in a extra­or­di­nary way. In fact, let me just ask you, if you think of your whole life, this might go back to a foot­ball team you were part of when you were a stu­dent, or some­thing at work, and ask this ques­tion: have I ever been part of a group who worked together in a extra­or­di­nary way, who were really excep­tional in their effec­tive­ness, in what they were able to achieve, and cre­ated a kind of envi­ro­ment that was really excit­ing to be part of. There is one more ques­tion I need to ask:
Did the group or the team start with that level of capa­bil­ity? When they first came together, did they have that ability?

So you were part of a “Learn­ing Orga­ni­za­tion”, you were part of a group of peo­ple who enhance their capac­i­ties to cre­ate types of result they truly want to cre­ate. How­ever, we don’t nec­es­sar­ily appre­ci­ate the prin­ci­ples that even oper­ate in our own expe­ri­ence. Often times these things hap­pen and  we don’t give a lot of thought to them.

One of the fea­tures of great teams is a lot of con­flict. But there is a spe­cial nature of the con­flict, it’s con­flict that becomes pro­duc­tive. It’s con­flict that leads us to see the world in dif­fer­ent ways. The first prin­ci­ple of effec­tive teams is: to cre­ate great teams, you must first cre­ate space for individuals.

How do we build the learn­ing orga­ni­za­tion?
–Talk about your aspi­ra­tions.
–Cre­ate space and open­ness for reflect­ing our men­tal mod­els.
–Keep ask­ing the ques­tion: what are the sys­tems we are part of? how can we con­tribute to those systems?

Fuente: Learn­ing Orga­ni­za­tion DVD — Peter Senge