Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline" Chapter 5 - A Shift of Mind

Seeing the World A New

Seeing Circles of Causality

Reinforcing and Balancing Feedback and Delays: The Building Blocks of Systems Thinking

Reinforcing Feedback: Discovering How Small Changes Can Grow

Balancing Processes: Discovering the Sources of Stability and Resistance

Delays: When Things Happen... Eventually

Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline" Chapter 4 - The Laws of The Fifth Discipline

1. Today's probelms come from yesterday's "solutions"
2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back
3. Behaviour grows better before it grows worse
4. the wasy way out usually leads back in
5. The cure can be worse than the disease
6. Faster is slower
7. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space
8. Small changes can produce big results - but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious
9. You can have your cake and eat it too - but not at once
10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants
11. There is no blame

Roger Martin, "How Successful Leaders Think"

Based on Roger Martin interview more than 50 leaders, most of them share a somewhat unusual trait: They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they're able to creatively resolve the tension between the those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both. This process of consideration and synthesis can be termed integrative thinking.

Opposable Thumb, Opposable Mind

The Four Stages of Decision Making

1. Determining Salience

Conventional Thinkers: Focus only on obviously relevant features

Integrative Thinkers: Seek less obvious but potentially relevant factors

2. Analyzing Causality

Conventional Thinkers: Consider one-way, linear relationships betwwen variables, in which more of A produces more of B

Integrative Thinkers: Consider multidirectional and nonlinear relationships among variables

3. Envisioning the Decision Architecture

Conventional Thinkers: Break problems into pieces and work on them separately or sequentially

Integrative Thinkers: See problems as a whole, examining how the parts fit together and how decisions affect one another

4. Achieving Resolution

Conventional Thinkers: Make either-or choices; settle for best available options

Integrative Thinkers: Creatively resolve tensions among opposing ideas; generate innovative outcomes

The consequences of integrative thinking and conventional thinking couldn't be more distinct. Integrative thinking generates options and new solutions. It creates a sense of limitless possibility. Conventional thinking glosses over potential solutions and fosters the illusion that creative solutions don't actually exist. With conventional thinking, they wear away with every apparent reinforcement of the lesson that life is about accepting unattractive trade-offs. Fundamentally, the conventional thinker prefers to accept the world just as it is, wheras the integratie thinkers welcomes the challange of shaping the world for the better.

David Allen Penguin, "Getting Things Done"

The Power of the Next-Action Decision

When a culture adopts "What's the next action?" as a standart operating query, there's an automatic increase in energy, productivity, clarity, and focus.

The Source of the Technique

Determine for what the next physical action is that will have something forward
 

Creating the Option of Doing

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one - Mark Twain
Without a next action, there remains a potentially infinite gap between current reality and what you need to do.

Why Bright People Procastinate the Most

- Bright people have the capability of freaking out faster and more dramatically than anyone else.
- Ceasing negative imaging will always cause your energy to increase.
- No matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid of confusion by taking one little step toward solution. Do something. - George F. Nordenholt
- Avoiding action decisions untuilo the pressure of the last minute creates huge inefficiencies and unnecessary stress

The Value of a Next-Action Decision-Making Standard

The "What's the next action?" question forces clarity, accountability, productivity, and empowerment.
- Talk doesn't cook rice - Chinese proverb
- Productivity will improve only when individuals increase their operational responsiveness. And in knowledge work, that means clarifying actions on the front end instead of the back.
- People are always blaming their  circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them. - George B. Shaw

The Power of Outcome Focusing

- the power of directing our mental and imaginative processes to create change has been studied and promoted in thousands of contexts - from the early "positive thinking" books to recent discoveries in advanced neurophysiology.

- applying the principle in terms of practical reality

- a "yes" to all of these questions: does it help get things done? and, how do we best utilize it in managing the work that allow us to produce what we want to have happen with less effort?

Focus and the Fast Track

As you begin to use it habitually as your primary means of addressing all situations, your personal productivity can go through the roof. 

Daniel Goleman, "Leadership That Gets Results"

The Idea in Brief

Many managers mistakenly assume that leadership style is a function of personality rather than strategic choice, Instead of choosing the one style that suits their temperament, they should ask which style best addresses the demands of a particular situation.

Research has shown that the most successful leaders have strengths in the following emotional intelligence competencies:

- self-awareness

- self-regulation

- motivation

- empathy

- social skills

There are six basic style of leadership; each makes use of the key components of emotional intelligence in different combinations. The best leaders don't know just one style of leadership - they're skilled at several, and have the flexiblitily to switch between styles as the sircumstances dictate.

The Idea in Practice

Managers often fail to appreciate how profoundly the organizational climate can influence financial results. It can account for nearly third of financial performance. Organizational climate, in turn, is influenced by leadership style - by the way that managers motivate direct reports, gather and use information, make decisions, manage change initiatives, and handle crises.

The six basic leadership styles are:

1. The coercive style

2. The authoritative style

3. the affiliative style

4. The democratic style

5. The pacetting style

6. The coaching style

Leadership That Gets Results

New research suggest that the most effective executives use a collection of distinct leadership styles - each in the right measure, at just the right time. Such flexibility is tough to put into action, but it pays off in performance. And better yet, in can be learned.

"What do effective leaders do?"

They sets strategy; they motivate; they create a mission; they build a culture.

"What should leaders do?"

The leader's singular job is to get results.

"How?"

- inference, experience, instinct

- emotional intelligence

- do not rely on one leadership style, depending on the business situation

- the pro senses the challenge ahead, swiftly pulls out the right tool, and elegantly puts it to work

Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, Marty Linsky: "The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and The World"

The Theory Behind the Production: Purpose and Possibility

The first humans went on to form cultures with self-sustaining norms that required minimal reinforcement by authorities. Cultural norms gave human beings remarkable adaptability and scalability. Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing people to take tough challenges and thrive. The concept of thriving is drawn from evolutionary biology, in which a succesful adaptation has three characteristics:

- it preserve the DNA essential for the species' continued survival

- it discards the DNA that no longer serve the species' current needs

- it creates DNA arrangements taht give the species' the ability to flourish in new ways and in more challenging environments.

Successful adaptations enable a living system to take the best from its history into the future.

What does this suggest as an analogyfor adaptive leadership?

- Adaptive leadership is specifically about change that enables the capacity to thrive

- Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than jettison it

- Organizational adaptation accurs through experimentation

- Adaptation relies on diversity

- New adaptations significantly displace, reregulate, and rearrange some old DNA

- Adaptation takes time

Mobilizing people to meet their immediate adaptive challenges lies at the heart of leadership in the short term. Over time, these and other culture-shaping efforts build an organization's adaptive capacity, fostering processes that will generate new norms that enable the organization to meet the ongoing stream of adaptive challenges posed by a world ever ready to offer new realities, opportunities, and pressures.

The Illusion of the Broken System

There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization need to change because it is broken. the reality is that any social system is the way it is because the people in that system want it that way. In that sense, on the whole, on balance, the system is working fine, even though it may appear to be 'dysfunctional' in some respoect to some members and outside observers. Jeff Lawrence says, "There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets".

CHAPTER 3

Before You Begin

Practicing adaptive leadership is difficult on the one hand and profoundly meaningful on the other; it is not something you should enter into casually.

Four tips before you step out:

- Don't do it alone

- Live life as a leadership laboratory

- Resist the leap to action

- Discover the joy of making hard choices

Peter Senge Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, "Drawing Forth Personal Vision"

Step 1
Creating a result
My result is to be on the peak of my achievement. If I am an employee, the peak as an employee is to sit on the peak of the line of the organization. Become a leader as not I have an eager to be one, but become a meaningful leader to others with less of collateral damage. At the end, an accountable leader is much more than just to be a sit on the peak of an organization.

Step 2
Reflecting on the first vision component
Sometimes there are some of doubt in the process on achieving my goals, but try to keep inspire all the time, energizing by myself or by sharing with others.

Step 3
Self-image:
That focus on target, with the support of the team, energize them by keep involving them and empathy to all of the team.
Tangibles:
Nothing in particularly, just want to be just enough when I need it.
Home:
I want to have an house for my retirement, such as a house in the country with big lawn yards.
Health:
Hope that I will not get sick or need to be hospitalized, especially in my elderly stage of life.
Relationships:
I want to have more quality and quantity relationship with my family.
Work:
More fairness and professional work environment.
Personal pursuits:
Graduate school to accomplish my masters degree
Community:
Build the Community become stronger.
Other:
Create an own company or business, create a social cause organization
Life purpose:
Meaningful and inspiring to others, create others become meaningful and inspiring.