Collaboration Is Key to Organizational Change: An Interview with Peter Senge
by Kali Saposnick

from Leverage Points Issue 34

Listen to audio clips from this interview at
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To get a fresh perspective on how organizations can meet the global challenges of the next several years, Leverage Points invited Peter Senge to share some of his current thinking. More than a decade has passed since Senge wrote the groundbreaking book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Currency/Doubleday, 1990), which Harvard Business Review named as one of the seminal books of the past 75 years. Through his engagement in countless change initiatives over the years, Peter has further developed his thinking about what it will take for organizations to thrive in the 21st century—and the role each of us can play in making that happen.

According to Peter, what any individual organization, whether a school or business, can do today to significantly break from the cultural mainstream is small. "Each one operates as if it were tied with a rubber band," he explains. "Even a group that innovates a great deal for a while eventually gets snapped back to the norm. Many extraordinary, innovative schools, for example, in which kids are engaged and teachers love their work, usually return to average within 5 to 10 years."

Why do organizations resist change? One reason, Senge explains, is that most of us erroneously believe that somebody—some senior leader or manager—must be controlling the organization's systems, which we ourselves feel overwhelmed by. From a systemic perspective, the reality is just the opposite. "Most large institutions are so complex that no one person—no 'mover or shaker' in a position of authority—can bring about the needed change," says Peter. "Rather, large-scale transformation can only evolve when lots of people at all levels of an organization start to do things differently."

Sharing Generative Ideas
If that is the case, then how do we get a critical mass of people doing things differently? "Through the sharing of generative ideas, ideas that can change how people think and act," he says. As an example of how a set of ideas can produce wide-scale change without a single plan or person guiding its process, Senge refers to the Industrial Revolution of the last 200 years. Over a long period of time, hundreds and thousands and ultimately hundreds of millions of people started doing things a little bit differently than they had before. As a result, factories sprang up, assembly lines were developed, public schools were created, and entrepreneurial activity exploded. As these concepts grew in people's minds, the way work was organized changed dramatically—for better and for worse.

One of the most effective means of spreading such ideas, Senge says, is through stories. "Academic books that lay out sound theories usually have less short-term impact than a compelling story told informally over and over. Even more powerful is a reinforcing pattern of stories that gradually starts to build an idea in people's heads." He describes, for example, how many of us have begun to internalize the notion that we're inextricably linked with others from around the world because we all live on one increasingly small planet—a public consciousness that did not exist 50 years ago. Whether the idea evolved from seeing pictures of the earth from space or images from the other side of the planet, or from being able to work around the clock with colleagues from Asia and Europe, we've begun to accept the "story" that we are all to a certain degree interdependent. "This is an historic change," Peter says. "Unfortunately, we still to a large extent identify first with our own tribe or country."

Creating Collaborations
Another idea that Senge believes is gradually eroding our identification with only those near to us is the need for collaborations among many stakeholders across organizations, societal sectors, and national boundaries to address important challenges. For the past year, the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), of which he is the founding chairperson, has been bringing together large multinational companies, prominent NGOs, and key governmental organizations to work on significant issues around environmental sustainability. For example, one new project is based on German chemist Michael Braungart's idea of "intelligent materials pooling." In their new book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (North Point Press, 2002), Braungart and U.S. green architect William McDonough discuss the adverse environmental and health effects of current industrial products. They propose a business model in which companies collaborate to eliminate toxins from their products and integrate natural systems ideas, such as continuous re-use, into product design. This paradigm has become increasingly attractive to companies, especially in Japan and the European Union, where some governments have started passing legislation that holds private industries responsible for their products from creation through disposal.

To demonstrate how sustainable product development can become a company's core strategy for success, Senge shares the story of Nike, Inc. About five years ago, the sports footwear, clothing, and equipment manufacturer began to address a serious discrepancy between its mission and its end product: Founded to promote fitness and vitality, Nike was making products that included potentially harmful chemicals. Several Nike leaders started meeting to figure out how to implement sustainable practices in product design, manufacturing, and distribution. Eventually, this group evolved into what is currently a substantial force at Nike. The company now sells an entire line of organic clothing made from cottons produced by small farmers around the world. They're currently trying to figure out how to mass-produce nontoxic organic fibers so they can use these materials in all of their products.

Shaping the World
Nike's example illustrates the kind of impact organizational change can have on the rest of the world. "What is shaping how the world evolves today?" asks Senge. "Not any one individual but rather a network of people and organizations who are planting ideas of interdependency and sustainability that will transform how our larger systems work in the future. We don't need a new world president who will make it all work out for us. We need many people who do things with an awareness that we're all interdependent."

And, according to Peter, there is no end to what people can do, either through individual actions, such as recycling and buying sustainable products, or group efforts. He is particularly impressed with innovative projects in which young people are trying to think globally while doing things locally. "Many youth today have grown up acutely aware of the imbalances in the world," he says, "especially those living in poverty or in countries with obvious social divisions. They're beginning to network with each other internationally to initiate changes in our social and environmental conditions." For example, Pioneers of Change, an emerging global learning community of people in their 20s and early 30s, is involved in significant social change projects to produce healthy communities around the world. One of its members is starting the first management school in Croatia. Another group, Roca, located in Massachusetts, is composed of former gang members focused on helping teenagers leave their gangs and build their communities.

Senge concludes, "If you talk to these young people, they'll tell you that they're basically trying to figure out how people can live together well. This idea is what I focused on when I first wrote The Fifth Discipline, and it is as much the foundation of this work today as it was then."

Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.