Ever since Peter Senge put forth the idea of "five disciplines" in the early 1990s, business management thinking has not been the same. This is all the more sharply felt in the way software development processes are handled in companies around the world.
This article takes a brief look at each of the disciplines espoused by Senge, which, according to him, are the hallmarks of a "learning" organization:
- Personal Mastery
- Mental Models
- Systems Thinking
- Shared vision, and
- Team learning.
Links of Interest
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In the backdrop of software projects, systems thinking, personal mastery and mental models work on the level of the individual, while the concept of shared vision and team learning have more to do with team dynamics. This is applicable for the project manager / leader as well as the team member.
Personal Mastery
"Personal Mastery" is another name given to the state of Self-Knowledge. This begins with each member of the software project conducting one's own SWOT analysis - a realistic, down-to-earth evaluation of one's strengths & weaknesses, and the opportunities
that are staring in the face, coupled with an introspection of what it is that affects one's output negatively (that is, the threats that threaten to trip one on the path of achieving our personal vision).
For a software project team to succeed, carrying out such personal SWOT leads to picking up personalities that complement and supplement each other, as opposed to working at cross-purposes with each other. Further, inherent in personal mastery is an attempt to identify areas that one needs to work upon, where there is deficiency.
Mental Models
"Turning the mirror inwards" is how Peter Senge describes mental models. He has taken as basis for his postulates, the research work done by Dr. Chris Argyris in the field of mental modeling. Dr Argyris, in his path breaking studies, made the contention that
people who manage projects swing between two mental models - one that they adopt as their favorite, and the other that they eventually slip into, in actual practice. He further came up with a "ladder of abstraction" that such people should "climb", in order to succeed
with software projects without slipping into the quagmire of time/cost overruns and crises-management.
Traditionally favorite mental models bestride extremes of the spectrum - with a plan-and-plan-to-minutest-detail project management approach balancing a plan-minimally-&-manage-as-you-go approach. Senge's mental model recognizes the "inherent" chaos in managing software projects upfront. Though the initial set of conditions that a project takes off from may be as orderly as possible, Senge suggests that we
- Understand and value "leaps of abstractions" - that is, the tendency to generalize specific issues;
- Recognize the subtext beneath our words that go into the project plan - that is, understand and appreciate that your perception of the other party is saying may be different from what actually got said;
- Strive to achieve a deft balance between the skill of inquiry and advocacy - this is done through actively listening to the other party, and, at the same time, articulating one's own thought processes and encouraging others to fill in any gaps that they see
in them; - Keep in focus the ambivalence in our own favorite theories and the ones that we actually end up practicing.
Systems Thinking
Systems thinking, as a discipline, requires a shift of mind:
- From focusing on cause-effect chains, to focusing on interrelationships between the components; and
- From looking at snapshots and arriving at conclusions, to looking at processes of change, and then form conclusions.
The key factor that matters in Systems Thinking, is that not only is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, but also it is different from the parts themselves.
As part of developing Systems Thinking, Senge advocates the asking of the "Five Whys", every time a software project is initiated. This technique brings to light any hidden assumptions that the project team might be having - individually as well as, as a group - about the project.
Shared Vision
Shared Vision is a group effort, as opposed to the earlier three disciplines that we have discussed so far. This discipline requires the project team to ask the Five Whys
about the project in order to be clear about the underlying tenets of the work in hand. This also helps in establishing the boundaries of the project and to articulate metrics against which success of the project shall be measured. The end result of this exercise shall be
an "Initial Vision" state that the team shall have reached.
This vision is then "sold" to all the stakeholders, through status meetings, emails, etc. Perhaps an exclusive Web site that details the project in full, and is packed with all the relevant information - which all the stakeholders have access to - would help too. The idea
here is to transform the "initial" vision to a "shared" vision, where everybody is aware of how the project has to perform and go.
Team Learning
Like the Shared Vision, Team Learning is a group-centric discipline in Senge's scheme of things. Team Learning has its roots in fostering creativity amongst the team members through three dimensions:
- Thinking insightfully on issues that are inherently complex;
- Taking innovative and coordinated action on specific tasks; and
- Creating a network that encourages other teams to participate and take action as well.
By picking members for a software project that have the right mix of skills and mindset - whose Personal Mastery is such that there is no possibility of working at cross-purposes - and putting them through the process of Systems Thinking and Mental Modeling, one gets
to the stage where a cohesive team has been built. A Shared Vision follows. When all the team members are on the same wavelength so far as the software project goes, contributing their ideas on a particular problem in a group becomes easy. Ideas start building seamlessly upon one another, and the entire team learns through this
process.
Final Word
From the above discussion, it may be seen that Senge has put forth the concept of continuously asking oneself throughout the life of the project of whether each of the five disciplines have been taken into account. As a software project leader, it would behove one to keep asking these questions over and over again. Encouraging personal
mastery in team members, and encouraging them to check and cross-check their mental models, and encouraging them to look at the problems facing the team from a Systems Thinking perspective; all go towards making a good team great. Finally, with a shared vision and group learning approach, crises-management and time/cost overruns can
be effectively brought under control.
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