Can You Navigate the Uncertainty of Change? with Peter Senge

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Jan 21, 2021

Peter Senge, an expert in organizational learning and author of The Fifth Discipline, discusses creating cultures of learning and navigating workplace uncertainty. Topics include new measures of success for change efforts, misunderstood complexity of change, creating healthy leadership communities, prioritizing well-being, and recognizing collective trauma.

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INSIGHT

Top-Down Change Often Backfires

Many change efforts fail because leaders push top-down ideas without genuine mutual engagement.
People resist when change feels like something done to them, not with them.

INSIGHT

Treat Change Like A Dark Room

Complex systems produce unintended consequences so good intentions often fail.
Treat change like moving in a dark room: take small steps and adjust constantly.

ADVICE

Prioritize Listening Over 'Buy-In'

Build cultures where ideas can bubble up from anywhere and people feel respected.
Prioritize listening and mutuality over 'getting buy-in' from below.

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Peter Senge, who has been at the forefront of organizational learning since publishing his classic text, The Fifth Discipline, in 1990, provided theories and methods to foster aspiration, develop reflective conversation, and understand complexity in service of shaping learning orientated organization cultures. Throughout Peter's work with leading organizations around the world, he's been asking, "How do we create the conditions for people to work together at their best, cultivating the innate system's intelligence that is our birthright, but is all but lost in modern culture." As an engineer by training, Peter's work has always emphasized tools and methods, not for their own sake, but as vehicles for building individual and collective capacities. And these approaches have been captured in the many books he's published.

In this week's podcast, we explore how to embrace the uncertainty and complexity of navigating change and unlocking learning in our workplaces.

Connect with Peter Senge:

https://www.solonline.org/

You'll Learn:

[02:57] - Peter explores if we need new measures of success when it comes to determining if workplace change efforts have succeeded or failed.
[06:22] - Peter explains why the complexity of change in workplaces is often misunderstood.
[11:32] - Peter offers tips for how we can create more cultures of learning to help us navigate workplace uncertainty and change in 2021.
[16:12] - Peter explains how we can better navigate the creative and emotional tension that exists between our hopes for the future and our current reality.
[21:50] - Peter shares why workplaces need healthy leadership communities, rather than leaders as heroes, to support change.
[24:17] - Peter explains why the desire for continual growth creates changes challenges in workplaces.
[28:49] - Peter offers guidance for our workplaces can leverage complexity to help them create more successful changes.
[32:30] - Peter enters the lightning round.

Thanks for listening!

Thanks so much for joining me again this week. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this post.

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Until next time, take care! Thank you, Peter!