Dr. Peter Senge speaks at the Vancouver Board of Trade (semi-liveblog)
I was invited as a media representative to attend a breakfast and interactive session with Dr. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline and the founding director of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL), as well as a Visiting Lecturer with the Massachussets Institute of Technology (ironically, my first choice for when I was deciding where to go and do my PhD). More coincidentally, the training that Dr. Senge and I have is fairly parallel (undergraduate in engineering, masters and PhD in social sciences/interdisciplinary/management). And not surprisingly, we are both interested in learning organizations.
I plan to to a more detailed analysis of the talk on my research blog. You can read my live notes on this post. Overall, it was a very good event. As I had mentioned to Terry Hadley (Director of Communications for the Vancouver Board of Trade), for people who haven’t been exposed to the notion of a learning organization, it was a great talk. Peter is a very good speaker. One thing I have to admire and appreciate is that he stayed pretty academic throughout. Often times, I’ve seen scholars move to the “I’m a great thinker” camp and forget about their academic roots and training. Luckily, that wasn’t the case with Peter Senge.
The five disciplines that Senge promotes are:
- Systems thinking
- Personal mastery
- Mental models
- Building shared vision
- Team learning
You can read more on Senge’s work here – Smith, M. K. (2001) ‘Peter Senge and the learning organization’, the encyclopedia of informal education. [www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm. Last update: February 05, 2009]
What follows below are my live notes from the talk. Thanks to the Vancouver Board of Trade for inviting me as media. I had a very pleasant talk with Terry about the role of new media (bloggers) in covering events. We also discussed having wireless access for the upcoming events (particularly, I think I’ll be focusing on the March 6th event on Green Energy)
So when you read my notes, think about them as a liveblog as I captured his thoughts on the spot. I have made very few editorial changes.
Action towards climate change is important . Roughly 90% of BC Hydro’s staff are involved in conservation practices outside of work.
THE NECESSARY REVOLUTION
Dr. Peter Senge
Senior Lecturer, MIT; Founding Chair, SOL; Author
Dr. Senge doesn’t come to Vancouver very often (although he comes to Seattle relatively frequently). The first part of the talk is a presentation on the kind of work he does. Dr Senge is an engineer by training (coincidentally, so am I!) so he believes in tools. All learning is doing. So he’s going to undertake a practice-oriented session (a workshop)
Dr. Senge’s work in the last 10 years he’s worked on the Society of Organizational Learning’s objectives. How do organizations learn from one another.
Core Learning Capabilities
- Aspiration (personal mastery, shared vision)
- Reflective conversation (mental models, team learning)
- Understanding complexity (systems thinking)
Evolution from focusing on individual organizations to realizing that we were building a network of organizations. The reason why they founded the research centres was to build new capabilities, to see the larger system, to work across boundaries. Pretty quickly, if it’s going well, trade may foster collaboration and people start doing things together.
The Global Sustainable Food Lab is a collaboration between numerous companies, non-profit organizations, academics. This lab focuses on the global food system and its sustainability. Apparently, the average pound of food in America travels 2,000 miles (the data change frequently).
Senge shows a graph on the prices of the 6 largest traded agricultural commodities in the world (soybean, corn, wheat, cotton, edible dry beans, potatoes). All of these commodity prices have gone down. Food prices (particularly corn price) started rising again around 2005, a big issue, huge problem because of ethanol (the big speculation on bio-fuels, particularly corn, being taken out of food production and into ethanol).
Food is our first system, the thing we actually consume. It’s still the world’s largest industry. Agriculture is still the largest employer of people. The question of what do you make of the significant trends on corn prices, and issues with bio-fuel is not an easy one. From the perspective of consumers. This is an example of ‘the success of globalization’ – we make more and more food available to people at a lower, lower pricer.
The rich Northeners benefit the most of this globalized system because they can consume apples whenever they want (even out of season). Not many people complain about this for the rich. It is a disaster for the farmers of the world, because these prices aren’t enough for their survival. Roughly 50 million people on average migrate from rural to urban environments in the developing world. Why would anybody choose to live in such a setting unless they had no choice? Arguably, the world’s food system is the greatest cause of poverty. And it is an illustration, it’s food for thought.
No one is seeking to bring this about. From a business economics standpoint most of us don’t recognize these . Commodity markets are characterized by falling commodity prices. In a pure commodity market, profits always go back to zero (basic economic theory). This doesn’t into account social or ecological concerns.
The vicious cycles that get kicked in by these dynamics (increased use of pesticides, etc.) because their margins are falling and profits are low, so they are trying to grow more. That, of course has a negative environmental impact.
The Global Sustainable Food Lab was launched by Unilever and Oxfam. One of the most significant changes that in the last 5-10 years have arisen, the Oxfam campaigning has changed a lot (from family relief to poverty alleviation). Their purpose now (Oxfam) is the end of the structural causes of poverty. What would make Oxfam collaborate with Unilever? Unilever has been working with World Wildlife to establish the Marine Stewardship Council. Why is Unilever doing this? Pretty simple “our business is based on food, otherwise we fail).
Water is the most acute problem in our world today (Note from Raul – I’ve been saying this in my own research for the past 10 years!). The scary statistics by 2020 by WHO 3 billion people in the world will not have access to clean drinking water. There are no substitutes for water.
In our way of operating our society, the number 1 issue for any head of state is the economy. If there is a prolonged period of negative economic growth, we are in trouble. This is just a reflection of how we live. Factually, we probably pay the least attention to the environment.
But we have it backwards. The ‘wedding cake of our priorities’ should go as first ecology, second society, third economy (I’ll draw a diagram when I have a chance).
Peter is now referring to the work of Dana (Donella) Meadows – the continuum space and time. [Raul's note - I actually love the work of Dana Meadows - she was the first person I had ever read whose work on systems thinking became influential and had an impact on my scholarly work]
People have asked Peter about what happens to CSR under tough economic conditions. People can say whatever they want When times get tough, people pay attention to what they consider more strategic.
Peter’s training at MIT was under Manning J. Forrester (complex systems thinking). They’ve been doing work on systems thinking. You have to pay attention to time horizons. They started doing a lot of work on shared vision and visioning tools. Rationality is a weak tool to compel people to have a long-range planning horizon.
Why do we think in decades vis-a-vis our kids? We do it naturally because we care. So we started realizing that systems thinking and shared visions of the future are one and the same and should be integrated. We can build better mental models if we focus on a long term, shared vision.
What was the mortality rate of firms in 1982 (3-4 decades average). This is the case during the last industrial era. Very large successful businesses. Half the expected lifetime of individuals in those same societies.
A study found that 20 companies that were 200 years old or older. About half of them were European, 2 in the US (Procter and Gamble and Dupont) and a few in Japan. The vast majority of very successful businesses actually don’t live very long and then you have a bi-modal distribution. Obviously they have an ability to learn and adapt and survive for quite a long time.
Features of long lived companies
* Identity: sense of who we are that transcends what we do. The eternal question – who are we?
* Tolerance: Openness to what we do not know. We tend to be arrogant and think that we know EVERYTHING.
* Fiscal conservatism: Maintain control of one’s destiny. The companies that don’t get into dangerous financial practices.
* Sensitivity to environment: Larger sense of responsibility, as a natural by-product of how we operate. This is interesting considering that the study was around 1982 and published in 1997 (when attention to the environment wasn’t amazingly strong).
Shell study in 1982 finally published in 1997.
A.P. de Geus, The Living Company, 1997.
A word or two about the book – the product of the last 10 years. The heart of the book are wonderful stories. These are stories not only of people who are radical environmentalists. Most of the stories are of people in responsible positions in organizations and non-profits.
In the last 5-8 years we have witnessed a big shift towards what collaboration between businesses and non-governmental organizations. The fair trade movement got a bit boost from Oxfam’s work (1999 – Great Rules and Double Standards). This report told a story of the trading regimes and the WTO.
We don’t know how to use our purchasing power to showcase our values. The fair trade movement allows us to do that and connects both concepts.
Peter is now talking about water access in India and the role of Coca Cola. Turns otu that there was an Indian blogger in Indiana who was filling up his blog space with incorrect facts. Until they figured out that they missed the biggest picture. Water is a very regional issue in India. Coca Cola was using very little of the water (mostly is in the deep aquifers).
It wasn’t about them to be right or wrong. The point was that they sell water in a country where there isn’t much water. They were wrong in some stuff that they had written before. They had a big campaign to improve water efficiency in their plants.
A lot of businesses start with efficiency measures.
He closes now with the conversation between WWF and Coke – “we appreciate your efficiency measures – our estimates is – you use on average 260 litres of water to make 1 litre of coke – because you never paid attention to the water necessary in the raw sugar that you are using in the process. He understood water and he said – we gotta do something – he went to the chairman of Nestle (given that they are both competitors, it’s amazing that they collaborated). We have a problem because water is a really big issue. In 2007 they announced jointly (Coke, Nestle) made a big announcement in Geneva – they both said – we decided that we have to work together – the world doesn’t know how to manage the water – it is the most acute problem – it has been exacerbated by climate change – wasteful practices and an affluent society.
- There was a question on what sustainability is – just stop using the word (it’s a buzzword). We should just get down to the real issues and the real aspirations. The thing is it has legitimated a lot of issues that otherwise would have been not talked about. For the very first time, a lot of the social justice activists and environmental activists are trying to work together.
We need to think in a systemic way – things aren’t disconnected, we need to look at systems from a holistic viewpoint.
Institutions really matter – of course we as individuals matter, but the question is always – how organizations interface
All real change is grounded in new thinking – this is the whole thing of mental models – we do what makes sense to us. We do what we do because that’s what kind of makes sense to us. Until we change our thinking, nothing really changes.
Peter is speaking to the idea of bottled water and the negative impacts of trading commodities with embedded water [Raul's note - I've written about the notion of virtual water on my research blog]
I will have an analytical reflection on Senge’s talk on my research blog within the next few days.
Related posts:
