Center for Community and Economic Development

CCED » Leaders

March 1998 No. 8

Leading through Learning1

By Gerry Campbell

When I began my work as a teacher with Wisconsin Rural Leadership, my theory of leadership was very clear. I believed that good leaders made good decisions because they had become experts about a particular subject. I trained leaders by creating experiences to deepen their technical understanding of economic issues. I wanted to make them experts in community economic development, education, public finance, rural affairs, urban issues, international relations, and government operations. Over ten years experience working with leaders convinces me that technical expertise is useful but not enough for effective leadership. I am now convinced that the essential for continuing effectiveness as a leader is a personal commitment to continuous learning, and as important, leaders need a commitment to foster continuous learning of those they lead.

Peter Senge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has become recognized across the world for his work in helping organizations, especially business organizations, change. His book, The Fifth Discipline, The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, (Doubleday/ Currency, New York, New York, 1990) has been read and studied by thousands and thousands of people who want their organizations to be able to continually expand their capacity to create their own future. Senge states:

"Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we repercieve the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each one of us a deep hunger for this type of learning" (Fifth Discipline, p.14)

Learning here means a real shift in thinking, not just taking in information. I've read many articles about trout fishing. I've taken in lots of information, but my real learning has taken place on the stream. The first time I tried to wade against the current, the first time I actually felt a trout on my line, the first time I actually tried to cast into the wind, these are all times when I was really learning. These experiences transformed how I think about trout fishing. I became able to do something I was not able to do before. I could go trout fishing and learn nothing, but if I'm deliberate and attentive, I can continually learn and improve my trout fishing capacity.

This idea of learning as a shift in thinking may not be new to educators or even those who work in leadership development, but for many organizations and their leaders, their idea of learning is still information gathering. The ideas Senge brought to wide attention laid out strategies for building our capacity for learning together that really shifts our thinking. This helps us to face and ultimately solve complex problems and to continually create increased capacity to take up new challenges. Senge also provided strong evidence that leading learning would take a different approach than traditional concepts of leadership.

Our traditional view of leaders as special people who set the vision, make the key decisions, and energize the troops, just isn't consistent with an organization where everyone is responsible for learning. Senge argues that in the learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. Their job is to build the structures that allow people to build their capability to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared understanding.

Senge never promises that this will be easy. He outlines five disciplines to build the essential capacities for organizational learning -- systems thinking (in order to understand complexity), mental models (in order to understand how our deeply held perspectives get in the way of communicating with others), personal mastery (in order to understand what drives us to achievement in our work), shared vision (to understand what we want to create together) and, team learning (to understand how we can collectively be more insightful and more creative than we can be individually). He calls these capacities disciplines because their development requires hard work and discipline. He argues, and the organizational leaders who support him argue, that what comes out of that hard work is an organization where people are truly engaged in creating a future they want to create. They are the creators of the learning organization and their leaders major responsibility is designing the structures that will let them learn together.

For leaders, groups, and communities, the challenges of becoming learning organizations are great. A first step comes in recognizing that any action we take should be mindful of what we will learn. Each of us has seen our organizations act without a clear understanding of what they wanted to accomplish. If they had no clear expectation of the outcome of their actions, how could they learn from them? "What do we expect to happen? and what will we learn from this?" should be questions which always accompany our groups' actions. Our leaders should help us in learning both for what we will do and from what we have done. In our action culture, some pundits have said that our normal sequence is "fire, ready, aim". We are a take charge culture who from the founding of our country have valued decisiveness and action in our leaders. Learning organizations and those who lead them will not be paralyzed by so called "analysis paralysis." They will be continually building the basis for informed action. As we choose our leaders and as we work with them, we might do well to ask, how will they help us learn together to understand and solve the problems before us?

    1This is the first of three issues related to learning and leadership. Learning means a real shift in thinking, not just taking in information. These newsletters are based on comments first offered April 22, 1997, to the Janesville Area Retired Teachers Association.