Peter Senge Quotes - Page 2

When all is said and done, the only change that will make a difference is the transformation of the human heart.

To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning.

When there is genuine vision(as opposed to the all-too-familiar vision statement), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.

We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry.

Leadership is about creating new realities.

Knowledge is constructed, not transferred

The most effective people are those who can "hold" their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly

Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we were never able to do.

Dialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking, to recognize that any certainty we have is, at best, a hypothesis about the world.

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence .

An accurate, insightful view of current reality is as important as a clear vision.

In great teams conflict becomes productive.

The rate at which organizations learn may soon become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage.

Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.

When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.

Most of us at one time or another have been part of a great 'team', a group of people who functioned together in an extraordinary way-who trusted one another, who complemented each other's strengths and compensated for each other's limitations, who had common goals that were larger than an individual's goals, and who produced extraordinary results ... the team that became great didn't start off great-it learned how to produce extraordinary results.

Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.

It's common to say that trees come from seeds. But how can a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources need to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial : a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges.

I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That's a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace.

Many in positions of authority lack the capabilities to truly lead. They are not credible. They do not command genuine respect. They are not committed to serve. They are not continually learning and growing. They are not wise.

Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision

When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results, but the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.

Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner.