The Learning Disabilities
- 1) "I am my position."
People fail to recognize their purpose as a part of the enterprise. Instead, they see themselves as an inconsequential part of a system over which they have little influence, leading them to limit themselves to the jobs they must perform at their own positions. This makes it hard to pinpoint the reason an enterprise is failing, with so many hidden 'loose screws' around.
- 2) "The enemy out there."
There is in each of a propensity to find someone or something outside ourselves to blame when things go wrong. This disability makes it almost impossible to detect the leverage we have on problems that straddle the boundary between us and "out there."
- 3) The Illusion of Taking Charge
All too often, proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise. Whether in business or politics, if we simply become more aggressive fighting the "enemy out there," we are reacting -- regardless of what we call it. True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems. It is a product of our way of thinking, not our emotional state.
- 4) The Fixation of Events
Focusing on events distract us from seeing the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the event and from understanding the cause of those patterns. The tendency to see things as results of short-term events undermines our ability to see things on a grander scale. Cave men needed to react to events quickly for survival. However, the biggest threats we face nowadays are rarely sudden events, but slow, gradual processes, such as environmental changes.
- 5) The Parable of the Boiling frog
We are adept at responding to sudden changes in our environment. We are terrible at assessing slow, gradual changes, even when they threaten our survival.
- 6) The Delusion of Learning from Experience
Practice makes permanent, rather than perfect
- 7) The Myth of the Management Team
Read more about this topic: The Fifth Discipline
Famous quotes containing the words learning and/or disabilities:
“They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.”
—John Morley [1st Viscount Morley Of Blackburn] (1838–1923)
“The more I read and the more I talked to other parents of children with disabilities and normal children, the more I found that feelings and emotions about children are very much the same in all families. The accident of illness or disability serves only to intensify feelings and emotions, not to change them.”
—Judith Weatherly (20th century)