Part I: “How our actions create our reality... and how we can change it”
The basic rationale of Senge (and other systems thinkers) is presented right in the first paragraph of the book: “From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world [...] we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole [...] We try to reassemble the fragments [but] the task is futile”1. Indeed, by committing ourselves to understanding identifiable and clear-cut cause-effect mechanisms in a linear sense, we tend to ignore that the dynamics of our social realities lie in moving interconnections and interactions, thus needing a network-understanding and not a linear one. This is why we need to engage into systems thinking:
The world isn’t driven by separate unrelated forces. However, individuals have difficulty seeing the whole pattern. “Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively”2 and with the least amount of effort _to find the leverage points in a system.
Systems thinking engages us into a shift of mind: we need to continually discover how we contribute to creating our reality3 and how we can change it. Therefore we should become learning organizations: “In everyday use, learning has come to be synonymous with ‘taking in