An organization commitment and capacity of learning can be no greater than that of its members. The roots of the discipline lie both in eastern and western spiritual traditions and in secular traditions. But surprisingly few organizations encourage the growth of their people in this manner. This result in vast untapped resources where in people enter business as bright, well educated, high energy people full of energy and desire to make a difference. By the time they are 30, a few are on the fast track and rest put in their time to do what matters to them on the weekend. They lose the commitment, the sense of mission, and the excitement with which they started their careers. We get damn little of their energy and almost none of their spirit.
Mastery might suggest gaining dominance over people or things .But mastery can also mean a special level of proficiency. A master crafts person does not dominate pottery or weaving .People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them and in effect they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their lifelong learning. Personal mastery is the discipline of continuously clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience and of seeing the reality objectively. As such ,it is an essential cornerstone of an organization and plays a very important role for the success of the organization.
Since we are a part of that fabric ourselves, its doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved .Systems thinking is a conceptual frame work, a body of knowledge and the tools that has been developed over the past 50 years to make the full pattern clearer and to help us see how to change them effectively. Though the tools are new, the underlying view is extremely intuitive; experiments with young children show that they learn systems thinking very quickly and effectively.
