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September/October 2001
PETER SENGE
Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites educators,
researchers, community activists, and policymakers from across the country to
talk about key issues in schools and school reform. We are pleased to be able
to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these forums. Below is an
edited transcript of a talk given at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
April 17, 2001.
For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following
sections:
Introduction by Robert Kegan, Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Remarks by
Peter Senge
Questions and Comments from the
Audience
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INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT KEGAN, PROFESSOR, HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION It is my special pleasure and privilege to introduce my friend Peter Senge, who is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, our sister institution just down the river. He is also the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, which is a global network of corporations, researchers, educators, and consultants, all dedicated to personal and organizational growth and especially the interdependent relationship between the two.
Peter is the author of the widely acclaimed book The Fifth Discipline:The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization and co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook and The Dance of Change. Most recently, [he edited] a book that I know is being widely read around here, Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education.
Everything that Peter does and says and writes is a kind of testimony to his stand for the importance of human values in the context of the workplace-the importance of vision and purpose and reflection as essential for individuals and organizations to realize their own deepest hopes and goals.
Peter's work has struck an absolute, undeniable, enormous resonance to an ever-expanding audience within the worlds of business and organizational development, as well as the educational community. He is not given to bragging, but since I can say anything I want, I'll tell you that more than one million of his books have been sold-not just a million in print, but a million that have been purchased and read.
In 1997 the Harvard Business Review identified The Fifth Discipline as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years. The Journal of Business Strategy recently named Peter Senge one of the 24 people who have had the greatest influence on business strategy over the last 100 years. The Financial Times recently named him one of the world's top management gurus, a title that I'm sure makes him uneasy, but that's what they said, Peter.
None of these accolades has gone to his head. He may be all of these things to the world, but to me he remains a humble, gentle, generous presence, who honors us by being here. It is my privilege to welcome my friend, Peter Senge.
REMARKS BY PETER SENGE
First off, I should say the obvious, which is that it's a tremendous honor to be here. When I was invited to come, I didn't actually realize it was for a speech. I thought it was a thing for Bob. I went back to look at the first of Bob's books that had really struck me, In Over Our Heads. As I thought about it a little bit, I realized that he and I have exploring the same core issues, but from almost opposite directions. Let me just illustrate to you what I mean by this. At one level, In Over Our Heads is about trying to understand a little more deeply what we all feel all the time: "How can I cope? My world seems to be much more complex than I can really deal with." Now, it's interesting. Probably not many of us think that explicitly. That's because we've developed a lot of great ways to cover up what actually might be, at a deeper level, our emotional experience. I always loved the title In Over Our Heads because it is such a powerful metaphorical evocation of this deep awareness. When you're a kid, who knows what's going on?
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Mom and Dad.
PETER SENGE: Mom and Dad. When you go to school, who knows what's going on?
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: The teachers.
PETER SENGE: When you go to work, who knows what's going on?
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: The boss.
PETER SENGE: But then, all of a sudden, you become one of them, right? All of a sudden you become a parent and you go, "Holy Cow! I don't have a clue!" And it looks like a big deal. It's not like a dress rehearsal. And if you ever have the opportunity or the circumstance to be in a position of authority in an organization, you realize everybody is kind of sitting around going, "Okay boss, tell us what to do." You discover the exact same thing.
I remember years ago I had a mentor who was a very influential person for me, and for many of us in the Society for Organizational Learning, which we always referred to as SOL, like Spanish for sun. Bill O'Brien was a marketing vice president and CEO for about 20 years in a company that went from the rock-bottom of its industry to one of the best-performing companies in its industry. Bill used to say that when he was a young person growing up in this organization he always had this image that sooner or later he would get to the top. And indeed he did.
Then he said that the very first thing he did when he became a CEO was to look under his desk. He was sure that under the CEO's desk were these levers and dials, because we all know that that person can do something the rest of the people can't do. He said it was a very sobering moment when he looked under his desk and he found nothing there. And he realized, "Oh my God! They all think that I'm kind of in control of this thing!"
That's not a surprising thing for people to expect, is it? Because after all, if Mom and Dad know what's going on, and teacher knows what's going on, and boss knows what's going on, obviously somewhere, all of the time, there must be somebody who knows what's really going on. I won't ask you to disclose too much this evening, but does that ring a bell? I mean, how many of you can remember some moment, maybe when you were 17, or 19, or 24, when suddenly you realized, "My God, my parents really screwed up!"
So why is this news? Well, it's news because of all of that conditioning that went on for all those years before. And you might ask where this comes from. Because by and large it isn't our parents who are telling us [things] overtly, except maybe on some occasions. By and large, they're probably not telling us directly, "Look, just listen. I know everything that's going on. I have the answer to all of the important problems. And if you just follow, things will be fine."
They don't usually say that, but somehow we pick it up. How many of you remember your teachers saying, "I actually know all of the answers to all of the questions you might have?" People don't actually say that, but somehow it kind of creeps in. It kind of seeps into the ground water. Somehow, we inherit these notions by osmosis that somewhere somebody knows what's going on. And yet at another level, we know that can't be true. Because we've had just enough experience, certainly by the time we're 18 or 22 or 24, to start to see the other side of those assumptions. And then we go, "Wait a second. Something is fishy here!"
I had a good friend years ago who was on the faculty of the economics department at MIT. And like Harvard's, MIT's economics department is quite preeminent. It is particularly famous for its mathematical economists. This was a young man who grew up in Argentina. And by the way, if there are any economists in the audience, this will probably be an insulting story, but I'm just rendering it the best I can. I'll warn you in advance.
Argentina, if you know anything about its history, particularly when this man was growing up, had wild, out-of-control inflation, total political instability, an economy that just seemed to be one of the world's basket cases. And my friend said, "I grew up thinking, 'The power . . . who had the power?' The people who really were the most important people were the economists, because they were the key to having an economy that worked, which in turn was the key to having any sort of political stability."
So, not surprisingly, he got his degree at the University of Buenos Aires. He was quite talented. He got into Berkeley. He raced through his Ph.D. He had, as the advisor for his doctoral dissertation, a Nobel laureate. He was one of those people who was doing such good work that he took a fellowship tour around the world to talk about his dissertation. He then was offered a position, which he didn't even seek, at MIT. And suddenly he found a lot of his papers, several from his doctoral dissertation, published in Econometrica, the premiere mathematical economic journal.
And then, he told me, something really scary happened. He suddenly realized that all of these people were talking to him and looking to him as if he were one of the world's most accomplished economists. And he said, "It suddenly hit me. I don't have a clue what's going on in the economy, and I realized at that moment that they don't either."
He left the economics profession at that time. By the way, he's doing work much more like Bob's than economics now. So there is something funny going on here. I would like to suggest to you that this is a non-trivial point. Because at some logical level probably nothing I've said in the last two minutes surprises you in the least. But at another level, something is going on in us that leads us to generate these sorts of expectations and to discover ourselves in over our heads as opposed to just realizing, "Gee, what's so surprising? I don't know what's going on. He doesn't know what's going on, neither does she know what's going on." It's called life. Now why isn't it that matter-of-fact for us?
Before even pondering that question any further, I'd like to look at the same thing from one other direction. Let's flip the whole thing around and look at it not from the standpoint of the individual, but from the standpoint of the larger systems that we as individuals collectively create. Let's look at it from the standpoint of our society, or our organizations, or our schools, or our school systems, or hospitals. You can take any aggregate, any larger social system created by human beings, because it's clearly not created by anybody else, and turn the question around and say, "Well, if we've got these human beings over here who at some deep level really do not know what's going on, who's in control or what's in control or what's happening? What does it mean for our social systems? Really, what does it mean for leaders or leadership?
See, here is actually the version of Bob's puzzle that I've lived with for a long time. It is really the same puzzle but viewed from the other side of the street, so to speak. As I said, I think we live in truly bizarre times. Let me tell you what I mean by that. At one level, we have this sense of extraordinary prowess, right? We can do unbelievable things. Now I have to be very careful in defining what I mean by "we can do," but I'll say in a minute. We have this hubris, this sense that anything we want to make happen, we can make happen. We live in an era of extraordinary technological capability, probably unprecedented. I mean, we literally stand in the middle of something, which no one knows exactly what it is, of literally being able to shape life, not to mention all of the extraordinary gadgets and machines we can produce and use. And this gives us a feeling of extraordinary power, right? I would argue that we simultaneously live with an extraordinary experience of powerlessness, and we hold both.
Let me just give you a couple of examples of what I mean. By the way, the most obvious example of this is what I consider almost a trivial case of this gap, which is information overload. Everybody talks about the fact that we generate extraordinary amounts of information. Individuals can access unbelievable amounts of information, but the question is, can they make sense of that information, or do they get totally numbed, overwhelmed? So as we have more and more information, we need more and more capacity for sense-making. I would illustrate for you, suggest to you, that that's a very small illustration of a much bigger problem.
About a year ago I was in a meeting over at the [Harvard] Business School with a very interesting, diverse group of people. The subject was leadership. There were about 20 or 25 people. Bob was one of the folks there. I would say this was a group that was not, obviously, lacking in confidence. And included in the group were probably four or five folks who had grown companies, were semi-retired at the age of 45, quite well off. They were very knowledgeable about technology as a group, because a lot of the younger people were still active as CEOs and were kind of forefront thinkers in technology.
So in our conversation, I found myself with this very funny feeling. All of these people were just going on and on about the extraordinary new technologies that were about to come, all of the things that we were about to be able to do-which, given the fact that we can do a lot of stuff today that we couldn't do five years ago, was very credible.
So I said, "If that's the curve of technological advance, it sounds to me like you're all describing this extraordinary process of growth." They said, "Yes, that's what we're describing." They were talking about specifics of the next generation of nano-technology, and so on. And I said, "But isn't there anybody who is even a little bit concerned about this?" And they said, "Yes, there are kind of some reasons to be concerned." I said, "But isn't the real question can anybody do anything about it?"
And at that point you could just feel the whole tone shift. Again, this was a group of people of extraordinary competence and accomplishment, not lacking in self-confidence. It was suddenly obvious to everybody that not a single person had the slightest hope that we could do anything to control this. What if there really are some problems?
By the way, several people had read an article, which I'm going to quote from here in a moment, that had recently come out. In fact, several people knew the author of the article a little bit before this meeting occurred. This is an article I've encouraged lots and lots of people to read, so it's one of these I like bringing along. It was published last spring in Wired magazine-an unusual piece for Wired, I thought-written by a man named Bill Joy. Bill is famous in the computer field. He is the chief scientist for Sun Microsystems. He is a professor at Berkeley. He wrote a lot of the fundamental software that makes the Internet work. He is one of the most respected people in the computer industry.
The title of the article is "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," and it was in the April 2000 issue. Now, as you might suspect, and I'll give you a couple of examples of what he means, an awful, awful, awful lot of people think Bill Joy has fallen off his rocker. And there have been an awful lot of rebuttals, although having read quite a few of them by eminent characters, I have yet to find one that made me feel that he was really off his rocker.
In particular, Bill Joy speculates about possible developments, kind of embedded in this silly little exponential curve, or super-exponential curve, of technological advance, possible developments that nobody can really foresee because they have to do with interactions of different aspects of technology. And the different technologies he primarily focuses on are nano-technology, the ability to make things smaller and smaller, and a particular forefront of this is called microelectronics or molecular computing, if you've heard that term.
Bill said, as someone who has been in the middle of the computer explosion, that he always assumed that Moore's Law would probably not run for more than two or three more doublings. (For those of you who don't know the phrase "Moore's Law," it's coined because of a statement by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, that processing power approximately doubles every 18 months. So every 18 months, a year and a half, the capability to put a certain amount of processing power in a certain physical space doubles. That's why we have many of the gadgets we have today, right?) Bill said that we would be reaching the limit of silicon some time in the first decade of this century. With molecular computing moving to a whole new level of micro stuff, Moore's Law might continue for at least another 30 years, which if you figure out is a lot of doubling. He said a lot of people are starting to get very excited about this, because they can imagine extraordinary applications.
But because of the way science works, actually the way universities and our whole educational system work, you have a bunch of people over here working on molecular computing and the future of nano-technology, and you have a bunch of people over here working on things like genetic engineering who don't know each other, don't talk to each other, have totally different academic trainings. And you have a bunch of people over here who work on things like robots and robotics, and they may talk a little to the nano-technology people, but they're actually another group of specialists. Bill goes on to say that the most compelling 21st century technologies-robotics, genetic engineering, and nano-technology-pose a different threat than any technologies that had come before, because we now stand at the edge of having machines that are self-replicating, that create themselves.
One of the fundamental definitions of a living system is what biologists call autopoesis. Auto meaning self, poesis from the Greek word that's the root of our word poetry, self-creating. This system creates itself. That's one of the fundamental definitions of living phenomena. Machines are technically allopoetic, created by another. Your car did not create itself; it was created by others. Your computer did not create itself; it was created by others. But what Bill Joy says is that he believes today we already have self-creating machines, self-replicating machines. No one is quite sure.
As you can imagine, it's a sobering piece. He is particularly concerned about the dangers of this technology being not only uncontrollable-because the machines themselves are self-replicating-but also because the access to this technology is virtually unlimited. Of course, there was a lot of fear for a long time that technologies like nuclear power and nuclear arms would have this same kind of risk. But in fact, the access and the spread has always been controlled by the inaccess, the lack of access, to fundamental materials like uranium. But there are no fundamental materials for any of this stuff. Genetic technology works with living cells anywhere. So he actually gives us some very interesting things to think about.
Now, the people in that meeting had all read Bill Joy's article, because most everybody in the technology field knows it. Most of them think it's wildly speculative, but that's his whole point. No one can tell what the interactions of these different technologies will be like.
I was in London about a month ago and had the chance to hear an address by Gro Brundtland. Gro Brundtland was the prime minister of Norway for 17 years and is now the president of the World Health Organization. She said-and I think a lot of people left that meeting with these words echoing in their heads-that today bacteria travel around the world almost as fast as money. And as many of you are probably aware, as a result of our dependence on antibiotics and our advances in antibiotics, there are more and more strains of bacteria that are highly resistant to antibiotics.
Now also, a little problem called global warming, which most Americans still think is a liberal media plot. It's amazing. It is truly getting more embarrassing to travel because for most of the people in the world, this is no longer a matter of conjecture. But in a poll in USA Today about a week ago fewer than 25 percent of Americans said they considered global warming or global climate change to be a significant issue. Yet, as Gro Brundtland pointed out, malaria is spreading around the world because climates are warming. I hope most of you know the permafrost layers are melting in the Arctic, releasing no one knows what kinds of bacteria and other chemicals into the atmosphere.
There was a small meeting in China that occurred in January. It was a very significant scientific gathering, hosted by the Chinese [and included] eminent scientists from around the world who are experts in different aspects of global climate change. A very sober, guarded summary statement was produced by the group of scientists and made the front page of the major newspaper in Sydney, where I happened to be at the time. Most Americans didn't even know the meeting occurred.
The headline said, "Scientists predict ten-meter increase in sea levels." The gist of the scientific summary is that we have vastly underestimated the rate at which ice caps are melting and sea levels will rise. And we probably can now expect something in the vicinity of a ten-meter increase in sea levels worldwide in this century, maybe in the next 50 to 70 years. Of course, we all know that's not going to affect people in Miami nearly as much as it's going to affect people in poor countries. These kinds of problems will occur in extraordinarily inequitable ways.
If there is no one in control, there is actually no one in control. Sooner or later it starts to hit us. Bill Joy is one of the leading people in the industry, and he is the first one who has actually begun to even write about this, although Ray Kurzweil wrote a book on a similar theme about a year earlier, though that book was pretty upbeat. So the flip side of Bob Kegan's gap in In Over Our Heads is the "our" part. We live in a bizarre time. On the one hand there is phenomenal growth in our technological prowess. On the other hand, whether we think about it or not, whether we've read articles about Bill Joy or we're on top of the latest scientific opinions about global warming or whatever, at some other level we feel extraordinarily, maybe historically, powerless. Because if these things are happening, we can't do anything about them, even though, ironically, we're the ones creating them. And whether or not we've thought that through, or however we might articulate it to ourselves, I would argue that most of us sitting in this room know this on some level.
And I'm pretty sure this is not going away, at least not through any conscious effort. I haven't yet seen anybody very able, even on very particular issues, to say, "Time out! Why don't we really do a halt for ten years in genetic engineering or some particular aspects? Because as clever as we are, nobody really has a clue what happens when you release new species into the biosphere, particularly if you consider how with micro or molecular computing and the ability to genetically manipulate those molecular computing machines we have less than no clue. So we'll do a time out. We'll do something wise. We'll just stop and give ourselves some time to let things settle, run some more careful experiments, develop a way of thinking that can guide us."
I don't hold much hope for that happening right now, and I don't know if anybody in the room does. So I think we can probably be pretty confident that this ain't stopping. I actually heard somebody say this about 22 years ago at a conference I was at in Vienna, and it just struck me so deeply. The phrase keeps coming back. He was a man who had worked at the United Nations his whole life. At that time he was responsible for a lot of the United Nations' support of research in the area of environment and health. I'm sure he's been retired for a long time now.
He was an elder, another dying species. And he stood up and said, "You know, of all of the problems I see in the world, I see one problem lying behind all of the problems." This is the phrase that I can just hear. I can see him, and I can see the setting, a room about this size. I just see him saying, "The fundamental problem of our times is the gap between our power and our wisdom." And then he added, "If we don't start to address that gap, I have very little hope for our prospects."
That same evening I had the opportunity to hear Gro Brundtland speak in London. That evening, a group of us had dinner with Prince Charles. The occasion for the event was a program that he has supported for about seven years called the Prince of Wales Business and Environment Program. It's a program that brings together business leaders by invitation to spend five days immersed in trying to understand the best scientific information on a whole host of environmental and global health issues.
So that evening after dinner, Prince Charles stood up in front of this group and said, "Well, I really want to thank you all for your support. I know you're all quite committed to this whole area. Two or three years ago there wouldn't have been a group like this sitting in this room. I want to acknowledge the shifts. But I just want you to know, from everything I can see, everything we're doing now is trivial compared to what's needed."
Then he said, "There is a lot of interest and all of this attention now in the business world, and filtering out from it, on learning- and knowledge-based management. You hear phrases like this all of the time." He said, "I can understand that. I think that's very important. But isn't what we need to think about the wise corporation, not the knowledge-based corporation?"
Then he went on just off the cuff, and he spoke for about 15 minutes on his musings about wisdom. Of course, that recalled to mind the comment of the gentleman in Vienna many, many years earlier: the fundamental problem underlying all of our problems is the gap between our power and our wisdom.
I'm going to stop in just a moment, because I'm much more interested in how this is striking you than in what more I have to say. Let me just leave a question hanging, and see where all of us would like to go with it. If any of what I've said has made some sense at any level, what does it mean to us to start to re-think, re-engage, with wisdom? Is it possible?
I made an off-hand comment a minute ago, one that should be considered in light of this question. For most of human history, there has been a segment of the population that has been held to be the most important segment of the population in subjects having to do with how we balance the short term and the long term, which is clearly an aspect of wisdom. Or, alternatively, we have looked to a segment of the population to help us have a perspective on complex issues, to see them either from a historical perspective or a deeper, what we would call systemic or structural, perspective.
As probably most of you know, one of the most universal practices of the human community worldwide for time immemorial has been sitting in a circle and talking until, as many Native American cultures would say, the talk starts. Maybe after a couple of days the real talk starts. You sink down to a level where something new starts to emerge. The conveners of those talking circles were the same segment of the population I mentioned in that off-hand comment just a little while ago, those we have managed to more or less eradicate: the elders.
Just as we may be the first society in human history to experiment with raising kids without parents, we are surely one of the first, if not the first era in human history to consider running a culture, governing or leading a culture, without elders. Have you noticed, by the way, that somewhere in the last 10 or 20 years the word "new" became synonymous with good, and the word "old" became synonymous with bad?
You know, these shifts in language are some of the most profound and direct indicators of deep shifts in our culture. But they go unnoticed because they happen very gradually. Do you notice that, though? Old, in almost all contexts today, means bad, obsolete, over the hill. And the reason for this is very simple. It's not complicated. We live in the Industrial Age. It hasn't ended, by the way. Please don't believe the Information Age is replacing the Industrial Age. It is the Industrial age. This exponential growth in technology is the Industrial age, the fixation on technology, the fixation on machines.
[The Industrial Age] is having a strong, or stronger, day than it has ever had before. If you don't believe it, walk into a school. You will see it organized the way it was organized 150 years ago. Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 6-has anybody thrown that out? A few on the edge, innovators, but by and large that system is as strong as ever. Why? What does it sound like?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: An assembly line.
PETER SENGE: It's an assembly line. It was not an accident. It was an explicit adoption of the most successful organizing scheme in that time, in the early and middle part of the 19th century, which is a factory assembly line, all designed to produce a uniform output at a predictable speed, completely in the control of the operators, coordinated by bells and whistles on the wall, and with a pre-set time schedule. Come on. This is not hard to figure out. We live in the machine age.
If you think the machine age is changing, think again. An old machine is an old machine. The cultural implication of this curve is very simply that new is good, old is bad. Once you start to see the entire world as machines, you start to see human beings as being like machines. And so naturally old is bad, new is good.
It's probably not going to help us much if what we need is to address the gap between our power and our wisdom. So, just to close the circle a little bit, I hope to see how many other places we want to take this in a moment.
We have a culture that is absolutely fixated on newness. And what does newness look like when you talk about people? It looks like 18-year-olds, right? And everybody wants to look like a 20-year-old. And any price is not too big a price. Who really wants to look 65?
In Buddhism there is an old saying that the human mind only gets interesting after the age of 50. I can speak for this personally. That's a far cry, it's a far, far cry from the way we as a society see the process of "aging." Isn't that interesting? What does aging mean? Does it mean developing a richer and richer capacity to perceive, to apprehend, to reflect, to generate perspective? Or does it mean a long, steady, downward motion of loss, which is exactly the way you would think about an aging machine?
So as I said, maybe just to close one little circle: If wisdom is part of what we need to be starting to think about very seriously, then guess what? Wisdom is acquired with experience. I don't think anybody is going to find a pill or a substitute for that. Wisdom is required with lived-through loss, pain, and suffering.
We have a bit of time to talk. I really am interested in how this strikes you.
QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS FROM THE AUDIENCE
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question is about the role of the university in lifelong learning. I'm wondering how you would see that fitting into your work, and where you think the university is going today in light of the need for wisdom throughout the life span.
PETER SENGE: It's a great question. It is probably no accident that universities have been around a long time. Anything that endures for a long period of time-it might have lots of problems, but you probably should pay attention. So what is enabling it to endure? Someone once told me it seems to be almost impossible to kill off universities. Now that may be a good or a bad statement, I don't know.
In some sense the university has institutionalized, or created some sort of institutional container or vehicle for, elderhood. I would agree with that, to a degree, but I worry a little bit about it also, because, of course, it also has an extraordinary exclusivity around it. The whole point of elders was that all communities needed to cultivate value, create space for, and pay attention to all elders, not just a few exclusive ones.
Secondly, you have to ask, "What's the nature of the knowing?" And of course, that varies. But when you asked your question, what first came to mind was, in fact, some of the professors I had the opportunity to learn with-and from-as a student who I would say really did have some extraordinary wisdom.
I remember one. I must have taken a half-dozen philosophy courses from this person. I was a crazy undergraduate. I was a major in systems engineering and a minor in philosophy, and I took a whole bunch of classes from this one professor whom I got to appreciate enormously, because he never, ever answered a question. He had an extraordinary capacity to really take it in, say some things which were quite clearly not an answer but a response, and then turn back a question.
So yes, I think you're right. I think universities do create some space, some social setting, for something like elderhood for a few. But it often seems to me it's more an accident that occurs than anything systematic.
Now, speaking from the side of someone who has been part of faculties for a long time, I would not call it an environment that's very conducive to maturation. I judge by the response of a few of you that you understand what I mean. It often seems to lock a lot of people into almost perpetual adolescent competition. Collaboration is relatively rare, and vulnerability is not exactly what gets you through the academic seminar.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'd like to know more about cultivating vulnerability. How do you do it?
PETER SENGE: I'd say the first thing is to get around a lot of kids, because they'll ask the question before they've learned how to ask the schoolroom question. I was talking with somebody today who was telling me about something that came up in a science class. The whole point of this program is to get the kids really posing their own questions. This kid asks the question, "What would happen in the world if there were no flowers?" Now you've got to be about eight years old to ask a question like that. By the time you're in college, you never ask a question like that, right?
Of course, the teachers were absolutely and completely stumped. So I would say the first thing is to make sure you get to spend a lot of time around kids, the younger the better. Because, you know, they ask real questions, not-pardon me-bullshit questions. We're great at the latter, because we've been in school a long time. We know how to ask a question that makes us look brilliant, which is usually not a question at all, but a chance to show what I know by virtue of this extraordinarily clever question I've asked. How many of us can ask a question like, "What would happen to the world if there were no flowers?" We've thought about that. What a great question. Think about the system diagrams you could help kids draw for themselves on this one, the way you could tap their innate knowledge of birds and bees flying around, how things move around, and what flowers are all about. But the science teacher was absolutely frozen in her tracks because she was so unprepared for real learner-driven learning.
So that's probably just a small illustration of how we expose ourselves to the real questions.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: As you've pointed out, if we look at the human timeline we've seen that, throughout history, deference to the wisdom of elders has been the centerpiece of our culture. You also pointed out that that's no longer the case, that newness now has taken priority. My question is, in your opinion, what has precipitated that transformation, and to what extent do you think it has something to do with the way children are being reared? Also, to what extent does it have to do with the seamless access to information?
PETER SENGE: First off, there is one very simple way you can construct a response to that. It's probably a little superficial: if you start to confuse knowledge with information, which I would say by and large we do-we treat information as if it were knowledge. "I know all about it. Of course I can't do anything, but I know all about it." That's confusing information with knowledge. Most of our education does that, because we either focus on dispensing information, and we call that education, or we focus on really quite narrow technical skills that we can test and monitor because, after all, it's an assembly line. We want to make sure we're making good progress. Higher order thinking skills, inquiry skills, collaboration skills are much harder to measure, so they have never been particularly important in our school systems.
We discard wisdom. We start to treat knowledge-real, deep capacity for action, which is what I consider knowledge to be, the capacity to act effectively in a setting-with information. Then, of course, the door is wide open. Whoever has more information knows more.
So you master information technology and you're at the top of the heap. This is kind of a superficial response, but he asked how do we think we got into this. That would be one way to kind of make some sense out of how we got into this confusion.
Let me also say something that I haven't said. It would be easy to take from my statements that we need to return to elderhood as it has operated traditionally. And to some degree, I probably would agree with that. But the other side of the coin is that deferring to those who are older has also been the basis for all kinds of craziness in human affairs. So it would be wrong to kind of elevate this as an unalloyed good. I merely wanted to bring it up because of what I felt as a strong connection to the deep current of Bob's work, which is that of ourselves as learning, living systems.
I was so taken by this a year or so ago. My secretary, who is a very close friend, said to me, "You know, as I get older, I really come to value the richness of my interior life." We're not paying attention to that. So it was in that spirit that I wanted to get this notion of elderhood out.
My own conjecture is that the real step to the future will be in some way to build on the essence of what makes the scientific method an appropriate antidote to unquestioned belief in what somebody else said, particularly an older person. In that sense, I think challenging authority is important. So it's kind of a paradoxical thing.
I am not just advocating for deferring, going back. I don't think we could anyhow. Science is a strong antidote to that, because the essence of science is skepticism and challenging things. We can challenge, and yet simultaneously be respectful. And the problem with our science is that we think it gets to answers, as opposed to simply improving the quality of our living and our awareness.
That's a different science, by the way. I'm off on a tangent now; it may or may not make sense to you. There has been a particular scientific worldview that has dominated the last 400 to 500 years, and it has a particular aspect to it, which is that the purpose of science-Bacon, of course, said it most powerfully-is to dominate nature. That's the purpose of science, to apply it so we can dominate nature.
Goethe had an extraordinarily different notion of science. He traced the word theory to the Greek theoria, which is also the root of the word theater. Theory is not an abstract statement of a truth. Goethe said theoria is seeing. And for Goethe, to be a scientist is to cultivate one's capacity to see. You can never separate out the statements made by the scientist from the level of awareness of the person, because it's actually all about awareness.
So that's a different kind of science. That kind of science could coexist with elderhood, but I don't think our current science could. Why? Because the folks who have been around a while can't possibly know as much as the young ones about all the new stuff. They could have a capacity for seeing, but it wouldn't just be deferring blindly. I think that has been a big problem in history.
So pardon me for going a little further than your question. I hope it at least helps a little bit.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Through my studies of statistics and information systems, and since I thought you wrote a book about the discipline and the fact that we need to think of ourselves as part of a system, I'd like to ask you about the magic of numbers.
In order to have a system, you need information. And for the system to be effective, the information is often quantified in numbers. And I just wanted to ask you, there is something about the numbers that I'm not getting. Why is it that we think when we have a number, it's summarizing the situation effectively?
PETER SENGE: Part of our problem today is that we are so disconnected from nature, we don't even know the obvious: that nature actually doesn't quantify. There is a lot of evidence that all kinds of species count. A mother hen can see a chick that's missing. There is a lot of evidence, there is counting up to a certain size, or a certain magnitude in nature. But 98.6 exists only among humans. It's very important to realize that. Quantification, which is a critical part of the last 400 or 500 years of scientific progress, is a human invention. That doesn't mean it's good or bad, but it's kind of important to recognize that.
Now, nature gets along extraordinarily well with amazing learning capacity without quantification by developing the ability to recognize patterns, complex patterns. There are, I don't know, 200 faces in this room, maybe 250. But you know what? I can see, and if you stood where I am, you could see everyone and the uniqueness in everyone. Isn't that astounding? You try doing that through quantification. You can do it, but man, it's going to be a pain in the neck. But I can do it immediately, and you could as well if you stood right here. Because nature has built into me an extraordinary capacity to recognize patterns of all different sorts, like the patterns of different faces.
You can't tell a person's health from 98.9, or 99, or 102, but it can be helpful, can't it, if you're right there? If you're close to being able to recognize the pattern, then quantification can be extraordinarily helpful.
The problem we've gotten into is that we think we can run very complex systems through numbers, and you can if they're machines. Surprise, surprise. And you cannot if they are living. Because if they are living, they produce complex, hitherto unrealized patterns of behavior, which can only be appreciated by another living system interacting with them. Nature does not quantify. I hope that helps a little.
Thank you.
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