It shifts profoundly how you think about leadership and change. If you use a machine lens, you get leaders who are trying to drive change through formal change programs. If you use a living-systems lens, you get leaders who approach change as if they were growing something, rather than just “changing” something. Even on a large scale, nature doesn’t change things mechanically: You don’t just pull out the old and replace it with the new. Something new grows, and it eventually supplants the old. Continue reading →

In “The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations,” Peter Senge and his colleagues identify 10 challenges of change. Grouped into three categories — challenges of initiating change, challenges of sustaining momentum, and challenges of systemwide redesign and rethinking — these 10 items amount to what the authors call “the conditions of the environment that regulate growth.” Continue reading →