Peter M. Senge-The Fifth Discipline：A Shift of Mind-p451-459.docVIP

43 The Fifth Discipline: A Shift of Mind Peter M. Senge SEEING THE WORLD ANEW There is something in all of us that loves to put together a puzzle, that loves to see the image of the whole emerge. The beauty of a person, or a flower, or a poem lies in see- ing all of it. It is interesting that the words whole and health come from the same root (the Old English hal, as in hale and hearty). So it should come as no surprise that the unhealthiness of our world today is in direct proportion to our inability to see it as a whole. Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing inter- relationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snap- shots. It is a set of general principles— distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management. It is also a set of specific tools and techniques, originating in two threads: in feedback concepts of cyber- netics and in servo-mechanism engineer- ing theory dating back to the nineteenth century. During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even physiological systems.1 And systems think- ing is a sensibility—for the subtle intercon- nectedness that gives living systems their unique character. Today, systems thinking is needed more than ever because we are becoming over- whelmed by complexity. Perhaps for the first time in history, humankind has the capac- ity to create far more information than any- one can absorb, to foster far greater interde- pendency than anyone can manage, and to accelerate change far faster than anyones ability to keep pace. Certainly the scale of complexity is without precedent. All around us are examples of systemic breakdowns— problems such as global warming, ozone depletion, the international drug trade, and the U.S. trade and budget deficits— probl