“Wildland Fire Management is a unique blend of firefighting and resource management; an unlikely blend of the social and engineering sciences; a mixing of cultures and perspectives; dabblings of real psychology and sometimes unneeded psycho-babble; and a committed conglomerate of friends, peers, and co-workers all working towards the same goals of making our profession safer… more effective…. and more cost efficient to the public and to the communities that we serve. You gotta know where we came from, to know where we’re going. Add in a few lost friends along the journey, and it all becomes strikingly real and personal to folks contributing.”. ~ RamblingChief (comments@ramblingchief.com)
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“Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static “snapshots.” 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…. During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility — for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character.” ~ Peter Senge, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.)
Dr. Peter Senge is a Senior Scientist and the Director of the M.I.T. Sloan School for Organizational Learning. He is known as one of the original principal scientists to study organizational learning, and apply it into a systems based approach. Much of his teachings and research closely follow the basic concepts championed by Dr. James Reason, widely known for his research into “human error”; building safer systems and approaches; and introducing many of us to the Swiss Cheese Model of Accident Causation.
Dr. Senge’s background is closely related to (and complimentary of) the current research being undertaken by such scientists as Dr. Karl Weick and Dr. Kathleen M. Sutcliffe in developing the High Reliability Organization concept within the wildland fire community.
Dr. Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization is highly recognized as a cornerstone within the Just Culture movement.
A reviewer of his book stated the following,
“He (Dr. Senge) argues that only those organizations that are able to adapt quickly and effectively will be able to excel in their field or market. In order to be a learning organization there must be two conditions present at all times. The first is the ability to design the organization to match the intended or desired outcomes and second, the ability to recognize when the initial direction of the organization is different from the desired outcome and follow the necessary steps to correct this mismatch. Organizations that are able to do this are exemplary.” ~ Reviewer, “The Fifth Discipline“.
Posted by RamblingChief 
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