Peter Senge Quotes

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.

Your belief systems limit your reality to a sub-set of the solution space that does not contain the answer.

All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

Paradigms power perceptions, perceptions power emotions.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

I think belief is like having the first Microsoft Windows - it's so rudimentary, in the human brainwork, it's so obviously a sham.

One of the most powerful transformational catalysts is knowledge, new information, or logic that defies old mental models and ways of thinking.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

What rules the world is ideas.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world.

Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.

Remember that our reactions are a product of our perceptions, and our perceptions are a result of what is at the center of our life.

I think that there is something that happens, a phenomenon that happens around a conspiracy theory, where if you believe in a conspiracy theory, then every critique of that theory is simply more proof that the conspiracy exists. And I think that that's something that goes on in the person of Donald Trump.

I think the misconceptions, there are certain people that are fixed in those with those beliefs, and been in those for twenty-five years, you're not going to change them.... What you've got to do is basically talk to the future about what you want to with the country.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

The only way you can sustain a permanent change is to create a new way of thinking, acting, and being.

In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models - that is, they are responsible for learning.

…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.

Fundamental assumptions in general and scientific assumptions in particular are so hard to overturn because they are based on belief. Beliefs are so hard to overcome because they are irrational and therefore do not yield to logical argument.