Biography

Marty Jacobs, president of Systems In Sync, has been teaching and consulting for twenty years, applying a systems thinking approach to organizations. She currently provides strategic planning and policy governance expertise for the Vermont School Boards Association and has worked with several school districts to engage them in community conversations. In the nonprofit sector, Marty provides strategic planning, board leadership training, Policy Governance implementation, community engagement facilitation, and staff development. Additionally, Marty has served on a variety of nonprofit, professional, and school boards over the past twenty years. Marty has also written for Vermont Business Magazine, American School Board Journal, Leverage Points Blog, and Confident Voices for Nurses on topics related to organizational learning, systems thinking, workplace culture, and community engagement. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Marty received her M.S. in Organization and Management from Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, NH.

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Systems Thinking

By engaging in systems thinking, organizations evolve into learning organizations. To paraphrase Peter Senge from The Fifth Discipline, the learning organization is an organization that deliberately plans to learn and establishes systems and processes to capture and use learning to continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire. It is a place where people are continually learning how to learn together, and it creates a culture which embraces systems thinking, the fifth discipline. Learning organizations also embrace the other four disciplines:


Personal mastery: Personal mastery is the ability to continually clarify and deepen personal vision, focus energies, develop patience, and see reality objectively.

Mental models: Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions or generalizations that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Working with mental models involves surfacing and examining organizational assumptions in order to understand organizational systems better and to develop more effective solutions.

Building shared vision: This discipline entails building and holding a shared picture of the future and developing the capacity to meet that vision.

Team learning: Team learning involves engaging in dialogue and the process of thinking and learning together. Learning organizations engaged in systems thinking are characterized by collective celebration and accountability and by an attitude of wholeness, where learning and growth are continual. They are flexible and informal organizations based on shared vision and shared power. Ultimately, learning organizations are the most successful because of their ability to adapt quickly.

Updated August 31. 2010