Most courses ask you to react faster to recurring problems. This course teaches you to see the structure that keeps producing them, challenge the assumptions that conceal it and use Senge’s five disciplines to design a higher-leverage response. You work one persistent proble
Meet the course lead and explore the practical focus, learning experience, and professional value of this course.
Enroll in this course →Persistent problems are usually managed at the level of events. A shipment is late, so a crisis meeting is called; quality slips, so another inspection is added. The immediate fire may be contained, yet the underlying conditions remain and the problem returns.
This course develops a more disciplined way of seeing. Through Senge’s five disciplines—systems thinking, mental models, personal mastery, shared vision and team learning—you will learn to trace the loops, delays and assumptions that generate recurring patterns. A continuous case follows a division leader as she moves from firefighting to a systemic diagnosis, while you apply the same method to a persistent problem of your own.
By the conclusion, you will be able to locate leverage, design an intervention that integrates all five disciplines and defend why it should change the structure rather than merely suppress the symptom. The emphasis is practical managerial judgment: building an organization better able to learn, adapt and improve.
Most advice on stubborn problems is either a call to try harder or a theoretical discussion of systems. This course teaches the disciplined middle: how to take one persistent problem, reveal the structure that keeps producing it and design a practical intervention that changes the cause rather than the symptom.
Learn the discipline behind the five disciplines: see the structure beneath events, surface the assumptions that hide it and integrate the whole through systems thinking. You leave with a method you can run again, not a maxim to repeat.
Follow one recurring crisis across both modules as it becomes a systemic diagnosis and then a defended intervention. Applying the same moves to your own problem turns the framework into practical capability.
Finish with an intervention that can be defended against all five disciplines and led through the first crisis that tempts a return to firefighting. The result is a change design your team can understand and support.
Move beyond isolated events to diagnose the loops, delays, archetypes and mental models that generate a persistent organizational problem.
You will learn to distinguish events from patterns and system structures, trace feedback loops and delays, recognize recurring archetypes, test hidden mental models and assemble a defensible diagnosis of why a persistent problem keeps returning.
Turn the systemic diagnosis into a shared, leveraged intervention that integrates vision, team learning and adaptive leadership.
You will learn to build shared vision, enable productive team dialogue, locate points of highest leverage and integrate all five disciplines into an intervention that strengthens the organization’s capacity to learn and adapt.
Dean of the School
Dr. Jeffrey Henderson is Dean of Monarch Business School and Professor of Business Ethics, with senior management and advisory experience across commercial real estate, finance, and professional services. His career includes leadership roles with Bentall Capital, Brookfield Properties, KPMG Canada, and other international organizations, involving projects exceeding $6 billion. He brings MMI participants an applied perspective on strategic judgement, ethical leadership, organizational responsibility, and the translation of management ideas into credible professional action.
Meet the accomplished professionals who successfully completed their doctoral studies in 2025, bringing deep leadership experience and rigorous scholarship to Monarch Switzerland.
Meet the accomplished professionals who successfully completed their doctoral studies in 2025, bringing deep leadership experience and rigorous scholarship to Monarch Switzerland.
