Back to the Learning Organisation

It must be 20 years since I read “The Fifth Discipline” by Peter Senge. It had such a massive impact on me. I’ve had “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook” sitting on my bookshelf for 10 years, and only in the last few weeks have I been drawn to read it. It’s a resource book written by many theorists, leaders and company owners, illustrating the principles of the five disciplines of the learning organisation. It’s a fantastic resource, full of ideas, techniques, examples and practical tools. It has re-energised my interest in the concept of learning organisation. 

We’ve all spent time in organisations – as employees, customers, clients or just passing through – where it is clear that there is little or no organisational learning happening. The mistakes, the poor judgement, the inability to see things from stakeholder perspectives and learn – are profound. 

This book has so many approaches that can be implemented. I said in a short talk that I gave recently, that it is crazy that some techniques come in and out of fashion. Learning Organisation and Peter Senge’s approaches are so key to developing reflective organisations where everyone understands the quest for lifelong learning, a life well lived where our impact on the world around us, leads to improvement, leads to us making the world a better place than we found it. 

I didn’t set out to write a full length review in this short post, just to encourage you to find out more about the learning organisation. You can do this through the work of Peter Senge or through John Burgoyne’s work in the UK. Even just dipping into this work will change your view of the world around you. If it has the impact on you that it did on me, you will develop a thirst and hunger for learning, and for improvement. That will be your new lens with which to view the world.  And it will be all the richer for that new perspective.