In his book the Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge addresses five disciplines of a learning organisation. Below, we list these five disciplines:
- Personal Mastery: The ability to do what is important to advance.
- Mental models: The perceptions that you hold of reality.
- Shared vision: Not a vision that is merely a lipservice. But a truly shared notion of where the company is heading.
- Teamlearning: The capacity of learning in a social and productive environment.
- System thinking: Overseeing the complete picture.
Peter Senge is an American systems scientist who is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute, and the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning.
See more in Dutch at De vijf disciplines van Peter Senge’s lerende organisatie
1 comment on “A Learning organisation: The five disciplines of Peter Senge”
CEOs and other business leaders are frequently heard complaining about their organizations’ lack of innovation, their inability to find great talent, and the difficulty they have in producing products and services that are distinguished from the competition. Back in 1990 Peter Senge published a book called The Fifth Discipline: The Art Practice of the Learning Organization that may hold a formula for overcoming these issues. His book summed up his thinking about how organizations can more effectively adapt and change based on his systems thinking background at MIT. He had come to the belief that there were five core disciplines or elements that would ensure that organizations continuously learn, adapt to a changing environment with agility and thrive. He defined a learning organization as one that has both a culture and the appropriate processes to deliberately shape the future it wants, rather than be a victim to circumstances.