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Learning Organization

💼 Business By CampusDown Wiki Editorial Team Last updated
Quick answer: a learning organization is one where people and the organization keep learning and transforming themselves. Peter Senge proposed five disciplines to get there.
Contents
  1. 1. The five disciplines
  2. 2. Background
  3. 3. Building one
  4. 4. Critiques
  5. 5. References

The five disciplines

  • Personal mastery
  • Mental models: surfacing and testing assumptions
  • Shared vision
  • Team learning through dialogue
  • Systems thinking: seeing feedback structures of the whole; the fifth discipline that integrates the rest

Background

Systems thinking draws on general systems theory and system dynamics. Argyris and Schön contrasted single-loop learning, which fixes actions, with double-loop learning, which changes underlying assumptions.

Building one

It requires psychological safety, knowledge-sharing systems, after-action reviews and leadership that rewards learning.

Critiques

Critics call the idea abstract and hard to measure; Garvin proposed a more concrete definition based on creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge and changing behavior.

References

  1. Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday.
  2. Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational Learning. Addison-Wesley.
  3. Garvin, D. A. (1993). Building a learning organization. Harvard Business Review, 71(4), 78-91.

Reports and materials that use this theory (Korean)

There are no materials dedicated to this theory yet, but you can search related reports in the CampusDown library (Korean).

Find more reports · Search '학습조직' on CampusDown →
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This article was last updated on October 15, 2026. It is based on widely recognized original works and textbooks; when citing it in a paper, please check the original sources listed in the references.