What is here?

This is a brief introductory page that links you to material about this important concept, that sits at the heart of the AMBIT approach to LEARNING at work, which is part of the Core Features of AMBIT.

It covers the work of Prof Peter Senge (Harvard Business School) - whose ideas in his book "The Fifth Discipline" about learning organisations introduce systemic thinking to the work environment, as well as having a great deal of overlap with Mentalization in organisations, and which offer some very practical ways to introduce this into our working institutions.

Are we already a Learning Organisation?

We provide information on Assessing a learning organisation

The Fifth Discipline

In 1990 Peter Senge wrote an influential book called 'The Fifth Discipline' and produced a revised version in 2006 (Senge (2006, 2nd edition) The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. Random House Business Books). Senge proposed that successful organisations were those which had the capacity for adaptation and learning and that five 'component technologies' were necessary to support such learning. These were:-

• Systems thinking (see Senge: Discipline 1 - Systems Thinking)
• Personal Mastery (see Senge: Discipline 2 - Personal Mastery)
• Mental Models (see Senge: Discipline 3 - Mental Models)
• Building shared vision (see Senge: Discipline 4 - Shared Vision).
• Team learning (see Senge: Discipline 5 - Team Learning).

Peter Fuggle: Is the concept of a Learning Organisation useful in AMBIT? (AMBIT conference 2013)


A very brief overview by Peter Senge of some of the key themes of his work is shown in the following 5 minute clip.



Senge also described the characteristics of organisations which were in his phrase 'learning disabled' (see Senge: the characteristics of 'Learning Disabled' Organisations).

In summary, the reasons for encouraging AMBIT teams to consider the ideas of Learning Organisations are:-

• to connect teams to some of the evidence base around organisational practice
• that mentalization itself is entirely consistent with a pedagogical stance
• that the theory of learning organisations is entirely consistent with core AMBIT values
• that team functioning is a core aspect of AMBIT and will be affected by organisational factors

The real difficulty in changing the course of any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas but in escaping old ones. John Maynard Keynes