Everything is political — even the learning organization.
Peter Senge’s development of the fifth discipline has informed much of my work around workplace learning for three decades. Sheila Damodaran takes a deep look at this seminal book.
The Five Disciplines were not assembled aesthetically. They were assembled structurally — each closing a vulnerability left open by the others, each compensating for a failure mode observable in real institutions.
—Systems Thinking prevented local optimisation from masquerading as improvement.—Personal Mastery prevented aspiration from collapsing under institutional pressure.—Mental Models prevented inherited assumptions from hardening into policy dogma.—Team Learning prevented the conversation from degenerating into positional defence.—Shared Vision prevented purpose from fragmenting into departmental ambition.
Remove one, and drift begins.
Emphasise one at the expense of others, and imbalance follows.—The Fifth Discipline at Thirty-Five — Lineage, Surge, and Scale
Personal mastery has informed my personal knowledge mastery framework.
Damodaran’s detailed article covers the research that informed Senge and then how the model has been used over the decades, including first-hand knowledge. I highly recommend reading the entire piece. A main theme is that the work of becoming a learning organization at the company level cannot be completely achieved if the organization exists in a state environment that is not one. The container has to be the nation state.
Peter Senge stood at the edge of corporations and widened their perception from within laboratories of organisational life; I stood inside a national institution for two decades, where allocation precedes execution and where budget sequencing quietly shapes operational possibility long before strategy meetings begin.
When you live inside a state apparatus, you cannot ignore upstream structure, because you see daily how ministerial silos, fiscal cycles, and sector prioritisation cascade into operational strain downstream. The crossing from organisation to nation did not arise from ambition or ideology; it arose from structural proximity. Once you have watched allocation shape behaviour in real time, you cannot return comfortably to firm-level redesign as if the container were neutral. —Damodaran 2026
In mastery & models (2017) I wrote that the inconvenient truth is that our institutions do not have the answers. They were all designed for a different era. Our markets, designed to capitalize on gaps and weaknesses, are already focused on creating digital platform monopolies, so that the rest of us may become nothing more than users and renters of space. But we can own our learning.
The challenge for learning professionals is to help organizations become learning organizations, as described in Senge’s Fifth Discipline. It is also to master the new literacies of the network era and promote critical thinking, for ourselves and others. Questioning existing hierarchies is necessary to create the organizations of the future where power and authority are shared, based on mutual trust. The dominant organizational models need to become network-centric and learning-centric. Personal knowledge mastery and the working in perpetual beta model can be two of the disciplines required to develop the third discipline: Shared Vision.
In a vision for learning (2018) I wrote that networked individuals are the new engaged citizens, and we have to connect with our professional communities, finding them where we can. These awareness networks can keep us connected to the real world, through wide and diverse human relationships. We cannot rely on our ‘algorithmic overlords’ to tell us how to understand our environment. Building these networks is everyone’s responsibility.
If we want to influence the container in which learning organizations can thrive then we must get politically engaged. As Lester Brown said, “Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.” He also made it clear that if you want to address climate change, then the best thing you can do is get politically active.
