Communities of Commitment: The Heart of Learning Organizations

Building learning organizations requires basic changes in how we think and interact on the most essential levels, as well as the development of a committed community. Fred Kofman, assistant professor of accounting and management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and Peter Senge, director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, explore basic shifts in the guiding ideas of contemporary management. They argue that dysfunctional characteristics like fragmentation, competition and reactiveness, are byproducts of a scientific, industrial culture, and overcoming these characteristics requires an overhaul of habitual thought patterns. The authors identify three fundamental problems present in current organizations; explore the root causes of these problems; propose three fundamental theses for shifting self-understanding; and suggest an approach for communities to form, grow, and become influential in moving organizations forward.

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