Peter Senge
Most large organisations have learned to manage events. They have not learned to change the structures that produce those events. Leaders push hard on a recurring problem and find the system pushes back, and transformation programmes lose momentum somewhere between strategy and behaviour.
Peter Senge is the MIT Sloan senior lecturer whose work on the learning organisation shows leaders why their hardest problems keep coming back, and what to do about it.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Peter Senge
- Built the framework that defined organisational learning. The Fifth Discipline has sold over two million copies; Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years, and the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published.
- Treats systems thinking as a leadership discipline. The Five Disciplines (personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking) give executives a working method for changing the structures that produce their hardest recurring problems.
- Three decades of applied work with Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, alongside cross-sector initiatives on global food systems, climate, and education.
- Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy, one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. The Fifth Discipline is now in its fourth decade of continuous use on MBA syllabuses and inside operating companies.
Biography highlights
- Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
- Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change.
- Author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, with over two million copies sold worldwide.
- Co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change, Schools That Learn, Presence, and The Necessary Revolution.
- Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy; ranked among the world’s top management thinkers by the Financial Times and BusinessWeek.
- Convened the Sustainable Food Lab, bringing major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture.
Biography
The Fifth Discipline, published in 1990, gave senior executives a working vocabulary for something they kept hitting in practice but could not name: the structure of an organisation tends to produce the very problems its leaders are trying to solve. Thirty-six years later the book is still in print and still the reference text for the field.
Peter Senge wrote it at MIT, where he is Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the Sloan School of Management. He is founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. The Fifth Discipline has sold more than two million copies. Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years; the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published.
The book is organised around five disciplines: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. The core argument is that the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than its environment changes. Senge’s later work extended the method into education through Schools That Learn, into large-scale change through The Dance of Change, and into sustainability through The Necessary Revolution.
His applied work has run through Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, and across cross-sector initiatives including the Sustainable Food Lab, which brought major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture, and the Compassionate Systems community in primary and secondary education. The Journal of Business Strategy named him a “Strategist of the Century,” one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy.
Key speaking topics
- Systems thinking
- Organisational learning
- Leadership in complex systems
- Sustaining change in large organisations
- Cross-sector collaboration
- Sustainability and systemic change
Ideal for
- CEOs and senior executive teams running multi-year transformation programmes
- Heads of strategy and transformation leads diagnosing why change initiatives stall
- Chief sustainability officers and ESG leads working across sector and stakeholder boundaries
- Senior leaders in education, healthcare, and government addressing complex public-system challenges
Audience outcomes
- A new vocabulary for talking about why their hardest organisational problems keep returning
- The Five Disciplines as a working method, applied through cases drawn from Ford, Shell, Unilever, and the Sustainable Food Lab
- Language to make the structural causes of organisational performance visible to senior teams
- A sharper read on what leadership in complex, multi-stakeholder environments demands