Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate Peter Senge's ideas from the perspective of the spiritual ideal of harmony/He ([foreign character omitted]). Design/methodology/approach: Following a literature review of the conceptualization of Senge's fifth discipline and harmony, an appreciative case study of Alibaba is adopted to…

Purpose: While many approaches in the field of unlearning aim at describing, understanding or explaining the "what" and/or "how" of unlearning, this paper aims to focus on the "where-to" and the goal of unlearning. In many cases, unlearning starts off with a specific result or goal in mind. This paper suggests that…

Purpose: This paper aims to show that systems intelligence (SI) can be a useful perspective in knowledge management, particularly in the context of the socialization, externalization, combination and internalization (SECI) model. SI is a recently developed systemic concept, a certain kind of human intelligence based on a systems thinking…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide advice to organizations on how to become successful in the digital age. The paper revisits Peter Senge's (1990) notion of the learning organization and discusses the relevance of systems thinking and the other four disciplines, namely, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to highlight challenges and opportunities that surround the process of learning with an emphasis on higher-order learning and learning as behavior. Higher-order learning has been conceptualized as learning behavior that can be learned. Design/methodology/approach: The holistic framework regarding higher-order…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of the learning organization, first discussed by Senge (1990), to determine if it can work as a model in the higher education sector. Design/methodology/approach: Using a critical feminist framework, this paper assesses the possibilities and challenges of viewing universities as…

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explore core contributions from two different approaches to complexity management in organisations aiming to improve their sustainability,: the Viable Systems Model (VSM), and the Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). It is proposed to perform this by summarising the main insights each approach offers to…

Purpose: Recent advances in the interactive technologies have transformed the way today's organizations and their different stakeholders learn. Now, because of the increasing learning requirements, neither these organizations nor their stakeholders can afford to be too self-focused while learning; instead, they collaborate and learn together.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose that the idea of the learning organization should be abandoned on the grounds that it was an imaginative idea that has now run its course. The paper seeks to explore the roots of the definition and provoke debate about the wisdom of retaining the concept. The argument is a challenge to readers to…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to revisit the practical worth of different systems thinking tools applied to three different business clients, which may be dismissed by academic researchers as theoretically old fashioned. Design/methodology/approach: The methodologies used are systems-based (SSM, VSM and causal loop diagrams), culminating in…

This paper is a continuation of the antagonistic dialogue about the differences of chaordic systems thinking (CST) and socio-technical systems design (STS). In this second part of the conversation a concrete example is used to illustrate the added value provided by CST. Whereas STS focuses on an organization's surface by designing processes and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to survey the various measurement instruments of the learning organization on offer, leading to the adoption of a tool that was considered most suitable for gauging progress towards the learning organization in two sectors of the Lebanese economy, namely banking and information technology (IT).…

This paper explores the added value of chaordic systems Thinking for organizational renewal, which is defined as transformation instead of reformation. The exploration is presented in the form of an antagonistic dialogue between two "voices," which develop commentaries from distinct theoretical inspirations, namely chaordic systems thinking (CST)…

In 1996 Hubert Saint-Onge and Smith published an article ("The evolutionary organization: avoiding a Titanic fate", in The Learning Organization, Vol. 3 No. 4), based on their experience at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). It was established at CIBC that change could be successfully facilitated through blended application…

A decision to don the chaos lens, adopt dialogue as its primary mode of communication, and to recognize the power of the organizational mind has fundamentally and irreversibly changed the way a Dutch capital-equipment manufacturer operates in its rapidly complexifying global marketplace. Beginning in September 1999, the focus of an ever widening…