What We Do - Practice

SoL's organizational members collectively constitute a field of practice in which organizational learning theories are applied to critical business results and new theories are generated. Our practitioners, representing some of the most complex large systems in the world, together create an incomparable peer network committed to learning and achieving results unattainable by any single organization. They regularly collaborate in areas of common interest and challenge such as large scale change, leadership development, innovation, product development, and sustainability.

Called "liaisons," company representatives convene quarterly meetings where they develop and initiate applied learning projects and draw on the experience and wisdom of the group to accelerate the impact of their individual efforts. The liaisons build partnerships and collaborative practices designed to achieve measurable, replicable, and sustainable results. Click here to learn more about organizational membership in SoL.

Always interested in gauging the effectiveness of our members' cross-organizational learning activities, SoL has undertaken research in this area with support from the National Science Foundation. Research members Hilary Bradbury, John Carroll, John Ehrenfeld, and Peter Senge are leading a study called Inter-Organizational Learning: Developing Sustainable Business Enterprises in a Context of Dynamic and Behavioral Complexity.

Focused specifically on the work of SoL's Sustainability Consortium, the overarching question guiding the research is: "What are the conditions under which shared learning takes place across company boundaries in confronting complex learning challenges such as those posed by sustainability?" Such conditions include guiding ideas; principles, methods, and tools; and infrastructure. Click here to read more about this study.