The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook
Strategies and Tools for Building A Learning Organization

by Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, Bryan Smith

Doubleday/Currency
Publication Date: July 1, 1994
Price: $29.95, paperback
Pages: 594 pages
ISBN: 0-385-47256-0

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, published in 1994, followed up on Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline. While The Fifth Discipline laid out the principles particularly applicable to long-term organizational improvement, the Fieldbook was meant to answer the question "What should we do differently when we go to work on Monday morning?"

Forging a new, and often-copied style, the Fieldbook incorporated practice guides, exercises, stories, resource reviews, and short essays all aimed at helping people implement the disciplines on a day-to-day basis in a wide variety of settings. It clearly described how to get started in the practice of the principles of organizational learning, reflecting not just one person's theory, but the experience and reflection of an entire community of practitioners (see authors and contributors).

Although the Fieldbook was intended as a book of practice, not theory, it embodies a key theoretical argument:

• Organizations are products of the ways that people in them think and interact;
  

• To change organizations for the better, you must give people the opportunity to change the ways they think and interact;
  

• No one person, including a highly charismatic teacher or CEO, can train or command someone else to alter their attitudes, beliefs, skills, capabilities, perceptions, or level of commitment.
  

• Instead, the practice of organizational learning involves developing and taking part in tangible activities that will change the way people conduct their work. Through these new governing ideas, innovations in infrastructure, and new management methods and tools people will develop an enduring capability for change. The process will pay back the organization with a far greater diversity and intensity of commitment, innovation, and talent.

Since the Fieldbook's publication, the theory and practice of building learning organizations have evolved and been presented in the new Fieldbook called The Dance of Change.