The Academy for Systems Change is a nonprofit organization co-founded by peter-senge and hal-hamilton focused on developing the capabilities of leaders working on large-scale systemic change. It emerged from the learning and relationships generated through the Sustainable Food Lab (see sustainable-food-lab-2002) and from Senge's ongoing collaboration with Hamilton on what they identified as a distinctive set of capabilities — system-leadership — required for effective work on complex, multi-stakeholder sustainability challenges. The Academy's founding reflects the maturation of the learning-organization tradition from its original focus on single organizations into an explicit theory and practice of systems change at the scale of industries, sectors, and societies.
The Academy's curriculum and programs are organized around the three core capabilities articulated in dawn-of-system-leadership-2015: seeing the larger system (the analytical dimension), fostering reflection and generative conversation (the relational and dialogue dimension), and shifting the collective focus from reactive problem-solving to co-creating the future (the generative or presencing dimension). This framework integrates systems-thinking-fifth-discipline with the dialogue-practice and presence-2004 lineages, treating all three as interdependent capabilities rather than separate tools. The five-disciplines framework is visible in the background: shared-vision, mental-models work, and team-learning appear in updated form as core elements of the system leadership practice the Academy develops.
The Academy for Systems Change works primarily with practitioners already engaged in significant sustainability and social change initiatives — food systems, education reform, health equity, climate adaptation — who have encountered the limits of conventional leadership approaches and are seeking frameworks that match the complexity of the challenges they face. This focus on experienced practitioners working on real systemic challenges distinguishes the Academy from more general leadership development organizations, and reflects Senge's consistent conviction, visible from fifth-discipline-1990 onward, that learning-organization and systems thinking concepts are most valuable when they are encountered in the context of genuine organizational and systemic challenges rather than as abstract curriculum.