David Bohm (1917–1992) was one of the twentieth century's most original theoretical physicists, known for his work on quantum mechanics, plasma physics, and the holographic model of the universe. Late in his career, he turned his attention to questions of thought, meaning, and collective inquiry, producing a body of work on dialogue that had a profound influence on organizational learning practice. His central argument was that fragmentation — in thought, in culture, in organizations — is not primarily an epistemological problem but a problem of the process of thought itself: we mistake our mental models for reality and then defend them against inquiry.
Bohm developed a practice he called "dialogue" — distinguished from debate and discussion — in which a group suspends assumptions and listens to the flow of meaning through the collective rather than defending individual positions. The aim is not to reach agreement or solve problems, but to make the process of collective thinking visible, allowing incoherence to surface and new shared meaning to emerge. His seminars on dialogue, and his short book "On Dialogue" (1996, assembled from his writings), became influential in organizational learning circles in the 1980s and early 1990s, circulating partly through Senge's network before formal publication.
peter-senge cites Bohm as the primary intellectual source for the dialogue-practice strand of team-learning in fifth-discipline-1990. The idea that teams can think together in a qualitatively different mode — not just pooling individual knowledge but generating collective intelligence — comes directly from Bohm. Senge participated in Bohm's dialogue seminars and brought the practice into the corporate consulting work he was doing through innovation-associates before the book's publication. Bohm's influence also runs through the later presence-2004, where the theme of suspended assumptions and open attention becomes central to the theory of profound change developed with otto-scharmer.