"The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook," published in 1994 by doubleday-currency, was a direct response to the reception of fifth-discipline-1990. Readers of the original book had found the framework compelling but were uncertain how to apply it in practice. The Fieldbook, co-authored by peter-senge with art-kleiner, charlotte-roberts, richard-ross, and bryan-smith, supplies what the original deliberately withheld: 593 pages of exercises, tools, case studies, and practical guidance for building learning-organization capacity across all five-disciplines.
The structure of the Fieldbook mirrors the five disciplines, with sections organized around each practice. The mental models section includes exercises for surfacing assumptions, techniques drawn from chris-argyris and donald-schon's action science — particularly the "left-hand column" exercise — and guidance on conducting productive inquiry. The team learning section develops tools for dialogue-practice, distinguishing dialogue from discussion and offering facilitation methods rooted in david-bohm's work. The systems thinking section provides accessible introductions to causal-loop-diagrams and the systems-archetypes, with worked examples from real organizational contexts.
The Fieldbook introduced the concept of "the SoL community" before the society-for-organizational-learning was formally founded, treating the book itself as a community artifact — each section draws on contributions from practitioners working in diverse organizational settings. This editorial approach, pioneered by art-kleiner and the co-authorship team, became the template for subsequent volumes in the series: dance-of-change-1999 and schools-that-learn-2000. The multi-voice format reflects a deliberate epistemology: no single author or organization holds the answer to building learning organizations.
The Fieldbook's influence on organizational practice has arguably exceeded that of the original book for working practitioners. Consultants, HR professionals, and managers who found fifth-discipline-1990 inspiring but abstract found in the Fieldbook a direct path to application. The book's treatment of mental-models work — particularly the distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-use — brought Argyris's rigorous but demanding framework into mainstream organizational development in an accessible form. The causal-loop-diagrams section has been used as a teaching resource in systems thinking workshops for three decades.