George Roth is an organizational studies researcher affiliated with MIT whose primary contribution to the learning-organization field is the co-development of the learning-history methodology with art-kleiner. The learning history is a structured retrospective account of an organizational change initiative, written collaboratively with participants and designed to facilitate collective reflection on what happened, why, and what it means for future action. The methodology represents a systematic approach to the problem that organizations routinely fail to learn from their own experience — a central concern of the five-disciplines framework — by creating a shared narrative artifact that enables the kind of reflective dialogue dialogue-practice requires.
Roth co-authored dance-of-change-1999 with peter-senge and the broader fieldbook team, contributing research on the challenges and obstacles that learning organization initiatives encounter after initial enthusiasm. "The Dance of Change" addresses a gap in fifth-discipline-1990: while the original book explained the disciplines and their rationale, it did not fully address why organizational learning initiatives so often stall, fragment, or get absorbed and neutralized by existing organizational culture. Roth's research on organizational learning in practice — including case studies of Ford, Harley-Davidson, and other mit-center-for-organizational-learning corporate partners — provided the empirical grounding for "The Dance of Change"'s more sober assessment of organizational transformation.
As a founding member of the society-for-organizational-learning, Roth helped establish the research infrastructure that gave SoL its credibility as more than a practitioner network. The learning history work in particular represents an attempt to develop a rigorous methodology for organizational learning research that is itself participatory and learning-oriented — applying learning-organization principles to the act of studying learning organizations. His academic publications in organizational learning and knowledge management extended the Senge framework into peer-reviewed research channels.