The founding of the mit-center-for-organizational-learning in 1991 marked the institutionalization of the learning organization movement at MIT in the immediate aftermath of fifth-discipline-1990's publication. peter-senge and bill-isaacs established the Center as a research organization at MIT Sloan that would bring together major corporations as research partners — not as clients receiving consulting services but as co-investigators in sustained organizational learning experiments. Corporate sponsors included Ford Motor Company, Shell Oil, AT&T, and Harley-Davidson, each of which contributed funding and access to their organizations in exchange for participation in research projects applying five-disciplines frameworks to real organizational challenges.
The Center's research model was designed to address a fundamental problem in organizational learning: the difficulty of building genuine learning capability within the timeframes and incentive structures of normal consulting engagements. By establishing multi-year research partnerships with corporate sponsors, the Center could study longitudinal organizational change in ways that short-term consulting could not. This research produced the case material and empirical grounding that dance-of-change-1999 drew on extensively — the honest account of what actually happened when organizations tried to implement learning-organization principles, including the resistances, setbacks, and partial successes that fifth-discipline-1990's more optimistic framing had not fully addressed.
The Center operated from 1991 to 1997, when it transitioned into the society-for-organizational-learning. The transition reflected both the success of the network it had built and the limitations of the university-housed model: MIT institutional structures, intellectual property frameworks, and academic timelines were increasingly in tension with the kind of global practitioner community the learning organization work had attracted. The Center's six-year run produced significant research on learning-history methodology (developed with george-roth and art-kleiner), dialogue-practice applications (through bill-isaacs's Dialogue Project), and microworlds as organizational learning tools. It remains one of the most ambitious attempts to embed serious organizational learning research within a major research university.