The Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) was founded in 1997 as an independent successor to the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, which had been established in 1991 with corporate sponsors including Ford, Federal Express, Motorola, Shell, and Harley-Davidson. The transition from MIT-hosted center to independent nonprofit represented a deliberate choice: to build a practitioner community that was not dependent on a single institution and that could sustain a long-term research-and-practice conversation across sectors. peter-senge became SoL's founding chair and remains its most prominent associated figure.
SoL's structure reflects its distinctive purpose. It is a network of member organizations — corporations, governments, NGOs, educational institutions — committed to applying learning-organization principles, connected through regional chapters, global conferences, and shared research projects. It convenes practitioners and researchers to work on specific organizational and social challenges, and it provides the platform for the ongoing development and dissemination of five-disciplines tools and concepts. arie-de-geus, otto-scharmer, art-kleiner, charlotte-roberts, and bryan-smith have all been active in the SoL community.
SoL also publishes Reflections, the journal of the Society for Organizational Learning, which has carried both research and practitioner perspectives on organizational learning, systems thinking, and sustainable development. The organization's evolution from the MIT Center to SoL to the present day traces the trajectory of the learning organization movement itself: from an MIT-centered research project to a global practitioner community engaging with questions of corporate sustainability, educational reform, and large-scale social change. The founding of SoL is documented in sol-founding-1997.