Realising the Learning Organisation through System Thinking: A Cyber-systemic Approach to Human Resource Development

The book offers a rigorous yet reflective framework for moving HRD beyond individual learning toward collective and organisational learning, grounded in management cybernetics, second-order systems thinking, and the author's thirty years of corporate and consultancy practice. This book revisits one of the management theory's most enduring aspirations, the learning organisation, through three decades of research, practice, and reflection. Structured in three temporal layers (1993, 2013, and 2026), this book traces the evolution of cyber-systemic human resource development from its origins in Stafford Beer's Viable System Model and Soft Systems Methodologies, through empirical field research with leading German corporations, to a deepened contemporary understanding of how organisations can genuinely learn, self-regulate, and regenerate. This book offers a rigorous yet reflective framework for moving Human Resource Development (HRD) beyond individual learning towards collective and organisational learning, grounded in management cybernetics, second-order systems thinking, and the author's 30 years of corporate and consultancy practice. It will appeal to HR practitioners, organisational developers, management consultants, and systems thinkers who sense the persistent gap between the concept of the learning organisation and organisational realities. Researchers in systems sciences, cybernetics, and organisation studies will find both a historically significant primary text and a theoretically rich contemporary synthesis. Readers will gain conceptual tools and practical models for designing self-reflective, resilient organisations, and an invitation to let the question of organisational learning evolve into a lived, generative understanding.