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Purpose This paper aims to demonstrate how the Nordic model, featuring highly regulated trade union–employer collaboration, has enabled the building of learning organizations through a co-generative learning model involving both practitioners and action researchers. Design/methodology/approach A literature search on the Nordic sociotechnical systems tradition led to a further search based on the snowball method. This paper reveals how the unique features of the Nordic model for work life through union–management relations constitute a formal system for building learning organizations. Findings This paper acknowledges the difference in power that exists between the social parties within the Nordic model. However, the practice is not due solely to the political structure in which trade unions, employers’ associations and the state form a tripartite collaboration, and thus, create a framework for workplace collaboration. This tripartite collaboration has enabled the development of an organizational practice by action researchers, union representatives and companies over several decades. Originality/value Limited literature has explicitly linked the formal structures of the Nordic model of work life and the effort to develop learning organizations. This paper addresses criticism that the research field has not fully considered power issues when developing a learning organization. It demonstrates how the Nordic model as a formal structure creates a system of democratic norms and rules that facilitates a safe arena for employees to invest their effort in co-generating a learning organization.

The systems idea is at the heart of the Learning Organization (LO). This chapter revisits the LO in the light of a revised understanding of the systems idea. It introduces the basic premises of three fundamentally different theories about the systems idea. It briefly reviews Senge’s work and the LO literature with these three theories in mind. It interprets the LO in terms of the most defensible of the three theories: Critical Systemic Thinking. It considers critical systemic practice as an alternative “Fifth Discipline Fieldbook”. This “mighty step” involves a paradigm shift and redefining relationships between: employees and management, management and consultants; and organizations, the wider human society, and the living planet.

This article presents the application of the systemic problem structuring approach Viable System Diagnosis (VSD) within the Department of Orthopedic Surgery in a large hospital in Norway. It explains why systemic thinking is relevant to this uniquely complex form of human organization. The department was coping with systemic dysfunction and VSD was chosen because previous applications demonstrated VSD excels at diagnosis of what is causing dysfunction. VSD was employed through a participatory framework that included in the process, among other stakeholders, medics, technologists, managers, administrators and, as far as possible given the sensitive nature of patient information, the patient. VSD guided thinking about what the organization is set up to do and the existing organizational arrangements to achieve that. The outcome was an agenda for debate that guided stakeholder discussions toward ways and means of improving organizational arrangements. The article briefly reviews previous applications of VSD in the hospital sector and other large complex organisations.

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