Organizational learning is the process by which an organization creates, retains, and transfers knowledge — and so improves over time as a function of its accumulated experience.
The field formalized in the late twentieth century around Chris Argyris and Donald Schön's work on single-loop and double-loop learning, Peter Senge's "learning organization," and the broader management discourse on knowledge as a strategic asset. Knowledge in this frame can be procedural (how something gets done), product (efficiencies, sales methods, customer engagements), or relational (who knows whom and who to ask) — and lives at the individual, group, organizational, and inter-organizational levels.
The discipline overlaps closely with 📝Knowledge Management but is distinct: knowledge management is the engineered storage and retrieval of explicit knowledge, while organizational learning describes the broader behavioral change by which experience reshapes future action.