Learning Organisations, Failing Systems: What Regional Australia Can Teach the World

You walk into the Shire meeting room and can feel it straight away, that mix of goodwill and quiet frustration. The air-con (or heater...depending on time of year) hums too loud, the IT is playing up again, and someone is hunting for a copy of last month’s minutes.

Everyone means well. Everyone genuinely wants to get something moving. But underneath the polite chatter is that familiar sense of déjà vu: we’ve done this before.

We’ve talked about collaboration, partnerships, joint ventures, all the buzzwords. Yet here we are again, circling the same issues, writing the same RED grant applications, chasing the same town sponsors, repackaging the same ideas with new taglines.

It’s not effort that’s missing. It’s clarity. The system we’re operating in, the way funding, decisions, and influence actually move through towns like Albany and Denmark, is invisible to most of us.

That line keeps haunting me because it perfectly captures regional life in places like the Great Southern of Western Australia.

We’re deeply interconnected, farms adjacent to national parks, family businesses beside tourism operators, shires aligning (or misaligning) with community groups, but we act as though we’re independent line-items in isolation.

I’ve been re-reading The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge.

The first time I read it was when I worked for an investment/business bookshop in my late teens, InvestorIQ, is what it was called. This store was that niche, no one really came in to buy books, which meant I had an unreasonable amount of time to read a plethora of business and investment literature. The Intelligent Investor, Irrational Exuberance, Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage to name a few, and it was there I read The Fifth Discipline between making long blacks for imaginary customers.

Over the years this book has changed for me. What once felt like a corporate leadership manual, on first read, now feels like a mirror for communities, for towns, for systems that stretch far beyond boards and briefings.

Because what Senge identified, the five disciplines of personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning and systems thinking, is exactly what regional Australia needs to get hold of if we’re going to shift from surviving to thriving.

There's a truth I’ve seen too often: the failure is not people. It’s systems.

You can have the most dedicated volunteer, the most visionary local business owner, the most progressive local council. But if the underlying system, the incentives, the feedback loops, the relationships, the unspoken assumptions, is broken, you will still end up in the same room next year, re-talking the same issues. Because the system is blind to itself.

Take a regional industrial operation like a lime mine in Nullaki, or any regional project you’re intimately familiar with.

On paper: limited production targets, extraction cost, logistics, regulatory approvals.

But when you look at the actual system it’s far more complex: local trucking capacity, seasonal road limits, community environmental trust, soil health downstream, workforce retention, extractive industry obligations, future land-use scenarios. That operation is embedded in a network of interdependencies.

One failure point and the whole chain shakes, maybe even breaks.

And this is where the regional context becomes both a challenge and an opportunity. Because smaller towns have something big in their favour: visibility.

You don’t hide in a town of 7,000 (Denmark's rough population); your kids go to the same school, your suppliers deliver to your cafe or gym or local-supermarket, your council decisions touch your farm.

That closeness can feel suffocating, and sometimes it is, but it also means that a feedback loop you can’t decouple becomes visible. You can track it. You can map it. You can design around it.

The trick is to move from reacting to sensing. From treating symptoms to mapping causes. From working in silos to weaving loops.

Now let’s bring in Otto Scharmer. His work on Theory U and the shift from ego-system to eco-system awareness gives a more inner dimension to what Senge described.

Scharmer argues that change isn’t just about new processes or structures, it’s about new levels of awareness, new mind-sets, opening your mind, your heart, your will.

For a regional community, that means something powerful: you’re not just upgrading your infrastructure, you’re upgrading your connective tissue. You’re not just rolling out a program, you’re tuning into the emergent future of your place, what’s wanting to emerge.

That might sound lofty, but it’s achievable if you begin small and real.

Here are three truths I’ve come to believe (and I see them reflected in both Senge and Scharmer’s work) which we ought to grab hold of in regional Australia:

1. The power of seeing the whole.

We habitually design for discrete wins: “let’s fix the road”, “let’s increase tourism”, “let’s get more kids in gymnastics”. But the loop that connects road to season, tourism to environment, kids in sport to future workforce, that’s the system. Senge: “Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things.”

Once you start diagramming the system, feedback loops, unintended consequences, reinforcing cycles, you stop blaming and you start designing.

A local skate park that the Shire and State have committed to funding here in Denmark becomes more than “let’s build recreation infrastructure”; it becomes part of youth engagement, local identity, spill-over business, volunteer load, road safety, and mental wellbeing.

2. The discipline of learning

A learning organisation isn’t a static state, it’s dynamic. It grows by doing, reflecting, adapting. In regional towns we prize persistence, but often confuse persistence with repetition. Doing the same thing harder doesn’t create a learning system.

This ties exactly into Scharmer’s concept of “presencing”, the place where you let go of stale mind-sets, you retreat into observation, reflection, and then act from emergence.

In a regional project you might pilot a local supply chain for regenerative agriculture. That’s fine. But if you don’t build the loop of feedback, what worked, what failed, what assumptions were wrong, you’re just running a project, not building a learning system.

3. The region as laboratory

Cities, like Perth, have scale, but they also have entanglement, inertia, complexity that is near-impossible to manage quickly.

Regional contexts, by contrast, while constrained, have clarity. You can trace cause and effect. Local leadership is known. The relational fabric is visible. Which means you can be faster, more adaptive.

If you design as though your town is part of a global experiment in systems change, and in fact it is, you gain courage. You move from service delivery to system design. From damage control to regenerative design.

Let’s imagine the Great Southern as such an island of coherence...what this means is a small group or space where things actually make sense, even when everything around it feels messy or chaotic. These “islands” are pockets of calm, focus, and teamwork where people are clear on what they’re doing and work well together, even while the rest of the world is confused or falling apart.

Think, farmers sharing soil-health data and working with local schools to turn that data into science modules.

Picture the local council working with the sports club on wellbeing outcomes (not just membership numbers).

Picture the tourism sector embedding conservation outcomes and local business incubators into their visitor experience. These are not independent projects, they are nodes in a learning system where feedback, shared vision, and adaptive capacity matter more than any one project’s success.

And while you’re imagining that, you’re learning. Because the system is starting to see itself.

The challenge is real. Because regionally we carry legacy systems: funding models built for silos, governance frameworks built for compliance not learning, volunteer systems built for delivery not for reflection. We run events, not ecosystems. We chase the next grant, not the next loop. We credit the pioneer, not cultivate the process.

We need a dream, but more importantly, we need to build the discipline to learn into that dream. Regional Australia can’t just hope for the next boom; it has to build the next system.

Here’s how you might translate that into action (yes, this is practical and yes, it applies to your context):

• Map your system: Choose a project, your footy or gymnastics or basketball club expansion, or the lime operation, or the winery supply network, and map all the roles, dependencies, feedback loops, delays, unintended consequences. Who benefits? Who loses? What would happen if you tweak one input?

• Create the learning architecture: Set up processes, not just deliverables. Every stakeholder meeting should include: what did we learn? What assumption was hidden? What feedback loop did we see? How will we adjust? Use dashboards not just for KPIs but for patterns.

• Cultivate generative partnerships: Not siloed collaboration (“we’ll run a joint event”), but interdependent alliances (“we’ll discover together how our work is connected and design accordingly”). Build forums where local business, council, community, education talk system, not just project.

• Embed continuous feedback: Design your projects with prototyping, testing, iteration. Scharmer emphasises prototyping as part of the ‘up the U’ journey: “Often what you think you will create at the beginning of the U process is quite different from what eventually emerges.” (Scharmer). That holds true in regional contexts: expect deviations. Learn from them.

• Build the story of the region as a learning organism: When your community starts telling the story, not just of individual successes but of collective learning, that becomes competitive. Position the region not just as “wine country” or “tourism destination”, but as “this is a place that learns fast, adapts smart, thrives together”.

It’s worth stopping here and for me to just be blunt: this is not easier than just living "in the status quo". It’s different. It takes patience. It takes leadership that isn’t about control but about design. It takes courage to surface what’s hidden: mental models, power dynamics, distrust, duplication.

But here is why it's a good thing to apply: once a region starts functioning as a learning system, momentum builds. It becomes harder to stop. Because the system itself becomes the enabler.

And that coherence is a kind of magic you don’t often talk about, but local residents, they feel it. They see patterns shifting. They recognise the same people meeting, not just for the sake of association, but to reflect, adapt, redesign. They feel the confidence that the next project will not just be “another initiative” but a node in something bigger.

Let me give a regional vignette (drawn from a mixture of real-life patterns in the Great Southern). A town decides to invest in a youth wellbeing hub (through the gymnastics or basketball or footy or whatever sport club). Simultaneously, a local winery decides to partner with local ag-schools for entrepreneurship and microbiome education.

At the same time, the shire revamps its procurement policy to favour local business and practical ecological outcomes. Individually, each makes sense. But collectively, they become the beginnings of a regional learning loop: youth wellbeing links to workforce pipeline; entrepreneurial culture links to business diversification; local procurement links to economic resilience. The linkages reveal themselves only when someone maps the system, tracks the loops, reflects on the learnings, and intentionally designs the next phase accordingly.

Now imagine replicating that map across sectors: agriculture, tourism, education, health, infrastructure. It becomes a living matrix of information, influence, feedback. The region becomes conscious of itself.

That’s the kind of leadership I believe regional Australia can pioneer. It’s not just building more; it’s learning faster. It’s not just collaborating; it’s integrating. It’s not just surviving the next season; it’s designing for the next generation.

One of the most used words in management is “scale.” What I’m proposing here is different: it’s “escalate learning.”

Scale often means replication, take this model, copy it, expand it.

But escalate learning means refine the system, improve the loops, deepen the metrics, broaden the feedback. Because in a system-rich regional environment, the highest leverage isn’t doing more, it’s learning better.

To do this you must reframe failure. In regional mind-sets there’s often fear of failure, good projects blow up, volunteers burn out, words become wagers.

But in a learning system, failure is data. It’s opportunity. It’s part of the feedback loop. When you change that story, when you treat “what didn’t work” as “what taught us what assumptions were wrong”, you start designing for resilience rather than for perfection.

So, here’s the closing challenge for regional leaders, change-makers, strategists of all stripes: don’t ask what project should we run next?

Ask what system are we building? Don’t ask how can we fill the gap? Ask how can we change the loop? Don’t ask how can we compete? Ask how can we collaborate to change the game?

Because regional Australia doesn’t have to wait for city models to learn from, it can lead. Not as a smaller version of the city, but as a different organism altogether. One built around relationships, feedback, adaptability, locality, and learning.

Today, more than ever, we need what Senge and Scharmer described: capacity to see the whole and capacity to let new futures emerge. We need regional places that aren’t just nodes in national supply chains but organisms that learn, adapt, regenerate, and thrive.

And if towns like Denmark, Albany, and the broader Great Southern can map their systems, design their loops, learn faster than they fail, then they don’t just salvage their future, they point a way forward for the rest of the world.

Now is the time. The system is visible. The links are there.

The opportunity is real.

What will you learn next?

TK