SESSION ABSTRACT: As the web of global interdependence grows, we increasingly face problems for which hierarchical authority is fundamentally inadequate, and individual institutions, even the most powerful, have little leverage. No head of state can create the political will to confront global climate change, or the widening social divide. No corporation can unilaterally alter the collision course of business growth and water rights, or sustainable agriculture and fishing, or eliminate the toxicity and waste built into everyday products. No school can cause fundamental innovation in the industrial-age system of public education. All these issues require collaboration across every imaginable institutional boundary. The field of organization development grew from the aim of improving individual organizations, and the focus of the training and development profession was shaped by this aim. Today, these aims must shift in order to face the realities of global industrial development and the profound challenges it is creating. In response, diverse collaborative efforts in the areas of environment, social justice, and educational change have emerged over the past two decades ? such as the UN Global Compact, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the SoL Materials Pooling Initiative, and the Coalition for Essential Schools. But forming such groups is only a first step toward genuine communities of commitment and action. What kind of individual and collective skills are required to enable such learning communities to develop? What sort of learning processes can enable diverse stakeholders in complex systems to give up blaming one another, and to see more deeply the current realities they face and their collective parts in creating those realities? What type of governance infrastructures are required to sustain collaboration, mutual learning, and sharing? What role can network information technologies play, not as a ?magic bullet? but as an element in building effective global learning communities? These are the types of questions that will shape the next generation of learning processes IF we are to develop inter-organizational learning capabilities commensurate with the systemic challenges we face.