System thinking is a conceptual framework that allows organizations to be studied as bounded systems. Learning organizations use system thinking to assess performance across the entire organization and its components. For an organization to be considered a learning organization, it needs to exhibit all of the key characteristics identified by Peter Senge, including system thinking. Personal mastery, one of the characteristics, refers to an individual's commitment to continuous learning and self-improvement, which provides competitive advantages for organizations when staff can learn more quickly than others. Mechanisms are needed for individual learning to be transferred into organizational learning.