Bill Torbert

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William R. (Bill) Torbert (1944- ) A graduate of Yale (BA 1965, PhD 1971), Bill Torbert became a leadership professor at Southern Methodist University, Harvard, and Boston College. Author of a dozen books, as well as a consultant and board member, Torbert is particularly well known for his developmental leadership theory and psychometric tool, the Global Leadership Profile (www.gla.global/the-glp-overview/); and for his Action Inquiry leadership practice (see his Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership - Berrett-Kohler; San Francisco CA, 2004) In addition, he has constructed parallel, analogous theories of organizational development and social scientific development, altogether named Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry or CDAI (Listening into the dark: An essay testing the validity and efficacy of Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry for describing and encouraging the transformation of self, society, and scientific inquiry. Integral Review. 2013, 9(2), 264-299.) CDAI combines quantitative, qualitative, and action research and includes the researcher(s) within the field of study and action.

Biography - Youth Born on February 8, 1944 in Washington DC, Torbert began his travels at the age of three, when his father, a Foreign Service Officer, was assigned to Madrid. At the age of six, fluent in Spanish, he travelled to his father’s next post, Vienna, where Bill attended the Lycée Francais, learning French from his teachers and German from his classmates. After a further three years in Washington, he went to Andover and then Yale, from which he graduated magna cum laude, All-Ivy-League soccer, vice-chair of the Yale Daily News, and winner of the American History prize. His senior thesis, with Malcolm P. Rogers, was published as Being for the Most Part Puppets: Interactions Among Men’s Labor, Leisure, and Politics (Schenkman: Cambridge MA, 1973). At Yale, Torbert met and was strongly influenced by political theorists Karl Deutsch, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul D’Entreves, by psychologists Erik Erikson, Abraham Maslow, and Daniel Levinson, and by theologian Paul Tillich. Here too, he first encountered his lifelong mentors, Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, who introduced him to Christian political action, and organization behaviorist Chris Argyris who would become his dissertation advisor.

Early Professional Life Upon graduation, Torbert became Associate Director of the Yale Summer High School for a year and joined the Gurdjieff Work. The primary question of this spiritual work, in which he participated for twenty-five years, is how one can develop an impartial, post-cognitive consciousness that facilitates timely action amidst the stresses of everyday life.

The following year, he became a doctoral student in Individual and Organizational Behavior and founded the Yale Upward Bound War on Poverty program, intending to write his dissertation on Upward Bound and his leadership of it. The program succeeded in cutting New Haven’s dropout rate in half, and Torbert’s research resulted in a new theory of organizational development. However, the faculty refused to accept a study written by the leader of the program studied, even though it included a critical analysis of the leadership process and introduced a new kind of social science that led not just to generalized truths, but to uniquely timely actions. As a result of this setback, Torbert designed and completed a different dissertation, titled Learning from Experience: Toward Consciousness (Columbia University Press: NY, 1972). He also wrote up the Upward Bound study, published as Creating a Community of Inquiry: Conflict, Collaboration, Transformation (Wylie Interscience: London, 1976).

Torbert’s first faculty role was at the Southern Methodist University Business School (1970-1972), where he taught a 400-student course on how to become an entrepreneur, via a course structure that engaged all students in personal and team initiatives that he named Liberating Disciplines. He was selected Outstanding Professor. Later, based on this experience, he published The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry (Sage: Newbury Park CA, 1991), which became a finalist for the Academy of Management’s Terry Book Award.

In the meantime, he became an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for four years (1972-76), followed by two years as founder and director of The Theatre of Inquiry. These years are best retold in Torbert’s memoirs, Numbskull in The Theatre of Inquiry: Transforming Self, Friends, Organizations and Social Science (Waterside Productions: Cardiff CA, January 2021).

Senior Professional Roles and Further Publications In 1978, Torbert accepted the position of Graduate Dean at the Boston College School of Management, where he remained for thirty years. Working closely with a faculty team, he created the first Action Effectiveness MBA program, which rose in the national rankings from below the top 100 to #29.

During the Eighties and Nineties, he completed two major, decade-long CDAI projects and many minor ones, using the Global Leadership Profile psychometric (GLP). He and Susanne Cook-Greuter adapted the profile from Jane Loevinger’s Washington University Sentence Completion Test, initially calling it the Leadership Development Profile (LDP); with Elaine Herdman Barker, he further adapted the measure and named it the GLP. (The history of reliability and validity testing of the evolving measure can be found in “Brief Comparison of Five Developmental Measures: the GLP, the LDP, the MAP, the SOI, and the WUSCT.” www.actioninquiryleadership.com 2020; and in “The pragmatic impact on leaders & organizations of interventions based in the Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry approach. “ Integral Leadership Review. August-November 2017.) The first of the major projects was a study of how the BC MBA program, configured as a series of Liberating Disciplines, reliably generated developmental transformations in students. Aspects of this study are reported in Managing the Corporate Dream (Dow Jones/Irwin: Homewood IL, 1987, winner of the Alpha Sigma Nu award (www.alphasigmanu.org/images/uploads/resources/Past_Winners_of_Book_Awards_2018.pdf). The second major project involved consulting to ten companies in different industries. This study found that only CEOs at late developmental action-logics reliably succeeded in supporting organizational transformation. (Listening into the dark: An essay testing the validity and efficacy of Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry for describing and encouraging the transformation of self, society, and scientific inquiry. Integral Review. 2013, 9(2), 264-299 page 272.)

During the Nineties too, Torbert served on the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Board (#1 HMO in the US, 1998) and, at the same time, on Trillium Asset Management’s Board (1988-2009), with founder and 1999 Time Hero-of-the-Planet Joan Bavaria as CEO. Other books published in these years include Personal and Organizational Transformations, with Dal Fisher (McGraw-Hill: London, 1995) and Sources of Excellence: An Unorthodox Inquiry into Quality in Recent U.S. Presidencies, in Business Leadership, in Management Education, in Adam Smith’s Ethics, and in Pythagorean Mathematics (Edge\Work Press: Boston MA, 1993). These were also years of service to his broader academic profession as Chair of the Organization Transformation PhD program at Boston College, Chair of the Organization Development and Change division of the Academy of Management, founding Research Member of the Society for Organizational Learning, Board member of the Organization Behavior Teaching Society, and founding Board member of several academic journals.

With the turn of the Millennium, Torbert shifted his attention more toward characterizing the distinctive qualities of CDAI as a new paradigm of social science. In articles like “A developmental approach to social science: A model for analyzing Charles Alexander’s scientific contributions” (Journal of Adult Development, 2000), “Toward a transformational social science: A further look at the scientific merits of action research,” with P. Reason in Concepts and Transformation, 2001), and “Transforming inquiry and action: By interweaving 27 flavors of action research” with D. Chandler (Journal of Action Research, 2003), as well as in three chapters of his edited book with Francine Sherman. Transforming Social Inquiry, Transforming Social Action: New Paradigms for Crossing the Theory/Practice Divide in Universities and Communities (Kluwer Academic Publishers: Boston MA, 2000), he demonstrated how CDAI includes first-, second-, and third-person research, on the past, the present, and the future, and can offer single-, double-, and triple-loop feedback on its findings. In 2016, with Hilary Bradbury, Torbert published Eros/Power: Love in the Spirit of Inquiry (Integral Publishers: Tucson AZ), a first- and second-person exploration of the authors’ relational action inquiry with one another and of each one’s own history of erotic relationships.

Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry* One of the constitutive elements of CDAI is an ontological theory of Four Territories of Experience, as contrasted with the bivariate distinction in much modern science and philosophy between mind and matter. In terms of first-person experience, the four territories of experience can be named: 1) the outside world (matter); 2) one’s own sensed perception and behavior; 3) the realm of thinking and feeling (mind); and 4) post-cognitive consciousness/attention/intention. One of the practices of action inquiry is to pay four-territory attention and recognize intuitions of fit and/or incongruity across the four territories.

In terms of second-person experience, Torbert calls the four constitutive types of conversational speech: 1) making an inquiry of another (outside world); 2) offering a story about one’s own or others’ perceptions or behavior; 3) advocating one or more strategies (mind); and 4) attempting to frame or re-frame a joint intent for the conversation. In third-person organizational experience, the four constitutive elements can be named: 1) outcomes; 2) operations/performance; 3) strategies/culture; and 4) mission/vision. In science, the aim is to align 1) data; 2) method; 3) theory; and 4) paradigm.

A second constitutive element of CDAI is an epistemological theory of how humans, organizations, sciences, etc. evolve toward increasing capacity for generating awareness of, and harmony among, the four territories of experience. Torbert’s names for the developmental action-logics in persons, organizations, and sciences are:

Persons Organizations Social Sciences Birth/Impulsive Conception Anarchism Opportunist Investments Behaviorism Diplomat Incorporation Gestalt Psych/Soc Expert Experiments Empirical Positivism Achiever Systematic Productvt Multi-Method Eclctcsm Redefining Social Networking Postmodern Interptvm Transforming Collaborative Inquiry Action Science Praxis Alchemical Foundational Comnty Coop Ecological Inquiry Ironic Liberating Disciplines CollabDevAcInq (CDAI)

According to Torbert, at different developmental action-logics a given word - like love, inquiry, wealth, or power - means something different. For example, the Opportunist action-logic understands that power is hard, coercive; Diplomat power is soft, charming; Expert power is smart, logistical; Achiever power is cooperative, productive. All these ‘early’ action-logics, at which the vast majority of human beings currently perform, treat power as unilateral. The ‘later’ action-logics can use the unilateral types of power when necessary, but increasingly appreciate that the most powerful kinds of power are mutual: the Redefining capacity to exercise collaborative visioning power to create a sense of shared purpose; the Transforming power to detect and heal incongruities between one’s own and other people’s talk and their walk; etc.

Awards In addition to the awards already mentioned, Torbert was named phi beta kappa at Yale and awarded a four-year Danforth Graduate Fellowship for his graduate studies. He won Outstanding Professor awards at both SMU and Boston College and received the David Bradford Career Distinguished Educator Award from the Organization Behavior Teaching Society in 2008 (mots.org/awards/) In 2010, he received the Outstanding Scholar Award from the Western Academy of Management (www.wamonline.org/scholars). In 2011, his 2005 Harvard Business Review article “Seven Transformations of Leadership” was selected for the top ten, all-time HBR Must Reads on Leadership volume (HBR’s 10 Must Reads: On Leadership. Harvard Business Review Press, Boston MA, 1911). In 2013, Torbert received the Walter F. Ulmer, Jr. Applied Leadership Research Career Contribution Award from the Center for Creative Leadership (www.ccl.org/about-our-research/ccl-research-awards/2013). And in 2014, he received the Chris Argyris Career Achievement Award from the national Academy of Management (https://issuu.com/academyofmanagement/docs/academynewsoctobernovember2014 - p17).

• The increasingly widespread recognition and use of CDAI is indicated: by its inclusion in the SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research (D. Coghlan & M. Brydon-Miller, ed.s, 2014) as a distinct entry by P. Foster; by others’ articles about CDAI (e.g. Reason, P. Three approaches to qualitative inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (ed.s) Handbook of Qualitative Research 1994; and Taylor, S. William Rockwell Torbert - Walk the Talk. In D. Szabla, B. Pasmore & M. Barnes (ed.s) Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers 2017; by M, Edwards’ extended critical appreciation of CDAI in his 2009 book, Organizational Transformation for Sustainability: An Integral Metatheory; by the fact that twelve of the chapters in H. Bradbury (ed.) SAGE Handbook of Action Research 2015 reference and use CDAI; by Torbert’s Google H-Index of 34; and by the 43,000 reads his work has received on ResearchGate.

References

Books by Torbert (with selected reviews and translations; most available in the Cyber Library at www.actioninquiryleadership.com ) Being for the Most Part Puppets: Interactions Among Men's Labor, Leisure and Politics, with Malcolm P. Rogers, Schenkman Publishing, Cambridge MA, 1973. Library of Congress Card Number 72-81516. (Reviewed in Contemporary Sociology, September 1975, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter.)

Learning from Experience: Toward Consciousness, Columbia University Press, New York NY, 1972. ISBN 0-231-03672-8 Search this book on . (Also published in Portuguese by the U. of Sao Paulo Press; reviewed in The Review of Books and Religion, mid- October 1973, by Charles B. Paris; and in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1974, by Willman J. Warner)

Creating a Community of Inquiry: Conflict, Collaboration, Transformation, Wiley, London, 1976. ISBN 0-471-91655-1 Search this book on . (Reviewed in the London Times Educational Supplement, February 4, 1977, by Charles Clasen; and in Sociology: A Review of New Books, 1977, by Thomas E. Drabek)

Managing the Corporate Dream: Restructuring for Long-Term Success, Dow Jones-Irwin, Homewood IL, 1987. ISBN 0-87094-922-5 Search this book on . (Alpha Sigma Nu Award; reviewed in Academy of Management Executive, August 1987, by Suresh Srivastva and Frank J. Barrett)

The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry, Sage Publications, Newbury Park CA, 1991. ISBN 0-8039-4067-X Search this book on . (Finalist, Terry Book Award; reviewed in Administrative Sience Quarterly, March 1993, by Robert Putnam; in Academy of Management Review, April 1991, by Judi Marshall; and in The Learning Organization, 2(3) 1995, by Dennis Heaton)

Sources of Excellence: An Unorthodox Inquiry into Quality in Recent U.S. Presidencies, in Business Leadership, in Management Education, in Adam Smith's Ethics, and in Pythagorean Mathematics, Edge\Work Press, Boston MA, 1993.

Personal and Organizational Transformations: The True Challenge of Generating Continual Quality Improvement, with Dalmar Fisher, McGraw- Hill, England, 1995. ISBN 0-07-707834-9 Search this book on . (Reviewed in Management Learning, 28(2), 1995, by Paul Tosi)

Transforming Social Inquiry, Transforming Social Action, edited with Francine Sherman, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston MA, 2000. ISBN 0-7923-7787-7 Search this book on . (Reviewed in The International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 10(2) 2002, by David Coghlan)

Personal and Organizational Transformations: Through action inquiry, (Revised editions) with Dalmar Fisher and David Rooke, Edge\Work Press, Boston MA, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2006.

Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership, with Associates. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. San Francisco CA, 2004. ISBN- 10: 1-57675-264-X (Translated and published in Japanese, 2016; in Chinese, 2018; and in Russian, 2019.)

Eros/Power: Love in the Spirit of Inquiry – Transforming How Women and Men Relate, with Hilary Bradbury. Integral Publishers, Tucson AZ, 2016. ISBN 978-1-4951-5914-5

Numbskull in The Theatre of Inquiry: Transforming Self, Friends, Organizations, and Social Science. Waterside Productions, Cardiff CA. (2021)

William R. Torbert edits

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