William R. Torbert

The Distinctive Questions Developmental Action Inquiry Asks.

Developmental Action Inquiry askes three types of questions together in one’s actions with others, with the normative aim of improving the timelines and transformational effectiveness of action. The three questions concern the first-person dynamics of one’s own awareness, the second-person dynamics of the immediate group with whom one is interacting, and the third-person dynamics of the larger institutions within which one’s action is situated. The article outlines the type of theory and practice that supports and reflects such inquiry, and highlights how different such integrated ‘research/practice’ is from empirical positivism.

Human Development and Managerial Effectiveness

Managerial effectiveness can be explained from a human development point of view. Recent research links structural theories of adult development to decision making and leadership performance. The implications are far-reaching for the management development professions. Applying what is known about human development would mean major changes in goals and methods for management education in universities, management training in organizations, and the practice of organization development.

Meaning Making and Management Action

This research suggests that management styles are shaped by developmental stage, that is, by the way the individual makes meaning of his or her world. Subjects were 49 MBA alumni and students, all of whom held full-time positions in a variety of organizations. Managers at later developmental stages, measured by Loevingers Sentence Completion Test, were more likely to redefine problems on an in-basket exercise than to accept them as presented. The data also indicated, though less clearly, that later-stage managers were more likely to act collaboratively. Implications are offered for leadership theory and management development.

The False Duality of Work and Leisure

Work and leisure are commonly viewed as dichotomous and antithetical. The authors argue that this conceptual duality is unreflective, confounding the meaning of each term. They suggest that work and leisure are complements that in their highest states share core elements and are best understood in dynamic relation to each other. Their purpose in this essay is to better understand work by learning about its complement. The authors characterize leisure as the experiential quality of ones time when one engages voluntarily and intentionally in awareness-expanding inquiry, which in turn generates ongoing, transforming development throughout adulthood. Leisure is intrinsically rewarding, facilitating personal and organizational transformations that increase extrinsic economic value. In response to an increasingly dominant work ethic, the authors advocate that leisure receive the same level of scrutiny and respect that we as management scholars naturally give to work. Cultivating true leisure, they conclude, is more demanding than work itself.

Managerial Learning, Organizational Learning A Potentially Powerful Redundancy

Two illustrations of organizational interventions by consultants and CEOs measured at late stages of managerial development are shown to generate significant opportunities for both managerial and organizational learning at the same time. Moreover, these learning processes occur during the real-time work of the organizations. The article discusses the kind of leadership awareness and action that can generate such simultaneous transformational learning and productive work at both the managerial and organizational scales. By contrast to single-loop and double-loop learning, this kind of leadership is characterized by timely triple-loop learning.

The tacit organization

Part 1 Metapattern and metamyth - tacit aspects in the culture of organizations: metapattern in the culture of organizations metamyth in the culture of organizations the managerial metamyth in children literature. Part 2 Strapping on the managerial metamyth - the Washington state ferries: from Black Ball Line to state ferries happy times hard times, and disasters DOT as a serieous player trying to implement Touche-Ross maintenance: on the brink of automation bears, rats, and magic Mayo. Part 3 The tacit dimensions in the culture of organizations: metapattern and metamyth and the ferry system. Afetrword: a symbolic approach to the study of organizations.

Transforming Social Science: Integrating Quantitative, Qualitative, and Action Research

During the twentieth century, the social sciences have been riven by paradigm controversies—so much so that physical and natural scientists often view this apparent disarray as prima facie evidence that social studies do not deserve the name science. For example, behaviorist and gestalt psychologists argued past one another well into the third quarter of the century; rational choice economists and political scientists, on the one hand, and institutional economists and political theorists, on the other, have tended to turn away from one another; and physical anthropologists and quantitative sociologists can talk to one another more easily than either group can to cultural ethnologists or qualitative sociologists.

Autobiographical Awareness as a Catalyst for Managerial and Organisational Development

This article argues and illustrates that autobiographical research, writing, and conservation that engenders autobiographical awareness, form a significant catalyst for managerial and organisational development toward continual quality improvement and the creation of learning organisations. The article also argues that autobiographical writing and conversation is a key process - indeed, an indispensable process - in social scientific research based on the action inquiry paradigm (Torbert, 1991).

The Good Life: Good Money, Good Work, Good Friends, Good Questions

This essay explores whether there is a general definition of the good life applicable cross-culturally to everyone, yet sufficiently open to permit infinitely idiosyncratic personal experience and lifetimes of inquiry. The essay proposes that four goods-good money, good work, good friends, and good questions-make up the good life, if they are pursued in the proper rank order of relative priority and with the proper blending. Readers are invited to test their own intuitive or explicit sense of the good life and the path toward it against the perspective offered here.

The “chaotic” action awareness of transformational leaders

This article offers illustrations of the action awareness and action style of transformational leaders, ranging from a World Bank executive to an artist-entrepreneur. The half dozen closely studied executives are identified as transformational leaders on the basis of their late-stage scores on a developmental measure. Their sensitivity to current conditions, and their ability to analogize across the domains of mission, strategy, own action and outcomes, suggest that their ongoing action awareness is consistent with a “chaos theory” appreciation of social reality.