William Rockwell Torbert

ABOUT BILL TORBERT

I spent most of my childhood in Europe, going to Spanish, Austrian, and French schools, because my father was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Graduating from Yale with a BA in Politics and Economics and a PhD in Administrative Sciences, I served as Founder and Director of both the War on Poverty Yale Upward Bound Program and the Theatre of Inquiry, as well as successively on the faculties of Southern Methodist University, Harvard, and Boston College. My aim was to learn how to study myself and the groups and organizations that I participated in or led from the inside as well as from the outside. I joined the Gurdjieff Work for 25 years to support inner self-study, as well as T-groups and Tavistock conferences to study myself and others in groups. My early book, Learning from Experience: Toward Consciousness, describes the self-study process, and my next book, Creating a Community of Inquiry, describes the group and organizational self-study-in-action process as it occurred during the Yale Upward Bound Program.

I came to Boston College in 1978 as the Graduate Dean of the MBA program, later becoming Director of the PhD Program in Organizational Transformation (the school rising from below the top 100 to #25 during that time). I have been a founding member of many academic journals and developmentally-oriented educational processes, such as Leadership for Change at Boston College, the international Society for Organizational Learning, and the Integral Institute. Within the academy, I served as Chair for the Organization Development & Change Division of the Academy of Management and on the Board of the Organization Behavior Teaching Society.

During the 1990s I also consulted widely to more than 50 organizations (e.g. Odebrecht Construction [Brazil], Volvo and UBS Warburg [England], Lego, Gillette, Bellcore, Citizens Energy, the US Army, the National Security Agency, the Center for Creative Leadership) and served on the Boards of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and P.B.Svigals & Associates (architects), as well as Trillium Asset Management (the first and largest independent social investing advisor).

Today I focus my consulting and presenting contributions through my role as Director of Research at Harthill Consulting UK and in alliance with Context Management Consulting Inc., Canada.

MORE PERSONALLY…

In order for you to know why and how I do the different things I do (teach, consult, do research, write, host small intensive communities of inquiry, even garden), you need to know my fundamental concern. My fundamental concern throughout my adulthood has been how to learn and exercise timely action/leadership in everyday life i.e. how you or I can engage, in the midst of our daily practices

in first-person research (e.g. observing what I am doing and the effects I and my environment are having on one another, what I am thinking and feeling, and what I really want);
in second-person research (e.g. encouraging mutual testing of attributions and assessments in real-time conversations and meetings, along with transformations toward increasingly mutual control of our friendship or colleagueship or collective vision, as well as of our strategies, performance, and assessment, on the teams and in the organizations to which we belong on a long-term basis);
and in third-person research (e.g. publicly testing propositions with persons not present through measures and publications, as well as through creating learning organizations that interweave first-, second-, and third-person research).

I have come to name this process of interweaving research and practice in one’s everyday work, family life, and leisure…action inquiry. Practicing action inquiry is what my teaching is about, what my research is about, what my consulting and Board memberships are about, what my spiritual search is about, and what my friendships are about. I think action inquiry is what generates peaceful and fruitful transformation in our lives, our vocations, and our organizations, as we increasingly create communities of inquiry within our different familial, organizational, and friendship relationships.

(Of course, anyone who is so monomaniacal must have a significant shadow side...so that gradually glimpsing and coming to terms with the uninquiring/habitual aspects of myself/yourself becomes, paradoxically, an ever-more-prominent aspect of the ever-less-confident inquiry.)

Let me try several more, brief alternative formulations of this concern to offer more of you some handle on what's at stake for me (and, I believe, you) here:

Action inquiry is about discovering actions in real-time personal and professional settings
that alert, attune, and sometimes even align
self, immediate others, organizational strategies, and global vision and that encourage
non-violent personal, organizational, and societal transformations.

*****

Action inquiry is about discovering,
not just knowledge,
but wisdom -
the integrity of being, knowing, doing, and effectuating.

*****

Action inquiry is about discovering,
not just temporary objectivity,
but the conscious, spontaneous interplay among
integral subjectivity (passion),
mutual intersubjectivity (compassion),
and sustainable objectivity (dispassion).

For more information about me and my research, you may go to the brief biography and/or to my formal vita, at the end of which one finds reference to my other publications over the years.

One description of my approach to integrating action and inquiry in social science is available in the article “The Action Turn Toward a Transformational Social Science,” written with Peter Reason and published in Concepts and Transformation 2001.

With good wishes for your own transforming search for integrity, mutuality, sustainability, and timely action,

Bill Torbert