GREETINGS AND WELCOME

Bill Torbert’s latest book (and, he says, his last) — is now available at Amazon.

Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1951805410

Ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Y9BDZ63

Numbskull is a memoir of Torbert’s life of discovering and enacting a theory and practice of leadership development, organization development, and scientific development. This highly readable book illustrates a new kind of social action and social science where the researchers include themselves in the study and explore to what degree all the different participants are, or are not, exercising timely and mutually-transforming action. Integrating leadership, teaching, and research, Torbert has won numerous awards for his work, which he now shows us from the inside out. 

Buy it here now and please forward this information to colleagues who may be interested. If you wish, we would very much appreciate your writing a short (or long!) comment/review on Amazon.

What people are saying:

This bubbling memoir is a guide to assumption-busting practices at work, at play, and in science that lead to mutually-transforming inquiry, power, and love.
Chuck Palus, Center for Creative Leadership

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We live in a moment of profound disruption, a crisis of our economies and of our underlying models of economic and social science thought. Bill Torbert’s pioneering work on Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry addresses this root issue head on. His concept of integrating first-, second-, and third-person action inquiry are foundational for transforming social science to better illuminate our collective agency in bringing forth a new world. Highly recommended!
Otto Scharmer, Author of Theory U; Co-Founder, Presencing Institute; MIT

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In his usual fashion, Bill Torbert has written a provocative, engaging, and timely book that illustrates how his groundbreaking ideas of Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry emerged over his career. This book neatly weaves the personal with the scholarly (be sure to read the endnotes!) to provide a kind of roadmap we can compare to our own lives and organizational experiences. For fans of Torbert’s work and new readers, it will be hard to put this one down!
Sandra Waddock, Galligan Chair of Strategy, Boston College

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Torbert — a senior member of the fields of adult and organizational development — introduces a transforming paradigm of transdisciplinary social science, where timely action is the fruition of successful inquiry. 

This book is a memoir of Bill’s own development and, importantly, includes three stories by a Millennial woman of color. Through their humor, humility, candor, and discipline, these and all Bill’s stories invite us readers to reflect on our own lifetime development.
Hilary Bradbury, Editor Action Research Journal and the Handbook of Action Research

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In the five decades since 1967-68, when I was a young teacher at Bill’s first venture in leading a community of inquiry — the Yale Upward Bound Program — I have had the privilege to witness and share in his work of thinking/friendship. Numbskull is his own critical uncovering of this life-journey, in which he has explored and demonstrated, intellectually and interpersonally, the deep connection between illuminating social theory and liberating social action. It tells a remarkable story, of a remarkable life.
W. Thomas Schmid, Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Wilmington

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‘Numbskull’ is as delightful and charming as I experienced Bill Torbert when we met. Both vulnerable and witty, both memoir and scholarship, this book not only shares Bill’s profound contributions, but his remarkable journey that brought them to life.
Frederic Laloux, Author of Reinventing Organizations

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Where to go next to find the latest on Action Inquiry and the Global Leadership Profile?
GLA (Global Leadership Associates)? Amara Collaboration? ActionResearch+? Veronica Menduina and Associates? The Third Act?

A new generation of Action Inquiry leadership is taking over, as will be evident when you visit any of the links offered above and briefly introduced below. In the past five years, Action Inquiry Associates has “given birth” to a host of new websites and organizations, while I, Bill Torbert, have entered my second retirement (my first, in 2008, was from Boston College).

Global Leadership Associates, led by Elaine Herdman-Barker and Richard Izard, is our new business site, featuring an automated GLP (Global Leadership Profile) ordering and administration process, GLP coach certification workshops, action-inquiry-based consulting, and more.

The Amara Collaboration in Northern Europe (led by Heidi Gutkunst and Jane Allen) and Veronica Menduina and Associates in Southern Europe (led by Veronica Menduiña and Pablo Tovar) spread the word – and, more importantly, the practices – offering the Action Inquiry and GLP workshops in their neighborhoods (the GLP can be taken in Spanish). Read Amara’s new book “Street Smarts” and come to Alicante’s beach, or any of our venues. for an “Action Inquiry and GLP” workshop

ActionResearch+ (led by Hilary Bradbury) invites you into the kinds of relational action inquiry that generate live friendships, first via webinar, then in the flesh, so to speak, at Eros/Power Workshops (also available through Amara).

The Third Act (led by Ed Kelly) offers programs for those of us beginning to explore how we can generate a creative and meaningful final third of our lifetimes.

My two most recent publications are my 2016 book, with Hilary Bradbury, Eros/Power: Love in the Spirit of Inquiry and the article below -– the first summary of two generations of CDAI (Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry) research and practice, just published in the Integral Leadership Review. This article presents the research behind our claims about the validity and significance of the Global Leadership Profile, as well as the transformational potency of the practice of action inquiry for cultivating leadership development.

The most recent CDAI publication, a November 2017 Integral Leadership Review article begins…

“As shown in this review, fifty years of research on real-world practice, guided by the Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry (CDAI) paradigm of social science and social action, have documented more powerful impacts than any other research and practice approach on leaders’ and organizations’ transformation…

“One study focused on four lead consultants, working with ten different CEOs and organizations in six different industries over an average of four years. Five of the ten CEOs measured at the Transforming action-logic and five measured at earlier, conventional action-logics.

“The study found that there was a correlation, significant beyond the .05 level and accounting for 42% of all the variance, between the CEO’s action-logic and their organization successfully transforming (and improving on conventional indices of performance as well). If one added together the action-logics of the CEO and the lead consultant for each organization, the correlation became significant beyond the .01 level and accounted for 59%.

“Accounting for 59% of the variance means that the quality of the CEO’s and lead consultant’s action-logics, combined, made more of the difference between those organizations that successfully transformed and those that did not than all the other possible influences combined…” (continue reading online or as a pdf.)

Trumping Trump by William Torbert ©

If developmental theory and the practice of Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry (CDAI) truly have practical value and transformational potential, then it must be important to know the center-of- gravity action-logic of the most powerful person in the world – namely, Donald Trump. And to learn something about how to trump him, if it comes to that.

People ask me what Donald Trump’s center-of- gravity action-logic is, and my response is Opportunist.

Then people say “How do you know? He hasn’t taken the Global Leadership Profile (GLP) has he?” No, he hasn’t. But one aim of CDAI is to learn how to make estimates of another’s action-logic based on that person’s behavioral patterns, using both prior research based on the GLP and one’s own clinical skills of interpretation in the field.

“Anyway,” they continue, “almost no managers you’ve ever measured – let alone anyone as successful as he is – score as Opportunists.” True enough.

“Isn’t Trump actually,” they conclude, “the epitome of an Achiever?” I agree that if one looks only at the monetary wealth he has accrued, Trump does look like an Achiever (although even here, the alternation between big profits and big losses in his different ventures, as well as the amount of short-term debt he carries looks more Opportunist than Achiever). Anyone who treats Trumps “Achiever-clothing” as his operating action-logic (and some of our Action Inquiry Fellows argue so) is in for a rough awakening. An Opportunist is far less conventional than an Achiever and will gladly eat your lunch.

If one looks at Trump’s daily behavior patterns, he sure looks like an Opportunist. He is famous for his short time span of attention, evident in his tweets, his inability to let others speak more than a sentence at a time in his presence (e.g. Mike Pence on “60 Minutes”), and his inability to develop coherent policy, let alone write his own autobiography. He is particularly famous for his flamboyant use of unilateral executive power, as in “You’re fired!” He focuses on concrete things (real estate, buildings, golf courses, “The Wall,” his name in gold). He rejects critical feedback out of hand, externalizing blame and mounting counter-attacks (such as law suits) until attention shifts to other issues. He exhibits hostile humor (e.g.mimicking a disabled journalist). He flouts sexuality and treats as legitimate “whatever one can get away with.”

He has been able to be as successful as he is for three main reasons: 1)because he started with a very large capital stake from his father, enabling him to afford law suits and punish enemies (whoever disagrees with him!) unilaterally from the outset; 2) because he “works all the time,” thus making “winning” a higher priority than anything (and anyone) else (does); and 3) because he’s never before been accountable to a boss, board or electorate. Now that he also has the most power of anyone in the world it’ll be harder than ever to beat him straight-on before the next presidential election.

Since, however, Trump thinks only tactically and his greatest skills are in catching others by surprise, he will unintentionally tend to create an increasingly dangerous set of network conflicts among companies, industries, government-
departments, and nations.

What is to be done? The public media may yet have their finest hours ahead of them. How to speak truth to power, indeed! Or better, how to speak and listen with love, with power, and with inquiry? Virtually no one knows how to interweavelove, power, and inquiry in action very well. May the professional media lead the way! David Brooke’s New York Times analysis on January 3 exemplifies such leadership (and is consistent with the analysis offered here).

Another whole sector that has the potential to model responsible action inquiry, based more on mutual power than on unilateral power is the Federal bureaucracy. Federal employees must beware to operate within current law and procedure. They should also know at what limit they are prepared to resign in as public a way as possible, and what their next steps will be if fired.

The public in general should be teaching itself how to create cultures of wonder (of collaborative inquiry and of mutually-transforming power) rather than cultures of hate (of blame and coercive power). Anyone can begin this learning process in their work teams, their families, and/or their friendship circles by devoting some proportion of their time (e.g. two hours per month) to developing cultures of wonder together and practicing how action inquiry can gradually dissolve cultures of hate. Also, members of the public who have never before participated in protest rallies or in non-violent civil disobedience should seriously consider these action inquiry avenues.

All of our worldwide Action Inquiry Associates activities in the calendar of 2017 events in the right hand column involve co-constructing cultures of wonder. Members of our Action Inquiry Fellowship devote 6 days a year to meeting together to wonder-in-action. We ask, how can we among ourselves generate timely interaction – the mutually-transforming power of love in the spirit of inquiry? And all of us devote most of our year to sharing our wonder-full practices with our clients or students.

In addition, many of us are now using the new TRANSFORMATIONS card deck for students or clients, so that they can make first-person self-diagnoses of their leadership action-logic; who can use the cards to tell their own story; and then to see how their self-diagnosis relates to their possibly ongoing leadership action-logic transformations, from the more unilateral earlier action-logics to the more mutual, later action-logics . The card deck is opening the way to doing this work in Africa and South America, China and Japan, not to mention larger audiences everywhere. See Transformations for global reports of using the TRANSFORMATIONS card deck and for its introductory 40% price cut.

At the same time, we also continue to offer the Global Leadership Profile (GLP) – the third-person measure of developmental action-logics with the most up-to-date reliability and validity testing. The basic book Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership appeared in Japanese in 2016 and is currently being translated into German, Russian, and Chinese. Also, Action Inquiry Fellowship members Hilary Bradbury and Bill Torbert published the critically praised Eros/Power: Love in the Spirit of Inquiry in 2016.

In 2017, may slow trump fast and may mutuality, if necessary, trump Trump.

Game on.

Action Inquiry Associates, in partnership with AR+ ActionResearchPlus, invite you to join us in online developmental capacity building web-chats. Designed for change agents seeking to address the big (and related small) issues of our time, we seek to discuss and grow the “action logic” adult development paradigm for those of us who work with the “wicked problems” we confront.

We bring a practical and scholarly approach so that participants are left after each web chat with: a deeper understanding of development; a sense of the value of being part of a community of inquiry/practice; a few useful ideas; and application “homework” that will enrich your coaching and change efforts before the next web chat.

Our first six web chats are intended as an experiment (and priced accordingly) so that we may learn together what our developmental community of inquiry/practice needs for our own development. To ensure continuity of the community of inquiry/practice, seats are limited (<25) to those who register for the series of six.

Suggested donation: $500 for all six web chats. Scholarships available upon request.

Registration:

• Thursday Nov 17, 2016 @ 11.00 pacific.
  Elaine Herdman Barker leading authority on profiling action logics & Dana Carman, executive coach.
  The Snout and Tail of Developmental Inquiry: What are we Moving to and from in our Practice?
• Thursday January 12, 2017 @ 07.30 pacific.
  Hilary Bradbury & Bill Torbert, authors Eros/Power: Love in the Spirit of Inquiry (Integral Publishers, 2016).
  Eros as Development: Women & Men in a Primal Dance Toward Sustainable Cultural Evolution.
• March 23rd @11.00 pacific.
  Chuck Palus. Center for Creative Leadership, collaborator with Action Inquiry Associates on the Transformations card deck. Developmental Transformations – Through Imagery and Interaction.
• May 18th @ 07.30 pacific.
  Heidi Gutekunst, Teal CEO.
  Difficulties and Beauties of Making Teal Real.
• July 27th @ 11AM pacific.
  Karen O’Brien, Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient.
  Climate Change: From Expert logics to Action Logics for Making Things Happen.
• September 21st @ 07.30 AM pacific.
  Marie Pace, Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding Specialist.
  What is a Mature Approach to Conflict Engagement? Learnings from the Field.
  

In this blog entry and newsletter, I want to bring your attention to some potent new tools for practicing the exercise of mutual power.

Mutual Power
The theory and practice of Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry claims, illustrates, and presents research data that support the notion that mutual power is more powerful than unilateral power. Unilateral power sometimes causes people to conform. But only the exercise of mutual power can cause people or institutions to transform.

More particularly, only the exercise of mutual power can transform humanity’s relationship to nature and the crises of global climate change created by the unilateral power of empirically-positivist science and technology. Only the exercise of mutual power can transform the relationships between men and women from widespread exploitativeness, abuse, and loneliness to love. Only learning the exercise of mutual power can help humanity create A.I. (artificially intelligent) machines that will operate, once they are smarter than us, on the basis of mutual power, rather than unilaterally creating goals that may well destroy or neutralize human life altogether. Only the exercise of mutual power can substitute for the use of unilateral armaments and wars when different human groups come into conflict.

The Potent Tools
In partnership with the Center for Creative Leadership, Elaine Herdman Barker and Bill Torbert of Action Inquiry Associates have created a set of cards called TRANSFORMATIONS which can be used in a wide variety of ways in organizations to support leadership and team development or a shared vision for the whole organization. The cards can be used without any prior knowledge of leadership development theory to help persons begin to recognize the developmental action-logics that guided their leadership earlier in life, the action-logics that guide them now, and the ones they aspire to grow into. These self-estimates of one’s own leadership action-logic can later be tested against the psychometric analysis of the Global Leadership Profile (GLP). The decks are less expensive than a GLP and can be used again and again with different people. For further information, go to www.ccl.org/transformations and/or contact Chuck Palus (palusc@ccl.org ).

DEEP DEMOCRACY is a powerful method for exercising mutual power in exploring conflict and emergent shared vision, originating from South Africa. Action Inquiry Fellow Aftab Erfan and her colleague, Sera Thompson are offering two-day DEEP DEMOCRACY workshops in Seattle, April 14-15, San Francisco, April 22-23, and Boston, May 28-29. Learn more by clicking on www.deepdemocracy.ca . Erfan and Thompson are also offering a Civic Forum titled “Is Hope Bullshit?” in San Francisco on April 24.

Action Inquiry Fellow Ed Kelly leads THE THIRD ACT CONFERENCE on April 26 in Ireland – how do we turn our increasingly long third age, not into retirement, but into a qualitatively different “third act”? And AI Fellow Mary Stacey, along with poet David Whyte and others, convenes the Burren Executive Leadership Retreat (also in Ireland), August 21-24.

Books can be potent tools too. Our friends Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey illustrate how mutual power through feedback works in three highly successful organizations in their new book, AN EVERYONE CULTURE: BECOMING A DELIBERATELY DEVELOPMENTAL ORGANIZATION. Action Inquiry Fellow Keith Merron and his colleague Barbara Annis have recently published GENDER INTELLIGENCE: BREAKTHROUGH STRATEGIES FOR INCREASING DIVERSITY AND IMPROVING YOUR BOTTOM LINE. And, as we highlighted in our last blog post and newsletter, Action Inquiry Fellows Hilary Bradbury and Bill Torbert have recently published EROS/POWER: LOVE IN THE SPIRIT OF INQUIRY, about learning to exercise mutual power in love relationships. The books are available at Amazon.

In addition, we remind you that three more ACTION INQUIRY & GLP Workshops are being offered this year – in Spain and Sweden in September and in Boston in November. See the Calendar of Events

Dear Friends of Action Inquiry,

In October, many of you have helped to make Action Inquiry Fellow Sophie Sabbage’s new book The Cancer Whisperer, an early Best Seller on Amazon. THANK YOU, FRIENDS, FOR YOUR SUPPORT!!!

Good things are said to come in bunches, and now in November Amazon has brought out Eros/Power: Love in the Spirit of Inquiry, Transforming How Women and Men Relate by Action Inquiry Fellows Hilary Bradbury and Bill Torbert – and it too has become an early-release best seller. See above for a 16-minute you-tube interview of Hilary and Bill about the book by AIF member Irena Pranskeviciute.

We now invite you (perhaps different ones of you for whom this topic is more directly relevant than the last) to consider buying the book on Amazon, giving it a star rating and submitting a short review, as soon as possible (the more it sells and is reviewed in the early weeks, the more Amazon will market it alongside other books). To purchase and/or review a copy of Eros/Power click here:
(P.S. Pay no attention to the ‘out of stock’ message on Amazon. All Amazon orders are printed on demand and sent out right away by our printer.)

To learn more about the book, read a sample, and/or register for a related workshop click here:

Wishing you well in this season of Thanksgiving, when we know the world is not safe, and when learning how to exercise mutually-transforming love, power, and inquiry in our own practice with others is more obviously important than ever,

Bill Torbert

2015 Handbook of Action Research chapters by AI Fellows:

• Nancy Wallis, “Unlocking the Secrets of Personal and Systemic Power: The Power Lab and Action Inquiry in the Classroom”
• Steve Taylor, Jenny Rudolph, and Erica Foldy, “Teaching and Learning Reflective Practice in the Action Science/Action Inquiry Tradition”
• Grady McGonagill and Dana Carman, “Holding Theory Skillfully in Consulting Interventions”
• David McCallum and Aliki Nicolaides, “Cultivating Intention (as we enter the fray): The skillful practice of embodying presence, awareness, and purpose as action researchers”
• Elaine Herdman-Barker and Aftab Erfan, “Clearing Obstacles: And Exercise to Expand a Person’s Repertoire of Action”
• Hilary Bradbury, “The Integrating (Feminine) Reach of Action Research: A nonet for epistemological voice”
• Erica Foldy, “The Location of Race in Action Research”
• Lisa Stefanac and Michael Krot, “Using T-Groups to Develop Action Research Skills in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous Environments”
• Aftab Erfan and Bill Torbert, “Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry”

Sophie Sabbage’s The Cancer Whisperer
FREE Amazon Kindle downloads, October 6 and following days…

Action Inquiry is just as significant for the development of lifelong friendships and for dealing with the great personal dilemmas and crises of our lives, as it is for successful leadership. In this regard, one of the members of our Action Inquiry Fellowship – Sophie Sabbage – has been facing a personal crisis since last November, when she was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, predicted to end her life before the 2015 year began. Still emphatically alive today, Sophie has written “The Cancer Whisperer” in the past two months.

This short, practical, and emotionally impactful book will help others discover how to face into this ravaging disease (or help friends or family face into it) without becoming its victim. We of the AI Fellowship who have been able to read the book prior to publication are immensely proud of, humbled by, and in wide-eyed wonder at, the incredible spiritual and practical resources Sophie has rallied to her cause and is now making available to others.

The book can be downloaded for free from Amazon Kindle for the first days when it comes out October 6, 2015. Download the book onto your Kindle device or Kindle app, which is free and can be downloaded onto any device – either from the App store or click on this link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/digital/fiona/kcp-landing-page?ie=UTF8&ref_=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd if you have a PC. Please consider forwarding this message to friends who may be interested.Action Inquiry Faces Incurable Cancer

Two recently published books remind us of a word rarely heard in the contemporary world, especially in reference to leaders. The word is “character.” The two books are conservative columnist David Brooks’ The Road to Character and Fred Kiel’s research-based book Return to Character: The Real Reason Leaders and Their Companies Win.

Brooks tells us that the path to character is through humility and that humility involves the uncomfortable awareness “that you are an underdog in the struggle against your weakness.” Kiel tells us that character includes integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion and finds, in his study of 44 U.S. companies, that CEOs who exhibit these characteristics generate about five times greater return on assets than CEOs who don’t.

These books are of direct relevance to the Global Leadership Profile measure and the action inquiry process that we at Action Inquiry Associates share with our participants through our writing, workshops, and conferences. Why? Because the action inquiry process that generates developmental change toward the later leadership action-logics is precisely the process of character development.

In the coming months, Action Inquiry Fellows invite you to join them for deep dives into various aspects of intensified action inquiry.

• From June 5-7, David McCallum SJ, Cara Miller, and Nancy Wallis invite you to join their  Spiritual Leadership Workshop  near San Diego
• From June 25-28, Keith Merron invites you to join the Sword and Scepter workshop near San Francisco
• From July 20-23, Jesse McKay and Bill Torbert invite you to join their The Body of the Embodied Practitioner workshop north of San Francisco
• From August 23-26, Mary Stacey invites you to join the Burren Executive Leadership Retreat in Ireland.
• September 18-19, our friends Heidi Gutekunst and Irena Pranskeviciute will soon post notice of the Amara Collaboration Ad-Venture Conference in Helsinki, Finland

After years on the back burner, the distinction between more common types of horizontal, skills-based leadership development and increasingly necessary, vertical, capacity-developing experiences for leaders seems to be the new rage. White papers from the Center for Creative Leadership and the MetaIntegral Institute advocate vertical development (citing research based on AIA’s Global Leadership Profile). Old Harvard friend, Bob Kegan, has spoken at the Royal Institute for the Arts on the potential for vertical development among the growing worldwide Third Age cohort of humanity. Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations highlights the need for vertical development if leaders are to take the reinventive stance.

We at AIA are seeking to cultivate such vertical leadership development through our books (Jennifer Garvey Berger’s Simple Habits for Complex Times and Hilary Bradbury’s Handbook of Action Research (3rd-edition), both appearing in 2015)… through Action Inquiry & Global Leadership Profile workshops for executives, consultants, and researchers (click here to see flyer for next one in London, March 2015)… as well as through our advanced Alchemists’ Workparties and our own AIFellowship retreats.

The (profound) trick of the vertical development process is that it is vertical both ways, or else it is mere sham and delusion – mere talking of a new talk. It is not merely a matter of developing ‘altitude’ or ‘headroom’ – a new awareness of contexts, uncertainties, and possibilities – a more panoramic view. It is also a matter of transforming one’s embodied, conversational processes in our on-the-ground, moment-to-moment organizing actions of each day. Our “Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry” approach in our workshops, consulting, and even our GLP measure combines the up (developmental inquiry) and the down (collaborative action) of the vertical approach.

For example, our GLP measure, of which of the seven leadership action-logics a client currently works from, does not merely result in a label we authoritatively pin on the client from on high. Instead, the process invites the client to do his or her own leadership action-logic diagnosis (before receiving our results) to be compared with our measure. In addition, the client (or client’s coach) is encouraged to gather relevant data from peers on the ground. Thus, the client has three different types of data (subjective, intersubjective, and objective) to work with in determining the point from which he or she is embarking on a next developmental step.

Since development to the later leadership action-logics cannot be inculcated from the top down or the outside in, but rather require a person’s deepest motivation and most inventive strategizing to blossom, it is key that the person feel well recognized (as well as partially liberated) by his or her current developmental location. Our workshops intensify this process by mirroring to participants how their actions reflect different action-logics and either support or inhibit other members’ development. So does our shadow coaching of participants who seek to be Certified to use the GLP with their own clients. We look forward to the possibility of working with you in the near future.

Bill Torbert

Is the new Ukranian Prime Minister’s call for NATO and UN support in a successful, non-violent defense of Ukranian independence weak or powerful? Is President Jimmy Carter’s new book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power one more whisper unheard in the jungle of politics, or does it point to the one issue (inter-gender relations) that engages every single human being politically and personally and will therefore repay a new kind of attention from all of us for the rest of our lifetimes?

As I have written in earlier blogs, we (humankind as a whole) don’t even have a working theory of the power of mutuality, such as action inquiry provides. Nor do we imagine that actions based on mutual power can be exponentially more powerful than those based only on unilateral power. (Put briefly, this is so because only development to late action-logics founded in mutual power can non-violently transform persons, organizations, and polities, while using admixtures of unilateral power sparingly and judiciously. If we remain constrained entirely within early action-logics that imagine only unilateral forms of power, we are left as lonely triumphalist imposers of our will or as defeated victims.)

If we have no theory of mutual power, we are even less familiar with a working practice of mutual power (except from distant exemplars, who may or may not have clay feet). Fortunately, two new books offer us close-up and personal exemplars of powerful mutual practice, and just how counter-intuitive it is to unconscious capitalist and other fundamentalist -isms (one is just out by Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, the other’s forthcoming by Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston, Simple habits for complex times: Powerful practices for leaders, University of Stanford Press).

Even more tangibly, I want to express my highest admiration for the life-work-and-presence-to-date of my long-time friend, Barry Svigals, who replaced me at left fullback on the Yale soccer team, joined me in The Theatre of Inquiry and The Gurdjieff Work, became a rock and roll band leader, architect-to-the-stars, sculptor, and most recently the designer of the new-to-be Sandy Hook Elementary School (look at the NYTimes article by googling Svigals Architects & Sandy Hook). Barry and his firm bring the human heart and collective inquiry to the mutual design of physical settings with clients like no one else.

Every team or community that wishes to be at the leading edge of learning the practice of mutually-alert, mutually-vulnerable, and mutually-transforming power must allocate ‘retreat-time’ (which is really ‘advance-time’) to come to grips with its own as-yet-under-articulated issues of vision, power, and impact… As we in the Action Inquiry Fellowship are currently doing by holding separate conference calls among the women of the fellowship and among the men. It is this kind of work among ourselves that gives us the courage and the dynamic equilibrium to offer this kind of transforming work to you.

Forthcoming Workshop
Building on our recent Action Inquiry & the Global Leadership Profile Workshops in England and Australia, we’ve planned our next one, as per this workshop flyer, near Boston, October 6-8, 2014.

For those interested in the scientific validity and efficacy of the GLP
Finally, we move all the way from what is relevant to every one of you reading this blog to what is meaningful to almost none of you (!), but which is nonetheless critical to the credibility of the Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry (CDAI) paradigm of social science and the accuracy of the GLP measure in particular cases. Namely, we offer two articles on the validity and action efficacy of the CDAI paradigm and the GLP measure in comparison with other developmental measures – one relatively brief and unpublished other than here)(click here), the other much more detailed, statistically and otherwise, and published in Integral Review, 2013 [click here]).