Welcome to William Rockwell Torbert's
Home Page!
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Introduction
As of July 2008, a
Professor Emeritus of leadership at Boston College, after 30 years on its
faculty (as well as an author, and an occasional consultant, executive coach,
or board member for many other for-profit, not-for-profit, and government
organizations), my continuing activities include:
1) serving as a partner of and Director of Research for Harthill Consulting Ltd UK, including the Transforming Leadership Workshop in Boston, October 15-17, 2008 (which authorizes executive coaches, academics, consultants, and corporate h.r. & o.d. professionals to use the Leadership Development Profile in their work) (www.harthill.co.uk)
2)
offering a keynote address at the June 11-14, 2008, Organization Behavior
Teaching Conference
3)
leading a week-long module at the June 22-28, 2008, Shambhala Authentic
Leadership in Action Summer Institute in
4)
making a keynote presentation at the first Integral Theory Conference at
5)
giving and invited address on “The Questions We (Ought to) Ask” at the
6)
serving on the executive committee of the board for Trillium Asset Management (www.trilliuminvest.com), the original and largest financial
company dedicated entirely to socially responsible investing,
7) convening
by-invitation three-day Alchemists Workshops (the next ones to be held near
Stonehenge Midsummer 2008,
8) serving as an active founding partner of BC’s Leadership for Change program (Leadership for Change), and
9)
counselling the Leading Organizational Transformation initiative at the Center
for Creative Leadership (http://www.ccl.org/leadership/research/connected.aspx?pageId=1844),
My work, in all these
and other roles, broadly engages the ongoing transformation of:
·
Leaders throughout adulthood (see, for example, David Rooke’s and my
award-winning article in the April 2005 Harvard Business Review article
“Seven Transformations of Leadership”; or explore www.harthill.co.uk and find the most
thoroughly validated transformational leadership measure in the social
scientific literature – the sentence completion form (SCT) that, if you fill it
out and send it in as directed, provides you with a 25-page, personally-crafted
Leadership
Development Profile [LDP])
·
Senior teams and whole organizations as they transform
through growth, ‘going public,’ merger, or new vision (see, for example, my 2004 book with
associates, Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership,
a Berrett-Koehler book available at www.bkconnection.com
(& explore their website too, because they are the most interesting and
success-sharing publishing company I’ve ever found)
·
The social sciences, from a supposedly neutral
generalizable 3rd person study of the past… to a 1st, 2nd, & 3rd
person, increasingly timely, participatory action research on the present and
the future as well (see,
for example, such earlier books of mine as Learning from Experience: Toward
Consciousness 1972, Creating Communities of Inquiry 1976,
Managing
the Corporate Dream 1987, and The Power of Balance: Transforming Self,
Society and Scientific Inquiry 1991; all now accessible at http://escholarship.bc.edu/william_torbert/
If you are engaged by the ideas presented in this site and in the articles and books referenced, they can be made more intensively and extensively available to you and your organization in many ways. You may browse the www.harthill.co.uk website to read case study material and a wider exposition of the related consulting work that my colleagues and I are engaged in. If you wish to contact me for possible speaking, workshop, or consulting engagements, please phone or e-mail my business manager, Anne Starr (617-666-9627 or through email).
Additional Information on Bill Torbert and his
Research/Practice
For more information about me and my research, you may go to a brief (one page) biography and/or to my formal vita, at the end of which one finds reference to my other publications over the years.
Perhaps the most accessible 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.
Another significant collaborative publication is the special issue of ReVision (Winter 2001) that Peter Reason and I edited, entitled "Toward a Participatory Worldview: In Physics, Biology, Economics, Ecology, Medicine, Organization, Spirituality, and Everyday Living." It tells the story of a four-day conference at the Fetzer Institute among 18 scholars, artists, social change agents, and spiritual leaders who dialogued together about the relationships among our own individual forms of 1st-person action inquiry, our mutual process of 2nd-person action inquiry during the four days, and the 3rd-person fields of scientific inquiry of which we were representatives… (we were really excited by one another and how the event evolved, but whether that translates into a 3rd-person printed dialogue that excites you, you, of course, will have to decide).
In order for you to know why and how I do these different things (teach, consult, do research, write, even garden), you need to know my fundamental concern. My fundamental concern, since before I entered the PhD program in Individual & Organizational Behavior at Yale in 1966, 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 collective vision, 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 my everyday work, family life, and leisure as 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 the reign of the practice of communities of inquiry gradually extends itself more deeply into our different global cultures. (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).
With good wishes for your own transforming search for integrity,
mutuality, sustainability, and timely action,
Bill Torbert