Action Inquiry: Transforming Ourselves, Our Cultures & Our Organizations

with Bill Torbert

Action inquiry is a disciplined practice that will accelerate your learning and transformation as a leader. No matter what the level of your positional power — within your family, organization, or community — this practice will enable you to access the transformational potential in every situation. Action inquiry enables you to assess, in real time, the effectiveness of your actions and to create opportunities for mutual letting-go into higher levels of relationship and organization, providing both a competitive and a collaborative advantage.

In this module, you will explore six-dimensional awareness as we create a community of inquiry together. You will share your leadership stories and diagnose difficult conversations. You will learn how to take and share leadership in particular situations. You will also diagnose your own, your associates', your team's, and your organization's developmental "action-logics" (strategies for analyzing the world and reacting to it). In the process you will learn how to foster your own and others' developmental transformation from dependence through in-dependence to inter-in-dependence. You will leave with next steps for transforming your back-home settings.

Module participants are encouraged to read Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership before they arrive.

Printable (PDF) module description

Bill Torbert is a professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and former Graduate Dean and Director of the College's PhD Program in Organizational Transformation. He received his BA and PhD from Yale University, and taught at Yale, Southern Methodist University, and Harvard prior to joining the Boston College faculty in 1978. He founded the Yale Upward Bound (War on Poverty) program and the Theatre of Inquiry. He has won numerous teaching and research awards.

Bill has consulted widely 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). He currently focuses his consulting contributions through his roles as consultant to the Center for Creative Leadership and as Director of Research and Senior Consultant at Harthill UK.

He is the author of the award winning Managing the Corporate Dream (Dow Jones-Irwin, 1987, the Terry Award Finalist book The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry (Sage, 1991), and Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership (Berrett-Koehler, 2004). His April 2005 HBR article "Seven Transformations of Leadership" won the worldwide Association of Executive Search Consultants Award for Best Published Research on Leadership and Corporate Governance.

“Buckle up your seatbelt and enjoy the ride. Torbert is an original and his ideas about life, learning and leadership will rattle your brain and stir your soul.” — Charles Derber, author of Corporation Nation and People Before Profit

“Bill Torbert dramatically illustrates, through exercises and dialogue, how action inquiry can be a path to self- and other-awareness, insight, and positive changes of the sort that can shape a world in the future that we will all want to live in.” — Sandra Waddock, author of Leading Corporate Citizens

Summer Institute Modules

Action Inquiry with Bill Torbert
The Art of Hosting and Harvesting with Chris Corrigan, Toke Møller & Monica Nissén
Creating Dynamic Network Organizations with Tom Hurley
Embodied Leadership with Wendy Palmer
Integral Development with Sarita Chawla & James Flaherty
Leader as Artist with Barbara Bash, Lanny Harrison, & Arawana Hayashi
Organizational Trust with Ruben Perczek & Susan Skjei
Practicing Fearlessness in Times of Fear with Jerry Granelli, Chris Grant, & Margaret Wheatley
Shifting the Money Paradigm with Victoria Castle & Bernard Lietaer
Solving Tough Problems in Practice with LeAnne Grillo, Adam Kahane & Bob Wing