In this paper, I discuss how developmentally transformational
learning occurs and how social
scientific writing can encourage such learning among its readers. I describe the methods we have
used - ranging from laboratory experimentation using psychometrically validated instruments, to
observational studies using tape recordings, to interviews, to self-reports and autobiographical
writing - all with the purpose of discovering how persons learn and help one another to learn in a
developmentally transformational manner. Next, I describe our findings on the conditions that seem
to be most conducive to individuals' learning in a way that generates developmental transformation
to the Strategist stage of development (which is, in turn, the stage at which organizational leaders
become capable of generating organizational transformation (see the Rooke and Torbert
contribution to this symposium). Third and finally, I describe how we have written our most recent
book in an effort to make it conducive to transformational learning by its readers. Our suggestion is
that a social science based on the "Developmental Action Inquiry" paradigm (see Torbert's
contribution to this symposium) will apply its findings to the scientist's own methods of inquiry and
of writing, thereby transforming what is regarded as good social science.
Multiple Methods and Paradigms
The methods we have used cover much of the spectrum of research
paradigms discussed by
Torbert in his paper: Empirical Positivism, Gestalt Sociologism, Postmodern Interpretivism, and
Developmental Action Inquiry. Here are some examples of each:
Empirical Positivism - We placed 49 MBA graduates in a
simulated managerial setting by
administering to them the Consolidated Fund In-Basket Exercise, published by Educational Testing
Services. They wrote responses to 34 letters, memos, reports, and phone messages similar to
those found in a manager's incoming mail. Because each subject responded to the same 34 items,
we were able to apply statistical tests which confirmed that subjects at the Strategist stage and
beyond, as measured by the well-validated Washington University Sentence Completion Test for
ego development (Loevinger & Wessler, 1978)
2
, made reframing responses to more of the items
and proposed collaborative action in response to more of the items than did subjects at earlier
developmental stages (Merron, Fisher, &Torbert, 1987). We were encouraged by this statistical
confirmation that people at the Strategist stage produced different and seemingly more effective,
manager-like actions, actions that appeared to be more learning-oriented for themselves and for
their organizations, than did people at earlier stages.
Gestalt Sociologis
m -
To find out more about Strategists in their natural work settings, we
interviewed nine men and eight women from a variety of positions, most of whom were MBAs
working in service industry firms (Fisher & Torbert, 1991). Ten were at the Strategist stage, while
the remaining seven were Technicians and Achievers. We asked the interviewees to describe in
detail two recent work situations, one in which they felt they had been effective and one in which
they felt they had been less effective. We found there were indeed important and numerous
differences in the ways the Strategists and the pre-Strategists thought, spoke, and acted at work.
In exercising leadership, for example, Strategists were more likely to state principles on which they
based their actions and to notice and learn from discrepancies between their action and these
principles. They were more likely to push out the limits of their organizations' traditional constraints
and create new spheres of action for themselves and their subordinates. In working with their
superiors, Strategists would explicitly address differences between their own frame and their
superior's and negotiate a new shared frame, while the others would assert their own frame as
being beyond question. The Strategists saw action as an iterative process involving creation of new
shared meanings, leading to the reframing of problems. All of these characteristics seem likely to
be conducive to transformational leadership and Torbert's and Rooke's contribution to this
symposium provides confirming evidence for this supposition.
In another interview and observational study, Torbert observed
in great detail six executives who
measured at the still later Magician and Ironist stages of development (Fisher & Torbert, 1995,
chapter 11). Here the question was whether the prodigious capacities of late stage individuals for
attending simultaneously to multiple and very diverse realities could actually be exercised in an
organization. The findings were strikingly consistent with developmental theory, but the extent to
which these executives simultaneously attended to and acted within multiple spheres of awareness
was astonishing nonetheless. Most were simultaneously involved as key players with several
organizations. Within each they attended concurrently to individual persons, group and
organizational issues, and with national and international implications. They were attentive to the
harmonies and disharmonies they sensed across the many territories of their experience. Their
personal style included incredible variation in pace within a day, from relaxed playfulness and
leisure to intense urgency and efficiency, even at the same moment, as in the case of one CEO
who talked with the office on a speaker phone while lounging or exercising at home.
Postmodern Interpretivism - This perspective posits that
the "fact" of development is not
objectively visible to an outside observer, nor to the subject of development during the early
transformations, but occurs in the unique consciousness of the developing individual, a
consciousness attained in the process of inquiry and active testing, a consciousness that begins
to become self-conscious during the Achiever-Strategist transformation. An example of our work
from this perspective involves an invitation to autobiographical writing (Torbert & Fisher, 1992).
In
Torbert's course, "Consulting Practice and Theory," given for students who are serving concurrently
as consultants to MBA project teams, students are asked to write three papers: a review of their
own work with their client group, a learning history of an organization for which the student has
worked or now works, and an autobiography. All three assignments are designed to help the
students heighten their developmental awareness. In the first, they analyze taped conversations of
their own consulting practice and address behavioral challenges they face in becoming more
effective consultants. In the second paper, the students apply a theory of stages of organizational
development (Torbert, 1987). In so doing, many reach new understandings of their organization,
their relatedness to it, and ways they can make newly "self evident" organizational interventions.
One purpose of the third, autobiographical, paper is to help students understand their own
developmental position. They compare key events in their lives to the developmental growth
process described in Kegan (1982), Kegan and Leahy (1983), and Torbert (1987). Thereby, they
appreciate their own prior transformational path and the thoroughness of their commitment to their
current managerial/consulting style. They also define the transformational challenges facing them,
if they choose to face them.
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, a Postmodern Interpretivist
aspect of the developmental
model is its explicit allowance for that moment in the development of a person (or an organization,
or a science) when the self among selves becomes self- conscious about its interpretive process.
Exhibit 1, containing two journal entries by a manager interweaving the book, Personal and
Organizational Transformations with her day to day work experience, shows the dawning of new
awareness by an individual who begins to see a new self in the process of speaking with work
colleagues and a new self as a team member.
Developmental Action Inquiry - Here the researcher combines
being an outsider-observer, an
insider-consultant, and a reflective practitioner, a quality of investigation facilitated by teamwork
between the researcher and managers, who themselves may be arrayed along an a continuum from
outsider to insider. The consultant works with the theory of personal and organizational
development given with the introduction to this symposium, but becomes involved with the
organization's problems and practices. This involvement is not merely as a trainer of interpersonal
skills, nor an expert making recommendations, but as an interventionist attempting to bring about
change in the organization, yet open at the same time to learning and to feedback leading to
personal change.
This kind of consulting is illustrated in the case of a small
company, recently made complex by
two acquisitions (Fisher & Torbert, 1995, pp. 118-21). The president asks the consultant to conduct
a two day retreat for the 40 top managers addressing "the people equation - our most intractable
issue - and [managers'] taking responsibility for the impact their actions are having on each other
and for the organizational values their actions are creating". (In developmental terms, the president
wants to move the organization from the Incorporation stage to the Experiments stage.) The
consultant forms cross-functional, cross-locational groups of ten to develop new ways of organizing
in four areas that interviews have shown to be of greatest concern: budgets, recruiting and training,
internal communications, and meeting management. The consultant asks senior management to
make binding decisions in response to the proposals in each area, and such decisions are in fact
made at the retreat. While much of the activity at the retreat represents Experiments stage
organizing by the participants, who are trying new ways of leading groups and making decisions,
the organizational characteristics of the retreat as a whole represent a "logic of practice"
more
ironic and subtle than the Experiments stage logic. The structure of the retreat is complex, yet
participants claim at the end that "the lack of structure strengthened learning". This kind
of
paradoxical structure, which widens rather than restricts participants' freedom of action, typifies
the
Liberating Disciplines stage, the most advanced form of organizing we can imagine (the eighth
stage of organizational development). This case provides one small, time-limited example of an
organization that simultaneously learns and produces results and generates personal learning
by
its members - (as well as learning by the consultant that an invited consulting intervention
may be
more likely to generate organizational transformation to the extent that the consulting intervention
itself represents a temporary late-stage learning organization).
In another intervention based on developmental theory, a five
year effort to help an organization
move from the Experiments stage through the Systematic Productivity stage and on to the
Collaborative Inquiry stage is significant for the consultant's involvement in day-to-day action (the
consultant was also a director of the organization). Writing later in the third person, the consultant
notes the complex ways in which he is internal to the organization and balances multiple long-term
relationships within it. However, this consultant's appreciation for complexity seems to blind him
somewhat to the simple issues . . . . [His] complex suggestion for restructuring senior
management "missed" the president, who was his primary client with regard to that issue. .
. .
[Although he did not think his balancing of his board role with his consulting role to be particularly
difficult], a recent evaluation by the senior managers of the consultant's performance shows that
the senior managers are not fully open with the consultant because of his board role (Fisher &
Torbert, 1995, p. 168).
The consultant's attention to senior managers' feedback to him
about his board role is typical of his
willingness to take a stance of vulnerability during the engagement. He is singularly open to
challenge, leading to successive reframings of his initiatives in ways that encourage others to
reframe as well.
The Process of Transformation
As these examples of our work suggest, we have begun learning
about how the processes of
developmental transformation play out in organizations and individuals. For example, with respect
to organizational transformation, the case of the recently merged small company shows the
consultant helping the managers work directly on task issues, not simply conducting training in
basic skills. This case also shows organizational stage-to-stage transformation as a process
involving encapsulated development through the full sequence of stages. In the 5-year ongoing
engagement, we see organizational transformation being aided and illuminated by a consultant who
understands developmental theory and wants to make contributions to it while applying it, and
whose vulnerability promotes organizational learning as well as his own learning. As we have
inquired about how individual development occurs, our special focus has been on transformation to
the Strategist stage, the first stage, according to theory, at which a person can initiate individual
and collective double loop learning (Kegan, 1982, 1984). We have observed five important elements
in the process of transformation to the Strategist stage:
1. Beginning to know the stages of individual development and
to recognize self-other
differences - Knowing where one is in the developmental sequence helps one to begin thinking
about and experimenting in action with themes characteristic of the next stage (Fisher & Torbert,
1995, pp. 73-75). One such theme is gaining awareness of other peoples' developmentally-related
frames of reference, a mode of attention that distinguishes persons at the Strategist stage and
beyond.
2. Experiencing autobiographical awareness - Rather than
simply being what one is, the
developing person now has awareness and can operate on self. Taken for granted purposes,
principles, paradigms - one's entire sense of one's life project - may be reinvented. (Bateson, 1973).
3. Actively seeking feedback - Feedback opens the possibility
of seeing new meanings of
oneself. The re-design of one's meaning-making frame is at the heart of the developmental process.
We have found people at the later stages to be much more likely than those at earlier stages to
seek feedback.
4. Using four "types of speech" - Speaking is
the primary and most influential human medium of
action. We have argued the value of speech that combines framing, advocating, illustrating, and
inquiring (Fisher & Torbert, 1995). Speech that does not omit any of these parts presents
one's
perspective clearly and strongly, but also interrupts one's usual momentum in a way that makes
one vulnerable, disconfirms one's implicit assumptions, and engenders learning. The four "types
of
speech" are a core skill in action inquiry, the art of combining practice with reflection.
5. Engaging in reflective practice - By "debriefing"
oneself after an event, reviewing what
happened, discovering explanations of why it happened, and planning an effort to be more effective
on a follow-on event, one establishes a new mode of thought. If practiced recurrently, this mode
can become on-line reflection, a type of thought-in-action that distinguishes persons at the later
developmental stages.
Writing with The Reader's Development in Mind
Our recent book, Personal and organizational Transformations:
The True Challenge of Continual
Quality Improvement, is written with the purpose of engaging the reader in these developmental
processes. This book is a report of research, including the work described in the past several
pages, but it is also an invitation to the reader to engage in a new kind of research-acting. Its
audience is early practitioners of action inquiry, not academics focused on the relationship between
our approach to social science and received notions of generalizability. While our approach is
founded on research arrayed across the full spectrum of methods and paradigms described earlier,
the primary type of generalizability that action inquiry seeks is a process by which each social
actor/inquirer who comes into contact with the claims of the book tests the approach and the
associated theories in his/her own work and leisure. Thus, action inquiry is generalized one
interpreter/actor at a time in that person's ongoing life. That person, in turn, seeks to make his/her
advocacies explicit to others, seeks disconfirmation, and, more generally, seeks to generalize the
action inquiry approach to his/her life as a whole. This much is directly stated in the book.
Everything about generalizability, reliability, and validity must be culled from footnotes or induced
by the reader in order that the focus of attention may remain on practice.
How do we endeavor to make our reader active rather than passive?
Our book attempts, insofar as
possible, to translate the conditions conducive to transformation into a written text that dialogues
with the reader and encourages the practice of action inquiry. We literally leave space for the
reader to write his or her own ideas about how to experiment with action inquiry, about the themes
contained in the speech of persons holding developmentally varied worldviews, about personal life
goals, and about what he or she objects to in our arguments. Like Postmodern Interpretivism, we
distrust any univocal narrative and therefore welcome many different voices into our book, not least
that of the reader.
The book becomes personal and practical in several ways. First,
the managerial examples are
frequently first person descriptions by managers trying out action inquiry on the job in an effort to
increase their effectiveness. Exhibit 2 shows an example, an excerpt from a description by a junior
staff member in a consulting firm of a personal action inquiry experiment that resulted in a
structural change affecting the entire top management of his organization. But we do not simply
report on others' experiences (Gestalt Sociologism) and allow them to report their experiences
(Postmodern Interpretivism). We invite the reader to begin rehearsing his or her own interventions
aimed both at personal development and organizational transformation (Developmental Action
Inquiry). Exhibit 3 is part of a rehearsal exercise where the reader is invited to reflect on an
unsatisfactory personal incident and invent new behavior for the incident based on action inquiry
speech elements we introduce in the book.
Second, as the book continues and the different personal and organizational
stages of development
are introduced, readers are invited to begin analyzing their colleagues' and their own paradigmatic
assumptions or "frames," in order to test whether they wish to remain bounded by that frame.
Again, first person cases written by individuals who are testing and transcending their own frames
are offered. Exhibit 4 is an autobiographical excerpt by the manager of an auto repair franchise,
who describes transformations he has made through four frames with the possibility of a fifth in
prospect. His matter-of-fact relating of everyday details makes this remarkable developmental
voyage accessible and attainable for the reader.
Third, two full chapters and one appendix are completely dedicated
to exercises that the reader
can try out in practice. The exercise in developing group process awareness and the exercise in
beginning to take initiatives based on this awareness shown in Exhibit 5 are examples. We are
coaching the reader to operate simultaneously in multiple paradigms as subjective observer-
explainer (Empirical Positivist/Gestalt Sociologist), existential (Postmodern Interpreter)
experiencer, and Developmental Action Inquirer.
Fourth, in the second half of the book, the focus shifts to groups
and whole organizations, and
readers are invited to consider taking leadership initiatives with regard to the team and organization
to which they belong, or to create a "Continual Quality Improvement" group of their own. A
CQI
group has the following characteristics, which typify the Collaborative Inquiry organizational stage:
Fifth, in the final three chapters, rare late-stage leaders and
organizations are portrayed, and
readers are invited to make their own beliefs about the nature of the good life explicit by comparing
them to four elements that we believe characterize a late-stage definition of the good life. Several
personal issues we ask the reader to consider, and a glimpse of the four "good life" elements,
are
shown in Exhibit 6. Also, as the book describes the experience of persons at the late
Magician/Witch/Clown stage, who are said to continually reframe situations, the book reframes
developmental theory itself. Our introduction to this level of experience, new to most readers, is
shown in Exhibit 7.
Thus, the book as a whole is intended to serve, not only as a
documentation of developmental
dynamics (empirical positivism and gestalt sociologism), but also as an inspiration and a
companion as readers begin or continue along an explicitly developmental and transformational
path (postmodern interpretivism, and developmental action research). In all these ways, one might
say that this book is addressed primarily to practitioners and not scholars. But one can just as well
say that it is addressed equally to scholars and practitioners, but focuses primarily on the practical
ways in which we can each transform our assumptions about our work and become more effective
on a moment-to-moment basis. The theoretical categories are just as relevant to how a social
scientist conducts an interview as they are to how a sales person tries to make a sale. They are
just as relevant to a social scientist analyzing the assumptions he or she makes about the nature
of science as they are to the executive analyzing the assumptions he or she makes about how to
evaluate competitive position and how to form and implement an organizational strategy. Ironically,
because this way of writing relegates scholarly references to endnotes and because the book
appears in a practitioner-oriented series, the book will probably not be regarded as scientific at all
from a mainstream science point of view.
Nevertheless, processes comparable to those of action inquiry
and the CQI group will occur in any
fully self-transforming institution, including social science itself. A social science committed to
self-
transforming inquiry will engage, not just in empirical and theoretical inquiry, but in inquiry that
challenges its own paradigm and assumptions and invites its interlocutors to become more aware
of, and test, their own assumptions, theories, and perceptions. The concern with creating
conditions for transformational learning has major implications for the kind of writing that is
appropriate within the developmental paradigm. It will have a personal flavor as well as a theoretical
and empirical flavor. It will accommodate the reader's voice as well as the writer's voice. It will
invite
the reader to develop skill and understanding simultaneously.
1. William R. Torbert
