William Rockwell Torbert: Walk the Talk

Bill Torbert’s career has combined being a leader, teaching leadership, consulting to leaders, and researching leadership. Above all else he has been intent on embodying and explicating what he came to call his “collaborative developmental action inquiry” (CDAI) approach to life, social science, and leadership. CDAI sees every action as an inquiry and every inquiry as an action. That is to say, we are constantly inquiring into the social world and also acting to change that social world. Torbert’s response to this is to suggest a social science that is based in multiplicity. Rather than a single set of practices, he suggests that social science research can have a first-, second-, or third-person research voice; have first-, second-, or third-person practice as its subject; and be about the past, present, or future; with single-, double-, or triple-loop feedback. CDAI represents a different paradigm that holds that the primary aim of social science research is to generate moments of deep inquiry amidst action and create capacity for and practice of mutual exercises of power, leading to patterns of timely action. In order to “do” CDAI, Torbert has created various ideas and tools for practice. For first- and second-person practice of CDAI, Torbert has developed two powerful tools, the four territories of experience and the four types of speech. In third-person research, he led the use of adult developmental theory in organization change and extended the theory to create stage models of organizational development and of social scientific development.