The Practice of Action Inquiry

Full text

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In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Ed.s) 2001. Handbook of Action Research
Sage: London. 250-260.
The Practice of Action Inquiry
William R. Torbert
Carroll School of Management
Boston College
Action inquiry is a research practice inspired by the primitive sense that all our
actions, including those we are most certain about and are most committed to, are in
fact also inquiries.
Conversely, action inquiry is also inspired by the primitive sense that all our
inquiries, including those we most painstakingly construct to detach ourselves as
researchers insofar as possible from biasing interests, are in fact also actions.
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Whether or not we imagine ourselves as inquirers at the outset of some semi-
conscious action, even our most innocent and well-meant act sometimes elicits
unexpected responses (e.g. “You’re fired!” “If that’s how you’re going to be, I want
a divorce”). Thus, when we act, we are also in part inquiring into an at-least semi-
intelligent cosmos (our fellow human beings its nearest envoys to us). And, the
main result of our action may be, not the consequence we had explicitly strategized,
but rather the future amendment of our tactics (single-loop learning), or a broader
reconstruction of life strategies (“I’m never going to be a victim again!”) (double-
loop learning).
Or, 30-years-into some version of the vocation/practice of self-observation-in-
action-with-others-in-the-natural/social/spiritual-environment – after millions of
such self-observational moments and thousands of elongations-of-such-moments
with other inquirers – we may begin experiencing triple-loop learning. Triple-loop
learning transforms, not just our tactics and strategies, but our very visioning, our
very attention. This can be experienced as an epiphany, or as occasional epihanies,
or as a semi-continual frisson of analogies among moments of self-observation-in-
action. For example, my old friend interrupts me in one of my rare moments of
loquacious enthusiasm, and with an unusually sharp tone that I instantly know is
meant to “raise” my attention, not make me defensive, says, “Why must you so
often reduce present pleasure by imagining a future program of doing the same?”
If all our action and all our inquiry is, even if only subconsciously, action
inquiry, how may we intentionally enhance the effectiveness of our actions and the
destructiveness of our inquiry (destroying illusory assumptions, dangerous
strategies, and self-defeating tactics)? How may we do so individually, in our face-
to-face groups, and in the larger organizations and collectivities to which we

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belong? How may we do so in the very midst of the real time actions of our
everyday lives – here and now? To what degree need such inquiry be explicit to and
to others at each moment?
If, to begin with, we try to bring just the first and simplest formulation of this
question (“How may we inquire in the midst of the real-time actions of our daily
lives?”) into our daily lives, we immediately discover a fundamental difficulty. We
rarely remember to do so. Moreover, we don’t really know what to do when we do
remember. We rarely experience ourselves as present in a wondering, inquiring,
“mindful” way to our own action. (If you try this apparently simple exercise for the
rest of today or tomorrow, asking “Am I fully present now?” whenever you
remember, I believe you will see how rarely you “see” yourself in action [especially
if you make a mark in your calendar for the day after tomorrow, so that you at least
remember to review the previous two days!].)
Right now, for example, have you been present to the way you are reading --
perhaps with a sharp question in mind, perhaps dully because this is just an
assignment, perhaps flipping back and forth among the pages to get a sense of
where this chapter is going? Is there a silent quality of seeing yourself seeing the
page and seeing your thoughts absorbing, rejecting, or conversing with these ideas,
as well as listening to your breathing, tasting your tasting, and touching what you
are touching? Is there a sense of presence to your sensing and to your reading? A
“common sensing”? Was there prior to these questions? Will there be a page from
now?
As much as we may like the idea of action inquiry, we rarely actively wish to
engage subjectively in first-person research/practice in the present. At least, that’s
what I’ve found. When I first began to learn about the possibility of self-
observation-amongst-others in Quaker meetings, civil rights demonstrations, Sufi
dancing, Tavistock Conferences, Buddhist retreats, coitus interruptus, etc., I was
very excited by the idea and by the special experiences when practicing with others
under direction. But I could go days at a time in my everyday life without a single
moment of intentional self-observation. Among all my teachers, as well as among
all the members of my immediate Lifetime Circle of Friends, I have known of none
for whom it seemed easy to fashion her or his version of making-love-as-a-lifetime-
act on a moment-to-moment basis. Geniuses have their special arts into which they
pour their love (cf. the man who loved only numbers [Hoffman, 1998]), and they
typically have equally strong shadows – arenas of daily life in which they are
inattentive, unloving, ineffective. What does it take to wish to see and participate in
every one of our moments, both the attractive and the unattractive, dispassionately,
compassionately, and passionately (Bennett, 1997; Raine, 1998)?
Similarly, we may like the idea of finding out in companionship with others,
intersubjectively, through ongoing second-person research/practice, how (different-
ly!) to love each person we meet. It seems to me, however, as I survey all my
relations and my friends’ relations, that it is the rare friend, colleague, therapist, or

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teacher, with whom we relate with an ongoing sense of mutual inquiry, mutual care,
and mutual influence. In many work and family relationships, attempts at gene-
rating mutual inquiry are greeted as disloyal to the existing (presumed) relationship.
Dialogue that questions the power, identity, and intimacy assumptions of the
participants is mostly relegated to meetings and short-term conferences far away
from one’s home and work base. As I see it, much as we may like the vague notion
of second-person, interpersonal research/practice, we rarely practice it explicitly in
our actual relationships (nor test how valid our implicit practice is). Indeed, we can
hardly imagine what relationships permeated by mutual inquiry would look like on
an ongoing basis.
Moreover, we may like the idea of increasingly objective, third-person re-
search/practice in organizations, associations, intergenerational families, and other
enduring collectives. And we may like the idea that such research can go beyond
determining how well a large organization performs in its environment. Third-
person research/practice can be devoted to collaboratively re-visioning our
collective’s future, to transforming strategies to meet each emerging era, or to
recrafting participants’ own practices, as well as to assessing outcomes. In fact,
however, at present our organizations rarely carry third-person research much
beyond its most externalized forms of quarterly financial and market results.
Although our profession and quite a few business leaders have recently taken to the
term “learning organization” (see Senge’s chapter and Senge, 1990; Senge, Kleiner,
et al., 1999), few of us are familiar with families, or economic, political, or spiritual
organizations that function from day to day with an ongoing sense of inquiry about
their assumptions, missions, strategies, power differences, practices, assessments,
and distribution of rewards; and that support transformational first- and second-
person research/practices among their members. So, the question of how to
organize first-, second-, and third-person inquiry in the midst of daily activities
turns out to enter territories explored by very few.
Not only are we individuals, our intimate relationships, and our organizations
unpracticed and unpolished in the domain of inquiry in the midst of our daily lives,
but so is social science itself. As practiced during the past five centuries, the natural
and social sciences do not provide research methodologies for generating mutually
interpenetrating first-, second-, and third-person action inquiries in the present – for
studying the interplay among subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and objectivity – except
at frontiers that are being explored through books like this one. Rather, the natural
and social sciences of the modern era are methodologies for conducting third-
person inquiries about other things or people treated as “outside” the researcher
(Reason & Torbert, forthcoming; Sherman & Torbert, 2000; Torbert, 1991, 2000a).
They study the preconstituted, externalized universe at the time of the study
(including the preconstituted attitudes, beliefs, or observations that are recorded
during such a study).
Action inquiry also studies the preconstituted, externalized universe,
sometimes in just the ways the social and natural sciences today do. But, in

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addition, action inquiry studies the internalizing and externalizing universe in the
present, both as it resonates with and departs from the past, and as it resonates with
and potentiates the future. Action inquiry studies three other “territories of
experience” in addition to the outside world, and it studies how all four interact. If
one wishes to conceptualize and exercise across the “four territory” way of
differentiating the aesthetic continuum (Northrop, 1947), one can begin with the
following words and numbers as pointers:
0. Visioning - The attentional/spiritual territory of inquiry-toward-the-
origin/purpose/mission/undifferentiated-aesthetic-continuum, from
which we may witness the present interplay among the other three
territories.
1 or 2. Strategizing - The mental/emotional territory of theory, dreams,
and passions, where the essential dualism of communicating
between origins and outcomes re-quires integration (the
development of focus, soul, character, integrity, one-ness, 2
0
=1);
3. Performing - The sensual/embodied territory of practical, aesthetic,
dialectically transforming performance (characterized by three
primitive qualities – i. energy, ii. resistance (bodily limits, objects),
iii. intelligence (timely, enlightening action); and
4. Assessing - The outside world territory wherein performance, its
effects, and all things are observed, measured, evaluated.
The body of this chapter illustrates some specific first-person, second-person,
and third-person research/practices that characterize a present-centered, timeliness-
seeking participatory action inquiry. (Other recent publications further explicate the
theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this approach [Torbert, 1999,
2000a]). Because it is early in the history of this new kind of science, the following
illustrations are offered without detailed analysis and will generate many questions
(I hope). The illustrations are meant to point toward wide fields of study, not to
define specific propositions precisely. More precisely, the different illustrations are
meant to generate a frison of analogies for attentive readers that calls them to join in
a personal and collective re-visioning of both social science and social action during
the next quarter century and more.
First-Person Research/Practice
In order for each of us to discover our own capacity for an attention supple
enough to catch, at any moment, glimpses of its own fickleness, we must each
exercise our attention. We may begin our first-person action inquiry from concerns
to perform more effectively at work, or from a desire to transform some cycle of
attributions, emotions, and actions that is costing us happiness in love. But, as it
evolves, our first-person action inquiry will either become increasingly energized
by a concern for the quality of our moment-to-moment experience of ourselves (for

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myself as only I [or other disembodied presences within me] experience myself, for
the quality of my aloneness), or it will cease to evolve.
At the outset, I cannot emphasize strongly enough how unknown such exercise
is generally, nor how reliant we must therefore be on personal guidance by longtime
practitioners of attention exercise in ongoing traditions of attentional inquiry.
Reading about it does not generate the capacity for doing it. Reading about it does
not even necessarily generate a very reliable wish to generate the capacity for doing
it. Through Morris Kaplan, Stavros Cademenos, and other members of my
sometimes-joltingly diverse circle of lifetime friends (each engaged in his or her
own versions of living inquiry as a lifetime practice), and through my longtime
mentors John Pentland and Chris Argyris, I have found myself returning again and
again to the influences of five distinctive traditions of research/practice. These
traditions can be named 1) gay Platonic political theory and practice (Butler, 1990;
Kaplan, 1996), Buddhist practice (Cademenos, 1983; Trungpa, 1970; Wilber,
1998), Gurdjieffian self-study-with-others (Vaysse, 1980; Pentland, 1997), Quaker
meetings (Nielsen, 1996), and Argyrisian confrontation (Argyris & Schon, 1974). I
have also sought out action/inquiry roles (as entrepreneur, consultant, researcher,
teacher, spiritual aspirant, dean, and Board member) in organizations that aspire,
not only to effective performance in conventional terms, but also to participate in
transformational learning for their members and transformational change for their
industry, science, and/or social class (Torbert, 1976, 1991; Fisher & Torbert, 1995;
Rooke & Torbert, 1998).
All this effort can sound daunting (and my mentioning it can sound
pretentious), but it is actually nothing more than what is motivated by my
deepening questions. Moreover, any discerning observer will note how
meandering, habit-ridden, and forgetful I am. (Even I notice it sometimes!) So, I
cannot imagine how anyone can generate awareness, mutuality, and competence-
expansion without: a) eventually seeking direct tuition in some sort of meditative
inner work; b) seeking ‘seeking friends’; and c) framing one’s own organizational
roles as action inquiry opportunities. In this direction, one’s whole life with others
aspires toward a continual living inquiry.
The following journal entries offer some more situated illustrations of what
ongoing (and offgoing) self-study-in-the-midst-of-action feels like to me after some
thirty years’ practice of specific disciplines. I offer episodes of leisure rather than
episodes of work because: a) I have mostly used work illustrations in previous
writing; and b) first-person research/practice must first and foremost be a voluntary,
leisurely pursuit, if it is to go far.
6/28/97
My body stiffens in the chair. My heart is faint. My mind is confused and invaded by
anxiety. My breath labors. As I notice this, I enter into my breath and it deepens. The
pleasurableness of breathing out again, and then of following the cycle of in-and-out-
breathing, begins to take over. My lower back softens, my shoulders round, my neck
becomes my throat, liquefying.

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My mind is emptying, increasingly engaged in a listening that welcomes the full
synaesthesia of the traffic sounds outside, the computer’s sounds as I tap, the smell of a
Chinese dinner cooking downstairs, the caress of strands of memory, and I could go
on...
But the phone is ringing and it may be one of my three sons... ...It was. (And I wrote
more about that, but delete it here…)
6/29/97
This morning my story continues when I rise and read, in the “Living” section of the
Boston Globe, Donald Murray’s column “Write what you don’t yet know,” which
starts:
Each year I live more lives. The hourly/daily experience becomes more
complex, more deeply textured, more joyful, and more painful at the same
time.
There are no simple moments. I watch my granddaughter banging a block
and she turns to me, smiling to share her delight in the drumbeat, and I see
my daughter in her smile. Turning to her mother, my daughter, we smile
and I see my mother in her smile - and in my mother’s remembered smile,
my grandmother with whom we lived. Four generations visited in a
millisecond (quoted with the author’s permission).
Twenty-one years after beginning my own journal, I hear a resonance from Don
Murray with the way my own experiencing increasingly functions. I want to share my
journey in this world with you, Dear Reader, not because I want to create a model for
others to follow, but because I want to model following an idiosyncratic path that leads
each of us more and more often into the inclusive present.
That’s what I hear Don Murray so clearly doing in his ongoing construction and
reconstruction of his living. He is documenting moments of presence - as in this case
of experience of intergenerational smiles - smiles of joy and love - that, when
perceived in relationship to one another, intensify one another toward a moment of
purely sublimated ecstasy.
Or, to put the matter of modeling an idiosyncratic path in the even more paradoxical
terms that it deserves, let me paraphrase Ursula LeGuin’s translation of the beginning
of the Tao Te Ching. “Taoing,” she writes, begins with the realization that:
The path you can follow
Is not the real path.
7/1/97
This morning I was determined to treat myself better from the start.
Yesterday became a difficult day. I could not maintain my presence in a full and
balanced way as I ventured forth to my office and appointed duties, and I suffered the
loss. I felt anxious, feeling irrelevantly and incompetently vulnerable. I was feeling
allergic to all humankind up close, but was enough aware of my own sense of
frustration not to become irritated with Reichi, who cooperated marvelously by moving
mostly in her own orbit and accepting my slight gestures of gratitude and affection.
My best moment late in the day was a five minute period of pleasurably-paced pulling
of weeds from our garden.

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I had hoped Virginia’s visit for dinner would resuscitate my sociability, but in the main
it did not. I enjoyed her conversations with Reichi more than my own with her. And I
felt cowed by the aspects of her that I most dislike - her tendency to overdo probing
talk, and then when the other shies away, probing still further. She probes til I for one
feel trapped (and her stories make me think others do as well). I become unwilling, as
I became last night, to be coerced into further talk about being trapped.
Perhaps sucked out by my silence, Virginia roleplayed her version of my interior
monologue as she left. As I was escorting her to her car, she had me making some
blaming-annihilating comments about her. Her conversational move felt to me like a
strong, semi-intentional bid to trick me into denying her attribution, thus getting into
the conversation she wanted to continue (and I did not).
I was enough at-One with myself at this point not to ‘meet her and raise’... but
remaining quiet was hard and unrewarding work. She was suffering, and so was I.
Why I, without question, preferred us to suffer separately than to join is beyond me.
So went yesterday’s living inquiry into maintaining my presence in a full and balanced
way - into remembering the One good I can always be doing—intentional listening—
and, once doing that intentional listening, dividing it in Two.
I had already told myself to treat today more like vacation, before heading out this
morning along the wooded path circling Cold Spring Park for my daily slow, twirling,
running, swinging-on-the-rings, and balancing-on-the-beam ritual. But it was not until
I passed the lake on the way back from the park that I realized that I could, and should
- and even deserved to - truly name today as my first vacation day.
After all, as a professor, I’m not paid for July and August. And today is the first day of
July. Certainly this is the day, if ever there be one, to shake off the cobwebs of petty
professional functionalism and to discover whether there are any pure pleasures and
inspirations left in this old rag by going swimming in the morning. My career was
meant to make all my time my own, to be lived at whatever variable pace my sense of
leisure chose, yet how hard to seize time is, moment by moment and day by day.
Daily rituals can serve as reminders in first-person research/practice. One kind
of reminder is a set time for meditative exercises. Regular journalizing (three to
four times a week) is another good early discipline for feeding a sense of identity in
which inquiry in everyday life plays as big a part as any outwardly directed actions.
For example, my dog and I run and twirl in the park early each morning; then, I do
house chores and ‘free’ journal writing for an hour most weekday evenings
sometime between 5 and 8pm. By contrast, Joseph Campbell [author of The Hero
with a Thousand Faces]) spoke of swimming in the morning and Scotch in the
evening as his daily meditative rituals.
A few further comments on how the foregoing journal excerpts illustrate first-
person action inquiry. First-person research/practice witnesses and suffers gaps,
such as the sudden phone call from my son interrupting my activity of journalizing.
Each interruption can provoke an inquiry: to attend or not? If so, how to reorder my
priorities while continuing to remain alert for interruptions that may be
opportunities? Over time, how to transform incongruities among emergencies,
short-term goals and routines, longer-term strategies, and lifetime character,
vocation, or mission?

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Again, I witness and suffer the sense of difference with Virginia without
conclusive interpretation (I later showed her the passage and we explored the matter
further). Such participant-witnessed gaps or incongruities are a special kind of
difference, invisible to conventional empirical science. The practice of action
inquiry recognizes and deals with differences of identity across persons or groups
(e.g. differences of race, gender, class, nation, or religion). But the practice of
action inquiry only really begins when one treats differences within one’s own self,
family, or a wider social system in which one participates (incongruities among
vision, strategy, performance, and outcome) as of greater concern than difference
from others. Honig (1996) calls this kind of difference “a difference that troubles
identity from within its would-be economy of the same (p. 258).” [But sameness is
not preferred to difference within action-logics that increasingly welcome inquiry
and mutuality, (Alexander & Langer, 1990; Cook-Greuter, 1999; Kegan, 1994;
Torbert, 1991; Fisher & Torbert, 1995).]
Second-Person Research/Practice
Since many of us spend repeated periods of our days in verbal exchanges, brief
or prolonged, with others, a useful second-person research/practice is to adopt
liberating speaking disciplines nested within the liberating listening disciplines
illustrated in the previous section. Indeed, as listening through oneself both ways
(toward origin and outcome) is the quintessential first-person research/practice, so
speaking-and-listening-with-others is the quintessential second-person research/
practice (Isaacs, 1999).
Language itself cannot finally be understood as purely cognitive content, but
rather always is written, uttered, heard, and (mis)interpreted as action within wider
action contexts (a proposition that is beautifully argued in Pitkin [1972] and also
explored in Torbert [1976b]). If our intended meaning is incongruent with the
content of what we say (if we do not mean what we say), if the content of what we
say is incongruent with the pattern of what we actually do (if we do not do as we
promise), or if what we actually do is incongruent with our effect on others (if we
offer charity, but generate corruption), what we say means something very different
from what it means when our intent, content, conduct, and effect are mutually
congruent. We generally seek congruity between intent and effect, though we
sometimes believe that we can best do so by the manipulative/exploitative strategy
of camouflaging our intent in what we say and how we perform (e.g. making
promises we have no intention of keeping). However, language ceases to mean
anything if its relation to intent, performance, and outcome become random, and
people lose trust in us if they interpret us as generating systematic incongruities that
we are not willing to explore. Indeed, the meaning of language is based on the
trusting premise of truth-telling (and one particularly depends on the premise of
truth-telling when one lies). Thus, both second-person trust and truth-telling require
a growing commitment to analogical harmony both down and up the ladder of
abstraction. We can (but rarely do) publicly test with others whether they
experience our actions from intent, through content and conduct, and into effect as
harmonious. We can also publicly test (but rarely do) whether we have heard

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another’s words and whether our inferences and assumptions about what they mean
align with their intent (see Rudolph, Foldy, and Taylor chapter).
Listening into the four territories of experience, we can gradually generate
increasing plausibility, balance, and analogical harmony in our use of four different
‘parts of speech,’ emanating from the four different experiential territories named
earlier. The four parts of speech can be named:
1) framing (declaring or amending a possible shared sense of
vision/intent for the occasion as a whole or for some
fractal of the larger occasion);
2) advocating (setting a goal, recommending a strategy, or making
some other abstract claim [e.g. “you’re beautiful”]);
3) illustrating (offering a concrete, visualizable picture/story based
on observed performance); and/or
4) inquiring (inviting any contribution or feedback from others
about their response to one’s speaking and associated
conduct [Fisher & Torbert, 1995]).
The very naming of these four parts of speech suggests how speaking is action
and how, as speaking becomes more effective, it tends increasingly to move away
from an exploitative/manipulative mode and toward mutually transforming action
inquiry.
As observant participants in ongoing conversations with others, we may seek
to balance the four types of speech in our own performances and seek to listen for
and evoke the four types of speech from other conversants. Behind merely
exercising and balancing these four complementary types of speech action lies the
eternal question and lifetime practice of discovering what articulation congruently
translates my (your) current personal, interpersonal, and organizational
experiencing into the frame/advocacy/illustration/inquiry that is most timely (across
how many time horizons?) now. Such a practice can gradually transform an
increasing proportion of our conversations from habitual, repetitive rituals into the
transformational dances between the known and the unknown that true dialogue can
be. The assessments generated by effective inquiry can either confirm the efficacy
of the overall direction of the current action, or can generate slight changes in
performance (single-loop feedback), a change in topic, timing, or strategy (double-
loop feedback), or a change in the framing assumptions of the occasion (triple-loop
feedback). Whatever our original motivations for engaging in second-person
research/practice, it either evolves into an increasingly mutual, loving listening,
disclosing, and confronting (e.g. Sedgwick’s [1999] study of her therapy
experience), or it devolves back toward habitual, unilateral behavior.

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Coitus interruptus is a second-person research/practice that exemplifies
mutual, loving listening. Coitus interruptus is a Hindu, Tantric, spiritual practice, as
well as a Tibetan Buddhist, Vajrayana spiritual practice. Most people who see the
phrase coitus interruptus are, of course, unfamiliar with such practices and their
purposes, and imagine instead that the phrase refers to some embarrassingly
involuntary dysfunction amidst sexual engagement. But in spiritual practice that
transforms erotic energy into something finer than just its physical, sexual
expression, the intentional pause of coitus interruptus is a symbol (as all properly
sublimated visible actions are) as well as a factual act. Coitus interruptus is a
symbol of two (or even three or four) persons’ ability to interrupt any pleasurable
perspective and action for the higher and more generous pleasure of a more
inclusive and more mutual awareness and interaction. Interweaving attentional,
conversational, and sexual intercourse (as Donne’s love poems suggest) is an
advanced form of second-person research/practice (see Torbert, 1991, 1993b, for
further detail).
The daily newspaper shows us in how many ways our global civilization falls
short of practicing such increasing mutuality in relations among sects, tribes,
nations, companies, or genders. Such stories of unilateral violence – especially of
the numbingly commonplace horror of rape – can touch each of us deeply, if we
pause long enough to allow them to do so.
They touch the essence of our uncertain sexuality. And each of us is
essentially uncertain sexually, insofar as we are truly sexual - truly erotic - at all.
For the truly erotic impulse is spontaneous and relational, not pre-meditated and
unilateral. The truly erotic impulse cannot know its proper form or enactment until
it engages relationally. Truly relational engagement brings recognition of actual
differences of power, status, development, etc. that influence the parties' actual
mutuality at a given time. Truly relational engagement also allows the fullest
realizable spontaneity among the players in mutually creating the pattern of this
particular dance.
What, then, is going on when men abuse children or women? We are told by
studies (Koss & Harvey, 1991; Raine, 1998) that the men more likely to rape have
experienced more violence in their families of origin, view males as properly
dominant, treat sex as a sport the objective of which is to see how far you can go,
and don't believe women mean "No" when they say "No." This framing is the
logical antithesis of second-person research/practice because it does not even invite
single-loop feedback and learning, let alone double- or triple-loop feedback. In
short, these men are not acting in truly inquiring, truly relational, truly erotic ways.
But it is not my intent to bash my fellow men. Instead, I would like to offer
some positive images that point to the rewards of exercising mutual, non-violent
power and inquiry rather than unilateral force. Perhaps the positive imagery of an
unfamiliar sport can help us at the start to begin to envision sport, conversation, and

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sexual engagement as predominantly collaborative inquiries rather than as
predominantly competitions with winners and losers.
My Greek friend Stavros brought with him to this country two rather large and
heavy wooden rackets. With the help of an old tennis ball, he has been teaching me
"pallette" over the past twenty-two years. (Today, one sometimes sees two persons
with similar, but much smaller, rackets and little rubber balls on beaches.) The
objective in pallette is for the two (or more) players to enter a mutual rhythm, so
attuned to one another's skills as never to overtax them, so spontaneous and ever-
changing as always to heighten one another's awareness, and so challenging as to
stretch one another's capacities. One applauds the other's reach and challenge,
appreciates the restful lobs, apologizes to the other and the god of the game for
one's own miscreant shots, and marvels at how much such mutual games improve
with age. Over the years, Stavros and I have played memorable games on pitch
dark nights, over and around patchworks of tree branches, and amidst the ocean
waves. Of course, we have never fully realized the objective, but we have become
true peers and lifetime friends.
Stavros has been teaching his wife, Anne, pallette as well, lo these many years,
with the same effect. In the meantime, she and I - she much more than I - have
been helping Stavros shape up his conversational game. For, true conversation
requires and generates this same mutuality, this same predominance of collaborative
inquiry over competitiveness (Evered & Tannenbaum, 1992; Grudin, 1996;
Sedgwick, 1999; Torbert, 1999c). Certainly, no conversation is occurring if any of
the partners interprets what others' say and acts on that interpretation without testing
his or her interpretation publicly with the original speaker(s). (Look at that
sentence carefully: few business or family conversations meet its test, and that
explains a great deal of human misunderstanding, sense of betrayal, and suffering.)
For example, to suggest that one has some kind of private insight or right to
interpret - unilaterally, without public testing - that another means the reverse of
what s/he says ("Women don't mean ‘No’ when they say ‘No’") is to undermine the
very possibility of mutuality - the very possibility of conversation - the very
possibility of human sociability. Whereas the statement "Women don't mean ‘No’
when they say ‘No’" treats women with utter contempt, it is the statement itself that
deserves our deepest contempt, while whoever utters it warrants our most
concerned confrontation.
Now: someone is sure to respond that he can document a particular case and
provide witnesses to prove that someone once said (or that many people have often
said) the reverse of what was meant. Good. Thank you. You have just publicly
tested whether you have understood what I just wrote (although, had you been more
aware that you were making an inference, you might have addressed me more
inquiringly). This gives me the opportunity to try again to convey my meaning, for
this response shows that I did not convey it the first time.

12
I did not say that no one ever says the reverse of what they mean. I believe that
sometimes happens, for we are complex, uncertain creatures with only the most
occasional and tenuous contact with what we ourselves truly wish. Hence, another
may see evidence before we do that we are not doing as we truly wish, or are not
saying what we truly mean. But this evidence may or may not be valid. Hence, it
deserves public testing.
A wonderful conversational game of pallette is being played when a partner
recognizes and acknowledges in an uncoerced fashion that he or she in fact means
the reverse of what he or she originally said. (And such an acknowledgement
properly represents anything but the end of the game.) But public testing of our
interpretations rarely occurs in conversations for two reasons: first, because we
rarely even realize that we are adding a questionable judgment to what we are
seeing; and second, because we implicitly believe that public testing may be
embarrassing and may reduce our control of the situation. These are in fact genuine
risks (so long as our self-images are strongly tied to being right-tobegin-with and to
exercising unilateral, rather than mutual, control). It does require courage each time
and oft-repeated practice to conduct public testing in a mutually liberating way.
But when we do undertake this second-person research/practice, we begin to realize
how much error, conflict, and harm are generated by not doing so, and how much
mutuality, trust, and good will can be generated by public testing.
Ironically, anyone inclined to interpret that others mean the reverse of what
they say should especially practice such interpretation and such public testing in
sexual situations when the other says "Yes." For, there is much evidence to suggest
that both men and women are more likely to say "Yes" in sexual situations when at
a deeper level they feel "No" than vice-versa.
This advice will no doubt sound ludicrous and unrealistic to those who treat
sex as an exploitative sport the objective of which is to see how far they can go.
But even those who would like to believe that sex can be 'played' as a different kind
of 'game,' as a kind of mutual, conversational, sexual pallette - even those of us who
would like to believe that sex can be an expression of collaborative inquiry and
even of love - will feel intuitively how difficult meeting the demand for public
testing of interpretations during sexual play is.
Certainly, listening for and testing interpretations publicly in the midst of
sexual play, political action, or a business negotiation is no simple, all-or-nothing
process, with a pre-determined gambit to begin the game and a definitive sign that
the game is over. Instead, it is a game that opens in many possible directions at
every step in the play (Carse, 1986), requiring all our powers of judgment, intuition,
and care just when these are most likely to be dimmed by sexual desire, political
conviction, or the urgency of a business goal.
To play this kind of game -- to do this listening -- invites us and requires us to
be more civilized than we ordinarily are -- to wed the biological, the social, and the

13
spiritual in ourselves in a marriage that few of us ever achieve momentarily, let
alone permanently. To play this game requires the actual and symbolic practice of
coitus interruptus. More prosaically, this game is an advanced form of second-
person research/practice.
Third-Person Research/Practice
As the previous section illustrates, second-person research/practice
presupposes and works to co-generate first-person research/practice. Similarly, one
of the key characteristics of successful third-person research/practice is that it is an
action inquiry leadership practice that presupposes first- and second-person
research/practice capacity on the part of leadership. This leadership (which is not
necessarily synonymous with the top executives of an organization) in turn creates
organizational conditions where more and more of the members voluntarily adopt
first- and second-person research/practices and join in the third-person
research/practice of distributed leadership (Fisher & Torbert, 1995; Reason &
Torbert, 1999; Rooke & Torbert, 1998; Torbert, 1997, 2000c). First-, second-, and
third-person research/practice mutually generate, require, and reinforce one another
because each is the preparation to welcome rather than resist timely transformation,
at the personal, relational, and organizational scale, respectively. These
organizational conditions result from a kind of organizational design called
“Liberating Disciplines,” wherein the leadership as well as other members are
vulnerable to transformation (Torbert, 1991).
If the leadership is to lead in this direction, it must lead in learning and in
modeling how to weave unilateral and mutual forms of power together so that the
collective as a whole can rely less and less on unilateral forms of power and
increasingly manifest mutuality. Both developmental theory, and statistically
significant empirical results in ten, multi-year organizational transformational
efforts support the proposition that one must be willing to be vulnerable to self-
transformation if one wishes to encourage ongoing, episodic transformation in
others and in whole structures of activity (Rooke & Torbert, 1998). Whereas
traditional forms of power (e.g. coercion, diplomacy, logistics, charisma) can be
exercised unilaterally, transformational power can only be successfully exercised
under conditions of mutual vulnerability.
But: virtually all third-person organizations and states today are dominated by
relatively non-voluntary, non-mutual, unilateral power relations, even though there
may be pockets and occasional democratic occasions of more mutual organizing.
Hence, among the many skills, methods, and theories relevant to third-person
research/practice, perhaps the most important are those that concern the question of
how to engage, motivate, and gradually transform concentrations of unilateral
power (Benhabib, 1996; Honig, 1996; Mansbridge, 1996; Torbert, 1991; Young,
1996). Over the past fifty years, however, most action research communities have
been virtually allergic to “power,” assuming that exercises of power are inherently
unilateral and therefore contrary to visions of voluntary, mutual decision-making.
This “allergy” to power has been sustainable only because action researchers have

14
typically worked outside organizations (but this position has also severely reduced
the potential influence of action research). In terms of gender stereotypes, men
prefer their power unilateral, women prefer to ignore it. Traditionally, few have
been eager to envision the long, voluntary, lifetime journey, with repeated
backward somersaults through hidden trapdoors of transformation, that is required
of persons, relationships, and organized collectivities that aspire to full mutuality.
The one action research school that does address issues of power directly is the
“Southern” participatory action research tradition inspired by Freire’s Pedagogy of
the Oppressed (1970) (see Gaventa’s chapter in this volume). But this tradition
offers a rather blunt, bivariate theory of oppressive, top-down, unilateral,
institutional power versus emancipating, bottom-up, mutual, people power, offering
little insight into how to transform power itself.
There are many approaches to third-person research/practice currently being
invented, and some are described in Gustavsen’s, and Martin’s chapters in this
volume (see also, Reason and Torbert, forthcoming; Toulmin & Gustavsen, 1996).
In addition, new forms of assessment, such as the Learning History, are being
specifically invented to support individual, organizational, and distance learning
simultaneously. Just today, for example, I have received a preliminary “Learning
History” of Peter Senge’s Society for Organizational Learning, a not-for-profit
society with a constitution that creates an elected council representing three
constituencies -- practitioners from member organizations (e.g. Shell, Harley
Davidson, the World Bank), consultants, and researchers (Bradbury, 1999; see also
Bradbury, 1998; Senge, Kleiner, et al., 1994). This “ultimate” learning organization
is just beginning to learn explicitly about itself (but it is only three years old; so, is
it acting precociously?). Next, there will be a “dissemination and verification”
meeting among all the participants in the creation of the Learning History.
Thereafter, a draft will be made available on the Society’s web page (www.sol-
ne.org), along with several other Learning Histories. Hopefully all these materials
will be of some use to others trying to create “learning organizations” or
“communities of inquiry.” But the fact remains that this democratic, not-for-profit
third-person research/practice (that encourages participants to engage in first- and
second-person research/practice as well) is in its infancy on this planet.
I will use another third-person research/practice method invented during the
past quarter century, a future scenario (Hawken, Ogilvy & Schwartz, 1982; Kleiner,
1996), as my primary illustration in concluding this chapter. The future scenario
method, or research/practice, focuses primarily on the exercise of mutual power to
co-construct the future, rather than on, say, the unilateral power of a positivist
laboratory experiment for reflecting the past. This shift of perspective from using
data to pin down the past with a known degree of certainty to using data-driven-
stories to hazily floodlight a possible future illustrates how fundamental the changes
can be when research participates in generating mutually transforming power.
The particular future scenario presented below is chosen in part for its content. For,
it envisions one way in which the interweaving of third-, second-, and first-person
research/practices may begin to evolve into a globally influential process. This

15
scenario was generated during a Board and senior management exercise in re-
visioning the mission and long-term strategy of one of the largest and top ranked
health management organizations in the U.S. during the late 1990s. Guided by
Collins’ and Porras’ Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
(1994), the Board and senior management of this HMO developed a 100-year
mission statement, a 25-year vision (summarized as becoming “the most trusted and
respected name in health care”), a five-year strategy, and an annual business plan
with specific priority projects to be completed that year.
The 25-year vision was not created as a target, but rather as a provocateur of
dialogue within the organization about fundamental issues in health care that invite
creative responses. As you will see, it suggests that fundamental values and
assumptions of contemporary life (e.g. monotheism, couple-based heterosexual
intimacy, family-based inheritance of wealth, and preserving human life as long as
possible) may be confronted and transformed during the next quarter century. It
also suggests that a fundamentally different strategy of organizing, besides the
corporate and governmental forms, will be invented. These suggestions may strike
you as highly improbable, or extremely disagreeable – even devilish. But if, as the
scenario suggests, a growing proportion of the world’s population is gradually
attracted – whether by the freedom, challenge, or security – to the so-called Not-for-
Prophets, your view will either transform along the way, or it will be shared by a
dwindling minority. In any event, the point of the scenario is to make value
differences discussible and to make the advent of an entirely new kind of institution
imaginable. Thus, the scenario is addressed as much to each reader of this article as
it was initially to the Board and senior management of “Philadelphia Quaker
Health.”
Philadelphia Quaker Health in 2025
In 2025, Philadelphia Quaker Health is the most trusted and respected name in health care.
It is one of the Nine Majors - the nine largest Not-for-Prophets (NFPs) in the world. (Of
course, just as many for-profit entrepreneurial ventures fail, many organizations have
failed in the attempt to create liberating developmental disciplines analogous to those of
successful NFPs).
Philadelphia Quaker Health has close to one billion members, and, of these, more than
nearly 100 million are fully vested. (Once fully vested, members’ income and life care
through death is guaranteed and at least half of their economic assets become fully
integrated into PQH’s Intergenerational Trust.)
Together, NFPs now account for approximately one-third of global annual revenues.
Unlike for-profit corporations and government agencies, Not-for-Prophets have become
global, multi-sector organizations by accepting the challenge of cultivating, not just the
negative freedoms so well managed by the U.S. Constitution (under which all of the top
500 NFPs are incorporated), but also and in particular:
the balanced adult
eco-spiritual, social, physical, and financial development
of members and clients

16
Philadelphia Quaker offers personal budgetary options in regard to elective care for
members who successfully maintain their health (and more than 80% of the membership
in every age group of the octave does). Currently, the Mass-age Mess-age unit receives
the largest proportion of the elective budget.
“Friendly Quakers” - as we playfully call ourselves, whether we are doctors, business
associates, member beneficiaries, or even mere clients of the enterprise - are all committed
to personal, family, and organizational initiatives to increase good health and prevent
disease. For example, every Friendly Quaker belongs to an “Active Health Triangle.”
The Triangles meet at least once every three weeks for exercise and conversation, to
address each member’s spiritual, organizational, and physical health dilemmas. In these
Triangles members typically discuss their most perplexing and troubling issues and share
suggestions, via the Web and the Intranet, about alternative resources they can access from
other PQH services.
The opportunity to join a different Triangle each year is what initially attracts most clients
to become members of PQH. As everyone is well aware, the Triangles shift membership
each year based on the stated partner-preferences of each member. “Free love,” new PQH
members fondly imagine. As another of the Nine Majors advertises: “Dreams do come
true… Dis-illusion-ingly… Trans-form-ingly…”!!!)
Like the others of the Nine Majors in relation to their original sectors, Philadelphia Quaker
Health is far and away the largest and most respected player in the health care industry
globally. It is also a Liberating Discipline that generates enormous trust and longevity
among its doctors, business associates, member beneficiaries, and clients. Indeed, the
organization is more likely to choose to discontinue its relationship with members prior to
their final, full vesting (after as many as 21 years) than the members are to discontinue
their relationship with PQH.
In the wider global market and in the US political process, there is great controversy about
the adult development orientation that all the successful Not-for-Prophets share. Spiritual,
scientific, political, and economic fundamentalists -- those who wish to preserve
traditional forms of religious authority, empirical validity, individual rights, and property
rights – tend to regard the Nine Majors as emanations of the Great Satan (the more so, as
members of their own families join an NFP and their family inheritance is threatened).
Why do the Not-for-Prophets generate such contestation and consternation? Because the
NFPs’ 21-year vesting process for adults tests whether members will voluntarily undergo
more than one developmental transformation, and these transformations challenge a
person’s inherited, fundamental, taken-for-granted beliefs and practices. For example,
most of the Nine Majors put primary emphasis on Triangles and Quartets rather than
Couples. Also, they divert wealth by inheritance from the blood family to the NFP
community. Moreover -- and worst of all from the perspective of the three dwindling
monotheisms -- they encourage “Fast Forwarding” (a fasting and communal celebration
process through which Senior Peers choose their time of death).
Religious and individual rights fundamentalists decry such transformational initiatives,
arguing they are often cult-inspired or cult-manipulated (most people, though, think that’s
like the pot calling the fairy godmother black). In any event, the Nine Majors and the next
491 of the “Good Life 500” have continued to gain market share by comparison to the
Fortune 500, the global governmental sector, and the traditional religious and educational
not-for-profits during the past twenty years.

17
This scenario envisions various institutions within Philadelphia Quaker Health
that help its employees and other members to interweave first-, second-, and third-
person research/practice over their lifetimes. The scenario imagines that such Not-
for-Prophet institutions help adults transform several times, from hardly seeking out
single-loop learning to developing a taste for single-, double-, and triple-loop
learning. The institutions themselves are primarily guided, neither by the single-
loop feedback of economic results (though positive results are necessary for the
ongoing sustainability of the institutions), nor by the potentially double-loop
feedback of members’ political preferences (though each Not-for-Prophet will
dwindle if its structure is not agreeable to its members). These Not-for-Prophet
institutions are guided by their capacity (through many different Liberating
Disciplines) for helping members develop to the point where they function as part
of the increasingly widely distributed leadership that exercises single-, double-, and
triple-loop action inquiry in its first-, second-, and third person forms.
The scenario only hints at the firm, consensually-and-experimentally-developed
boundaries central to the NFPs success, such as the 21-year vesting process, which
some aspirants never succeed in completing despite seeking tuition in several
different NFPs. It also only hints at the many lessons that successful NFPs have
learned from the thousands of NFP experiments that early-on failed the economic
(market), political (attractiveness), and spiritual (generating timely, transforming
action) tests.
Conclusion
The foregoing 2025 scenario contemplates a social world in which a very large
and increasing proportion of adults around the globe are engaging in a new kind of
research/practice in their personal, relational, and organizational lives. This “living
inquiry” seeks to integrate subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and objectivity in
moment-to-moment and lifelong actions that are timely and potentially
transformational.
For millenia, we have had first-person meditational, devotional, and martial
arts research/practices that only very small minorities of the world’s population
have committed to (sometimes because these practices have been offered in the
context of authoritarian institutions that have in practice demanded conformity
more than inquiry and mutuality). During the twentieth century, there has been an
explosion of types of more or less disciplined and imaginative second-person
research/practice dialogue (psychotherapy, 12-step meetings, sensitivity training,
cooperative inquiry, etc.). At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the biggest
missing link between now and the vision of large, decentralized “Not-for-Prophets”
in 2025 is a population of well-developed third-person research/practices, based on
mutually transforming power, that make adult development through first-, and
second-person research/practices as common as child development today is.
This chapter attempts to reframe and revision the ends and the means of human
action and human inquiry, indeed of human civilization. At best, its illustrations

18
may generate questions that confront or confirm your assumptions about, and
visions of, desirable personal, interpersonal, organizational, and scientific conduct.
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i
A third inspiration for action inquiry accounts for the third word with which I usually characterize this
approach nowadays – “developmental action inquiry.” This primitive sense or intuition, which remains
implicit throughout this article, is that the ultimate essence of efficient, effective, transformational,
inquiring action is its unique, myth-making timeliness, where “timeliness” is understood to refer not just to
an immediate effect or short-term consequence, but to a widening and deepening and transforming effect
across ages of history (e.g. Socrates drinking the hemlock, or John Hancock signing the Declaration of
Independence). I begin to address the mysteries of six-dimensional time/space in Torbert, 1983, 1991
(Chapter 15), 1993 (Lecture 5), and 1999.