Alchemist at Work: Two Sessions with Bill Torbert
A Review by Russ Volckmann
Some who know him well say that you can never know what to expect when you go to one of his classes, presentations or workshops. While it is true that he does not come with a linear agenda or slide presentation, what is predictable is that what you will experience is authentic Bill Torbert and his alchemical beliefs about learning processes. For example, Bill said to me before a two-hour Friday night presentation at the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco that throughout his academic career he has not approached teaching through lectures. But, he added, “I am really good at giving fifteen minute responses to questions!”
Authenticity is an apt word to describe Bill and his work. In describing levels and stages of development (action logics) based on Loevinger and Susanne Cook-Greuter’s (Bill’s associate at Harthill USA) Leadership Development Profile what those in the room experienced was a quality of transparency and presence that must be characteristic of the Alchemist, the highest stage of development in their model and the purported subject of the presentation, “The Alchemists Among Us: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership.”
William R. Torbert, lead author of Action Inquiry, several other books and a recent article on leadership in Harvard Business Review with co-author David Rooke, is a professor at the Carroll School of Management, Boston College. The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and the Saybrook Institute sponsored his presentations in San Francisco. These are both organizations to watch as they are developing programs that should be of interest to students of the integral and related applications to leadership.
Bill began his presentation in describing the different ways we go about measuring things, similar to the discussion in the lead article in this issue of Integral Leadership Review. He relates the levels to four key processes we use in our “territories of experience:”
- Assessing relates to interval measures
- Performing relates to ordinal measures
- Strategizing relates to nominal measures
- Visioning relates to level of attention
By looking at how we relate to measurement in our work and lives we can identify our assumptions. And the key point is that by looking at our assumptions we can find their correspondence to the various action logics. For example, my interpretation is (Bill didn't cov er this in the presentation) that strategizing and nominal measurement relate to the second stage, the diplomat, while performing and ordinal measures would relate to the expert stage. The Friday evening session also included a discussion of the action logics of CEOs in relation to transformational change in organizations. This work is well summarized in the Harvard Business Review article.
Saturday was an all day session. It was divided into three parts: individual, interpersonal and organizational. We began by going a bit deeper into the idea of action logics as how people prefer to use their power. Much of this section of the day was spent on connecting with how different action logics show up in our own lives. This was, for me, the most useful demonstration of Bill’s instructional alchemy.
Perhaps the most valuable thing I took away from the session had to do with the relationship between stage theory and the organic interplay among stages in our being and doing. I have lived in a tension between these two ideas for some time. I had not conceived on the both/and in this relationship in a way that I felt I had truly “gotten it.”
What I saw very clearly, thanks to Bill, is that at each stage of development there is an organic interplay between that stage at the “center of being” for the individual and all the prior stages. A question that is still unresolved for me is that of the presence of all stages at all levels. For example, can one be centerred at the expert level and have strategist capabilities under some circumstances? Leadership Development Profile results suggest that is possible, since typically individuals show up at a number of different levels, but with greatest presence in one or two.
The section on interpersonal involved an attempt to apply a model drawn from Action Inquiry that begins by looking at desired and actual results, actual action, actual and desired frames and future actions. Bill then began to work with a volunteer on a difficult interpersonal situation. This is where the process broke down for me. While I am sure that the volunteer achieved some benefits from what happened, what did not happen was the application of the method and the model. Rather, participants began giving the volunteer all kinds of advice and analyses of what was going on. The result was that the volunteer achieved some clarity, but the group never had the opportunity to experience the approach that Bill was introducing, despite his best efforts at linking what was being said back to it.
A similar thing happened when we turned to the organizational level: a lot of consultation, very little learning about what Bill was bringing to the table. I suppose this is the risk of alchemy. While lead was not always turned into gold, perhaps a little copper or silver was created. The greatest amount of gold in the day was experiencing the alchemy of who Bill Torbert is.
[If you would be interested in writing brief reviews of integrally informed workshops that you have attended, please contact me: russ@leadcoach.com]