We’re delighted to be supporting GLA Co-Founder, Bill Torbert’s, new book Numbskull in The Theatre of Inquiry: Transforming Self, Friends, Organizations, and Social Science. Renowned senior member of the adult development, leadership, and organization transformation fields, award-winning researcher, consultant, and teacher Bill Torbert offers us his final, signature book. Numbskull shares Torbert’s dramatic early life in Spain, Austria, Italy, and Somalia, then at Yale, the Southern Methodist University Business School, and the Harvard Ed School, culminating with the creation of The Theatre of Inquiry.
Says Chuck Palus of the Center for Creative Leadership,
This bubbling memoir is a guide to assumption-busting practices at work, at play, and in science that lead to mutually-transforming inquiry, power, and love.
Torbert recounts for us how he gradually learned, from the experiences of his own leadership efforts, a theory of learning from experience and a developmental theory of leadership. He also learned a theory of organizational transformation, culminating in ‘liberating disciplines’; that help others learn transformationally from their own experiences. And, last but not least, he formulated a developmental theory of social science that culminates in the paradigm of Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry (CDAI).
…A wild ride through a life showing why we need many more inquisitive and activist ‘numbskulls’; to save ourselves from disaster; writes Charles Derber, author of Sociopathic Society and Welcome to the Revolution.
CDAI interweaves first-, second-, and third-person research and practice, as Numbskull illustrates by surrounding Bill’s first-person memoir with an introduction, a postscript, and endnotes in the second-person voices of his action inquiry colleagues, as well as appendixes in the third-person voice describing the ontological, epistemological, ethical/political, and methodological foundations of CDAI. Numbskull challenges students, leaders, and academics to ask what knowledge and practice is timely at each particular moment. “Torbert’s pioneering work is foundational for transforming social science.”
Highly recommended!; offers Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U and founder of Presencing Institute, MIT.
Provocative, engaging, and timely …a roadmap we can compare to our own lives and organizational experiences,; concludes Sandra Waddock, Galligan Chair of Strategy, Boston College.
Get your copy today: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1951805410
