Books
Action Inquiry
Bill Torbert and associates illustrate how individuals and organizations can progress through more and more sophisticated “action-logics” — strategies for analyzing the world and reacting to it — until they will eventually be able to practice action inquiry continually. Offering action inquiry exercises at the end of the chapters, the book moves from junior managers beginning to practice action inquiry through CEO’s transforming whole companies, to world leaders transforming whole countries, as exemplified by Czech president Vaclav Havel.
Numbskull in the Theatre of Inquiry: Transforming Self, Friends, Organizations, and Social Science
William R.Torbert. Available on Amazon.
Renowned senior member of the adult development, leadership, and organization transformation fields, award-winning researcher, consultant, and teacher, Bill Torbert offers us this final and signature book — an anti-heroic memoir named Numbskull that shares his 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.
Leaving the Ghost Light Burning: Illuminating Fallback in Embrace of the Fullness of You.
Valerie Livesay, 2023. Available on Amazon.
The scenes of our lives often trigger our smaller, more shadowy selves to steal the show – we call this “fallback.” Fallbook invites us to leave the ghost light burning for our characters, offering practices to notice, arrest, reflect on, and recover from fallback, and even to transform ourselves in the process.
Making Room: A 30-day Invitation to the Art of Seeing Differently
Danny Morris, 2026. Available on Amazon.
Making Room is a thirty-day journey through some of the world’s most remarkable works of art. Not as an art history lesson, but as a daily invitation to grow as a human being. Each painting is a metaphor. Each metaphor opens a room. And each room explores something that matters: how we pay attention, how we make choices, how we handle conflict and uncertainty, how we let go, and how we become more fully ourselves. This is adult development made visible through the act of looking. You don’t need to know anything about art. You just need to be willing to walk in. The gallery is open.
The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry
Presenting a new theory of power, a new practice of management and a new theory of social science, this volume contradicts the following received wisdoms: that `all power corrupts’; that all organizational structure constrains; and that social science is `purer’ the more it is divorced from action.
Torbert presents a conceptualization of power that generates productivity, justice and inquiry; develops a theory of `liberating structure’ through which organizations can generate continual quality improvement; and introduces a new paradigm of engaged social science – `action inquiry’.
In the second of three sections, Torbert offers an autobiographical case study of applying these theories – a highly charged account of a two-year experiment in business education at Southern Methodist University that combines transformational learning, confrontational politics, and personal intimacy.</>
Learning from Experience: Toward Consciousness
Learning from Experience: Toward Consciousness, William R. Torbert, Columbia University Press,
New York NY, 1973. (also published in Portuguese by the U. of Sao Paulo Press)
Creating a Community of Inquiry
Creating a Community of Inquiry: Conflict, Collaboration, Transformation, William R. Torbert. Wiley, London, 1976
Managing the Corporate Dream
Managing the Corporate Dream: Restructuring for Long-Term Success, William R. Torbert. Wiley, London, 1976