CDAI Cyber Library

There is a vast amount of research and writing related to Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry, much of it summarized in the November 2017 Integral Leadership Review article. Many of the publications referenced in that article can be found in the following five sections of readings.

In the first section, immediately below, you will find six short (and very different) ways of getting First Impressions of action inquiry, beginning with a three-minute video. After that come four sections with books, articles, and PhD dissertations. These sections are titled:

  1. First Impressions of Action Inquiry
  2. How Leaders Act at Different Action-Logics
  3. Cultivating Leadership Development and Organizational Transformation thru Action Inquiry
  4. The Science of CDAI: 27 Methodological Flavors
  5. The Foundations of Action Inquiry: Social, Political, Ethical, Epistemological, and Ontological

Section I – First Impressions of Action Inquiry

  • For a brief (5-page) introduction to action inquiry and the individual and organizational action-logics, see this Systems Thinker article.
  • For a more general account of how action learning can help large divisions of a major companies transform, read Action Inquiry Fellow Mary Stacey’s story ( Fresh Perspective on Action Learning-2 ).
  • What does action inquiry have to do with love? This analysis of a Star Trek episode ( STAR TREK ) in which Captain Picard falls in love with Commander Nella Daren can acquaint you with how relational action-logics can transform.
  • You can gain new understanding of your own life journey by writing your own developmental autobiography… or you can begin by reading someone else’s, either Ed’s or Gwen’s (or both)( student autobio ) .

Section II – How Leaders Act at Different Action-Logic

  • Ed Kelly wrote his PhD dissertation on Warren Buffett and how Buffett’s action-logics have changed over his lifetime. This article summarizes that work and offers some suggestions about the causes of ‘vertical’ transformation from one action-logic to the next.
  • Nancy Wallis offers an article, the second half of which is a case study about how seven members of a hospital executive team, measured at different action-logics, relate to one another.
  • Karen Yeyinmen wrote her PhD dissertation describing the daily strategies and action of three leaders in higher education, all of whom measured at the Redefining action-logic, the first of the relatively rare post-conventional action-logics. (See especially chapters 4, 5, and 6.)
  • One predominantly quantitative study and one predominantly qualitative study show how managers at different action-logics perform the same tasks differently and respond to the same questions differently.
  • I began to measure people’s leadership action-logic and offered a full chapter describing each individual action-logic and each of the organizational action-logics in Managing the Corporate Dream.
  • It turns out we all act some of the time from action-logics earlier than our highest capacity – sometimes because such an action is appropriate for the situation; sometimes because we are under stress or tired and “fall back.” In his PhD Dissertation, David McCallum showed that leaders at later action-logics recover from fallback faster.

Section III – Cultivating Leadership Development and Organizational Transformation thru Action Inquiry

  • Fifty years ago, in 1967, I accepted the role of Director of Yale Upward Bound, a War on Poverty program… and thus entered upon the most demanding adventure of my life… from which I first learned about action inquiry (which I called ‘action science’ at that time). I also began my ‘vertical’ leadership development by recognizing some of my ineffectual action assumptions. And, in reviewing the history of those two years, I first formulated the notion of organizational transformations. All this is retold in blow-by-blow detail (and there were blows!) in Creating a Community of Inquiry.
  • Four years later, I found myself in charge of a huge undergraduate course at Southern Methodist University teaching entrepreneurship. This is when I began to learn how to teach action inquiry and how to co-construct a deliberately developmental organization, as recounted in the middle section of The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society and Scientific Inquiry.
  • Over the 1980s and 1990s, a number of studies combining quantitative, qualitative, and action research showed how late action-logic organizations action inquiry developmentally transformed individuals (Torbert & Fisher, 1992 ); (Torbert, 1994); and how late action-logic leaders transformed whole organizations Personal and Organizational Transformations (Role of CEO in Org Transf).
  • Cara Miller’s doctoral dissertation describes how she and her students and the organization of her undergraduate class on Leadership transformed over four semesters of teaching it.
  • Shakiyla Smith’s Dissertation 2016 documents her second-person action and first-person learning in bringing together an on-line, year-long set of personal development meetings with fellow professionals.

Section IV – The Science of CDAI: 27 Methodological Flavors

  • Transforming Inquiry and Action: 27 Flavors Of Action Research (2003) offers the most general overview of CDAI as a new paradigm of social science.
  • Erica Foldy and Steve Taylor offer articles on the significance of claiming one’s own first-person voice in action inquiry and interweaving it with second- and third-person voices. See Foldy’s “Claiming a Voice on Race”,( Claiming a Voice-1 ) and/or Taylor’s “Presentational Form In First-Person Research”. ( PFFPR )
  • Written with my longtime colleague and friend, Peter Reason, The Action Turn in Social Science (2000) explicates how social science can move beyond both empirical positivism and the language turn.
  • The Global Leadership Profile, the psychometric instrument we use to measure persons’ developmental action-logic, has proven its reliability and validity, not only through its ability to correlate strongly with all sorts of other variables in predicted ways in particular field studies, but also through its history of reliability testing (Comparison Among Developmental Measures) and a construct validity test of the difference in conceptual structure between conventional action-logics and post-conventional action-logics (Factorial Validity ).

Section V – The Foundations of Action Inquiry: Social, Political, Ethical, Epistemological, and Ontological

  • My first research project and book involved interviews with 209 blue collar workers about the nature of their jobs, their leisure, and their politics. My colleague Mac Rogers and I found that the less discretion and decision-making power workers had on the job, the less they displayed in their leisure and politics as well. We named the book Being for the Most Part Puppets and wondered what work conditions and what kind of learning would be necessary for them to become more free. (Forty years later Joy Beatty and I reviewed the field of leisure studies and found no research or theory that superceded ours… ( Leisure Handbook ch. )
  • My next book, named Learning From Experience, tried to answer the ‘learning to become more free’ question by theorizing and portraying a previously undescribed kind of learning – not behavioral stimulus-response learning and not cognitive goal-oriented learning, but rather ‘learning through self-recognition’ whereby others and oneself question one’s own action assumptions. This approach to learning led to the later studies of single-, double-, and triple-loop learning, found in Section III.
  • What are the primary goods of a life dedicated to transforming inquiry and action? Good money, good work, good friends, and good questions, I argued in The Good Life.