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Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates leaders is not so much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or their style of management. Rather, it’s their internal “action logic”—how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged. Relatively few leaders, however, try to understand their own action logic, and fewer still have explored the possibility of changing it. They should, because we’ve found that leaders who do undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies.

In this chapter, we offer an introduction to our work over the past 40 years of developing the distinctive integral theory, practice, and types of research known as Developmental Action Inquiry (DAI), including the most recent empirical and clinical findings using the Leadership Development Profile (LDP, Harthill).

Life in the 21st century is increasingly complex, paradoxical, and ambiguous, bringing into question the ways that graduate adult education programs function. In this article, we describe an action research study involving the method of collaborative developmental action inquiry (CDAI) conducted with key stakeholders of a program in adult education at a research in one university. By using the method of CDAI, the process of conducting the study using this method created opportunities for transformative learning (TL) to take place. Thus, the study process and outcomes suggest that the method and practices of CDAI could themselves create favorable conditions for TL to occur.

During the twentieth century, the social sciences have been riven by paradigm controversies—so much so that physical and natural scientists often view this apparent disarray as prima facie evidence that social studies do not deserve the name science. For example, behaviorist and gestalt psychologists argued past one another well into the third quarter of the century; rational choice economists and political scientists, on the one hand, and institutional economists and political theorists, on the other, have tended to turn away from one another; and physical anthropologists and quantitative sociologists can talk to one another more easily than either group can to cultural ethnologists or qualitative sociologists.

A nine-stage theory of organizational development, analogous to Erikson's (1959) theory of individual development, is introduced in order to provide a new perspective on the problems of creating new organizations, changing bureaucratic organizations, and envisioning qualitatively different kinds of organizing. Illustrations of the stages derive mainly from alternative educational settings.  

Work and leisure are commonly viewed as dichotomous and antithetical. The authors argue that this conceptual duality is unreflective, confounding the meaning of each term. They suggest that work and leisure are complements that in their highest states share core elements and are best understood in dynamic relation to each other. Their purpose in this essay is to better understand work by learning about its complement. The authors characterize leisure as the experiential quality of one’s time when one engages voluntarily and intentionally in awareness-expanding inquiry, which in turn generates ongoing, transforming
development throughout adulthood. Leisure is intrinsically rewarding, facilitating personal and organizational transformations that increase extrinsic economic value. In response to an increasingly dominant work ethic, the authors advocate that leisure receive the same level of scrutiny and respect that we as management scholars naturally give to work. Cultivating true leisure, they conclude, is more demanding than work itself.

This essay explores whether there is a general definition of the good life applicable cross-culturally to everyone, yet sufficiently open to permit infinitely idiosyncratic personal experience and lifetimes of inquiry. The essay proposes that four goods-good money, good work, good friends, and good questions-make up the good life, if they are pursued in the proper rank order of relative priority and with the proper blending. Readers are invited to test their own intuitive or explicit sense of the good life and the path toward it against the perspective offered here.

In the organizational learning literature a variety of concepts exists denoting some third order of organizational learning, notably that of ‘triple-loop’ learning. Despite this there has been no systematic, critical consideration of this concept or its origins, impeding both theoretical development and empirical research. Whilst ‘triple-loop learning’ has been inspired by Argyris and Schön, we establish that the term does not arise in their published work. Indeed, we argue that conceptualizations of triple-loop learning are diverse, often have little theoretical rooting, are sometimes driven by normative considerations, and lack support from empirical research. We map the major influences on these conceptualizations, including Bateson’s framework of levels of learning, and offer an original theoretical contribution that distinguishes between three conceptualizations of ‘triple-loop learning’. We also highlight implications for practice, and caution against the uncritical preference for ‘higher levels’ of learning that is sometimes discernible in the literature and in practice.

Contemporary organizations face critical challenges associated with possessing and leveraging leadership capabilities. Researchers studying leadership development have responded to this practical imperative, although research on the topic is still in the early stages of scientific development. In assessing the state of the science in leadership development, we review an array of theoretical and research approaches with the goal of stimulating thoughtful intellectual discourse regarding fundamental questions, such as, what is leadership, and what is development. We highlight the breadth of this phenomenon by reviewing theory and research that has considered the development of leadership in individuals, dyads, and teams/organizations. Additionally, we describe a set of proximal and distal signs that indicate leadership may be developing, and we promote experiences, interventions, and interactions as factors that enhance the leadership development process.

In the context of management and organization studies, the potential of action research for generating robust actionable knowledge has not been yet realized. While there are historical reasons for this with roots in different philosophies of social science, there are areas of common ground that may be explored fruitfully. This paper works from the insight that there are two key perspectives on action research: one from inside the action research community and one from outside. It explores how action research is a form of science in the realm of practical knowing and that this perspective provides an insight into how the views of action research from inside and from outside may be engaged. It proposes a general empirical method and the notion of interiority, based on the operations of human knowing, with a focus on how we know, rather than on what we know, as a synthesis, whereby the two perspectives on action research may be engaged.

Relationships and interactions should be an important focus of attention in organizational scholarship. In contrast to traditional research approaches that focus on independent, discrete entities, methodologies oriented to relational concerns in organizations allow researchers to study the intersubjective and interdependent nature of organizational life. In addition to providing historical and philosophical bases for a perspective which emphasizes relationality, we review the growing number of methods that capture relational aspects of organizational life. Examples include network analysis, and “complexity” modeling, correspondence analysis and participatory research, case study methods, the learning history approach, psychometrics, and action inquiry. Our goal is to establish a “palette” of methodological choices for the researcher interested in operationalizing a relational perspective within organizational research.

Examines the impact that a firm's history has on the future of the firm. Firms pass through a series of developmental phases as they grow. Each of these phases begins with a period of calm ("evolution") and ends with a management crisis ("revolution"). By considering the history of the firm, i.e. the previous phases, the management of a growing firm can anticipate the next crisis and better prepare to deal with it. Five dimensions are identified as key to the development of this model. They are the age of the organization, the size of the organization, stages of evolution, stages of revolution, and growth rate of the industry. Based on these dimensions, the five phases of development for growing firms are identified. Each of these five phases starts with growth. The management styles which highlight these stages are creativity, direction, delegation, coordination, and collaboration, respectively. The crises that end each phase are leadership, autonomy, control, and red tape, respectively. Based on these phases, several recommendations are made for managers including understanding where the firm is in the developmental sequence and recognizing the limited range of solutions.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866-1877) was a Russian philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, and composer of Armenian and Greek descent. Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential.

The music of Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff - Thomas De Hartmann. Pianists Michele Fedrigotti, Danilo Lorenzini, Michèle Thomasson. The pieces were recorded during the concert on January 29, 2001 at the Teatro della Cometa in Rome.