161 - Bill Torbert: A Response to Dave Snowden’s Critique of Developmental Theory

Bye. Welcome back to the Coaches Rising podcast. Today I'm going to be speaking with Bill Torbett. This is a response to a podcast I put out a few months ago with Dave Snowden and that podcast we were exploring. Dave's critiques of how we hold the notion of mindsets and adult development theory or vertical development. And so Bill and his associate Elaine Herdman Barker wrote a short response to that podcast.

And so I read that and I thought, oh, let's get Bill on and we'll talk about that. We'll talk about some of his responses to Dave's. of vertical development. So the main critiques that Bill will respond to are that vertical development theory can be wielded in an elitist hierarchical fashion, that it's too individualistic and lacking. context. It's too linear that they are treated in a way that's too simplistic. They become stereotypes and close down the emergent of novel.

and pluralistic forms of thinking and cognition. And I really appreciate where we end up in this podcast. We end up talking about love and Bill's health and death. and Bill's relationship to death. And I think it's really beautiful. So highly recommend you listen to this one all the way through. A few more words about Bill. He is a thought leader in adult development and leadership. He's generated the global leadership profile for measuring a person's current leadership capacities.

He's the author of several books, including Seven Transformations of Leadership, Action Inquiry, and his most recent book, Numskull, The Theater of Inquiry. He taught leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. and at the Carroll Graduate School of Management at Boston College. And his intent is to leave a legacy of persons capable of practicing collaborative developmental action inquiry.

Okay, let's dive in. Here's the podcast with Bill Torbett. Okay, so, well, Bill Torbett, it's great to see you again. You actually taught a session. in a Coach's Rising program quite a number of years ago. So it's really great to reconnect with you. And yeah, you know, I just want to share how much I've appreciated your work over the years as well. So how are you today? I'm just fine. Thank you. And very happy to be here with you and the people who will be listening to this. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's interesting. We have this conversation because of a podcast we put out a few months ago with Dave Snowden, where he was critiquing. mindsets and developmental theory the way that some people hold that. And what I really liked was that you and someone else co-authored a short paper responding to some of his critiques.

And so I thought, oh, well, let's get Bill back on the podcast and we can have a conversation about that and expand on some of these points. So that's what we'll... do today so so why don't we do that let's move through some of these um yeah i mean the first thing that you wrote about and then that dave spoke about was how developmental theory can be wielded in a kind of elitist

hierarchical fashion you know and he's even said um you know if i look here that it can actually you know um kind of have stress on people you know it's highly evaluative and can even create stress on people when they receive a kind of diagnosis of what stage they're at.

And I'm just curious for you how you feel about that critique, basically, what comes up for you? Well, it is very easy to make. developmental theory and elitist enterprise and a put me above you enterprise. I'm better than you are. If one. is treating developmental theory as an answer, which one uses to categorize other people.

possible to use it that way, obviously, because some people do. It's also possible to use it that way in a kind of scientific testing way where you're making a kind of hypothesis about the other person's developmental action logic in order to be able to, well, either communicate better with that person and discover with that person what the next steps in growth are for each of you.

Or it can be used as a way of putting a person down. And people at the earlier action logics will use it that way and will want to. hurry as fast as they can up to the later action logics, imagining it as a kind of mental enterprise. Whereas, in fact, development, at least in the theories that we use, is a holistic person development and requires emotional development and practical development. as well as a kind of greater intellectual complexity.

You know, he's launching a critique that everybody that's involved seriously with developmental theory and practice has to take in and apply to oneself. Is one just talking theory? and considering that a conversation about development. And to what extent am I entering situations with conclusions about people and the setting as opposed to questions about them? How to approach the situation in an inquiring mode is a skill that, you know, one has to learn and it's easy to become.

It's easy to become uneasy in a situation and want to assert oneself to show that one is a... a lead participant in this situation, a lead interpreter of what's going on. But as I've often pointed out, the developmental process moves from a tendency to want to use power unilaterally in a situation, which is part of this, I know what's going on and I know better than you. Actually, it's the early stages, opportunist diplomat.

expert that are the most unilateral, and they assume that their worldview is the way the world is, and that power is unilateral. by nature, that there is no such thing. It never occurs to most people that there might be something called mutual power. That seems like a contradiction in terms. In fact, toward the later stages, one is wishing to become more and more mutual with whatever one's engagement is because...

It's only through mutuality that people gain trust in one another and therefore only under conditions of mutuality that we're going to really reveal ourselves to one another and be vulnerable about where our growth may lie. So the. It's only people had early action logics that treat developmental theory as though it is an elitist enterprise.

I guess I'll stop there for a second and let you push me one way or another. Yeah, great. Do you think it might be easy to fall into the kind of subtle trap?

of um you know um that kind of power because it i think and again i want to be careful not speaking for dave too much because um you know uh i've only read some of his critiques but And I think one of the things they're saying is that a lot of coaches are kind of... saying, hey, I've got this theory and it can, you know, it's like, I'm going to show you where you need to go. You know, I'm going to tell you where you're at and I'm going to show you where you need to go.

that it seems that maybe some coaches doing that are still not at those lower action logics. Maybe they are. I don't know. I guess my point is, do you think it's... still easy for people to fall into that trap of playing that game, even when they might be in some of the more mature action logics. Well, yes. First of all, up until very recently, power itself has been defined by social scientists.

as well as by most power possessors, as being unilateral. You know, when you ask how can you demonstrate power, people say, well, if A can get B...

to move to C, even though B doesn't want it, then A has power over B. That was a strictly unilateral way of understanding power. So it's so... common in our entire culture, and the sort of Hobbesian notion of how the king has to have absolute... power or otherwise there will be civil war and disorganization is still the theory that God's most international thinking about how nations relate to one another. And so it is very easy for everyone to move into that.

that purely coercive view of power, but even the next kind of power, diplomatic power, which I call charming power, which has a whole different feel to it, but it's still unilateral. In its nature, it's still trying to manipulate the other person into doing something that's for my good. And same thing with expert. You know, we talk about hard power. soft power, logistical power, smart power, we say smart power. Now we've been able to distinguish opportunist diplomat and expert types of power.

But they're all unilateral in nature. The expert is trying to get the right answer and to persuade you of what the right answer is. So, yes, it's very easy to fall into that mode, especially for intellectuals who... are used to trying to win arguments. And that means you're sort of sumo wrestling, pushing each other around. And I think also one could say that In most cases,

power is sort of the last quality that gets transformed to a later stage. So you might be at a later action logic in all sorts of ways, but when it comes down to a situation in which... there's a power concern, you're more likely to lag in the action logic you're using than you might be. if the topic is or the concern is love. Well, the word love implies mutuality, but there's still lots of love that's done at the early stages that's not mutual.

You know, you're going to like this, whether you like it or not. I love you. You've got to do what I want to do. But the word itself has a connotation of mutuality, which the word power doesn't necessarily have. Yeah. yeah and i wonder i wonder if um i might be wrong that a form of that power you know the And I think Dave speaks about this too, but you mentioned it, you know, it's actually better to inquire rather than kind of perhaps judge or place, you know.

definition over someone and you know maybe that's one of the critiques too that like people hold these in a simplistic way you know like it's it's um and it's a prescriptive judgment of a mindset of how someone should be, which doesn't perhaps allow for a kind of novelty or pluralistic kind of set of beliefs.

thoughts to to emerge you know so i guess i'm mixing up a few things here but you know what what do you think about like could you say more about that tendency that people might have to fall into

of like simplistically applying these descriptions of stages to people as opposed to how they could hold it in a more inquiry based? Well, First of all, I think an important thing to say here is that the whole way of... using developmental theory that is in effect being talked about in this kind of question is a third-person notion. Can I find an authoritative judgment?

of your action logic or of my action logic. And as long as it's approached from a third person point of view, it's going to have a tendency to apply labels to people and be... not very fluid. But, you know, when we ask people or they ask us to be able to fill out the global leadership profile. The presumption is that there's an interest in personal development on their part and on our part as coaches. And so we ask people to make their own estimate of their developmental stage, which we treat.

as equally significant as the third-person analysis of the test. And then we suggest that people ought to do some debriefing with a coach. In the case of the debriefing, if there's a difference between the first person and the third person estimates of a person's action logic, the coach can use... the behavior that occurs during the coaching session as a second person way of working with a person. So you try to triangulate among the first, second, and third person.

estimates. But in the meantime, you're also, you're depending on where the client is, you're Sorry, I've reached an age where I drop things in the middle of a sentence. The effort in development becomes to see... In what circumstances might I try an expert form of power? In what circumstances might I try? a redefining type of power. And the first person is trying to look at themselves also in the midst of action, not just look at other people. And so to what degree?

Am I actually still connected to your question or have I gone off on my own into my own world here for a minute? and lost contact. So I think that way of thinking about measuring an action logic is helpful. to not have it be something that's just applied by someone to somebody else. Yeah. And I hear you kind of, I mean, maybe this is good to bring in the... critique about maybe these developmental theories are too individualistic.

And it maybe doesn't include context. In one of Dave's papers, he writes about 4E cognition as well. kind of cognition is embedded and embodied and enacted and so on um and and you know you can see how these critiques weave together because that maybe it's also good to bring in here the critique of also that uh are these are these things models seen as being too linear you know like that each stage unfolds in a linear way um but yeah maybe we take that first one of like yeah

that um how do we define what the individual is uh do a lot of people hold the models as you know focusing wholly on the individual and then something's lost uh yeah how do you Well, I like to start at the point of saying, well, the theory itself says that as we move toward later action logics. we pay more and more attention to the context that we're in. We don't want to act in a general way. We want to act in a way that is sensitive.

to these other persons I'm with right now, and the context of the organizing process that we're embedded in as we talk. So, you know, in my case... The individual level theory is complemented by a parallel organizational development theory and indeed another parallel scientific development theory. So it is very concerned. is equally concerned with the collective as it is with the individual. So it's true that the...

The GLP, the measure, is a measure of an individual. I spent years trying to develop a usable measure of corporate development. I have the theory, and it... quite specifically describes the activities at each stage on a corporate level. But it is very difficult to develop a measure of that because everybody who will be asked to

rate the organization or categorize the organization will be members of the organization or people that are close enough to know something about the corporation, and they all have their individual action logic. So you're going to get a mishmash. You're not going to necessarily get a clear view of the organization from the individual's perspective. People at earlier levels of a large organization are...

Their group or unit may have an action logic which is quite different from the corporation as a whole. And their members, however, if they're asked about the corporation, they see it. through the experiences they have in their own unit. So that has been a difficult problem. We've been able to get...

expert raters who know the theory well and have been involved in consulting to organizations at different stages. We can get a group of three raters to score the action logic of the organization in a highly reliable way that we can use in our empirical studies to show that leaders at the later action logics, in fact, are better at helping an organization as a whole transform. And that, of course, is itself one example of how the theory doesn't just focus on the individual.

So that's at least the beginning of response to the first question. Yeah. And therefore... Do you think then, yeah, context dependent, it could be, you know, holding the notion that someone's at a particular stage of development is a good way to think about it? Or is it like, yeah, you know.

um going through your day in different contexts certain particular um you know ways of seeing and being in the world may come to the forefront you know so that there's a variation a variable it's much more nuanced And, you know, I mean, again, I don't know if you remember Dave speaking about this idea of, he said, I like to see them as modulators, that these stage, I think he says these stage descriptions are, yeah, they're valid, they're useful.

and actually important and empowering, but I see them as modulators of experience rather than stages of development. So, yeah. Well, it's a sort of... empirical and experiential study to determine whether there is a sense in which they unfold systematically in a predictable...

way or not. But it isn't the only thing that's going on in developmental theories. First of all, it's sort of odd to call it, one understands why it's called a linear progression, because it's, especially at the beginning, people present it as a... a set of stairs up to heaven, and you climb up the stairs and you reach heaven at the end of it. And, you know, all of us who are in the field, or at least many of us, have been working like hell.

to get rid of that staircase version of the theory because, of course, there's each change. from one action logic to another is anything but a linear process. It's a process where your sense of linearity gets challenged seriously. And what made sense before no longer makes it. same kind of sense and one has to really explore, one can get stuck.

in between stages for long periods of time, depending on one's life circumstances, not just at the stages, but in between the stages. And again, at the later... action logics, one shows more capability of seeing the fluidity that you were talking about in one's day, for example. I think in the end, the movement is beyond an intellectual cognition of what's going on to a post-cognitive consciousness of what you're actually doing minute in, minute out. And...

And you develop a practice which isn't rooted in the mind so much as it is in looking at the conversation between you and... the outer world you're dealing with at the moment. And one does see that one uses different action logics at different times of day. I mean, I drive. in a highly diplomatic way. I very rarely go to the other side of the road to drive out of a feeling of freedom and so forth. No, you need diplomatic rules.

in order to make traffic move. And sometimes I become an opportunist when I'm driving and try to cut across a line that stopped there in the right-hand lane. Why can't I get another? mile ahead and then merge into that line before the exit. I'm pretty good at that. So there are moments when one acts as an opportunist. I seem to not regret my opportunist moments too much. Maybe someday I will learn to regret it because I get some penalty for it. I have had to pay a few traffic tickets in my time.

So, but, you know, that's how one days ago, I mean, I spent a lot of my time in expert still at this age, writing little papers and. responding to people, helping people with their dissertations, sitting here at the computer in that manner.

It is a variable thing. And one of the capacities, if one has this sort of post-cognitive awareness, is to say, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're off balance here. You're pushing something too hard. You're not getting a response. You need to try something new, maybe really new. And in my... numbskull in the theater of inquiry book that came out a couple of years ago. I demonstrate just how much of a numbskull I have been.

because very often I have misread the situation at first and done something that got me walloped in one sense or another. Usually I gradually learn from that situation and get back in the saddle again. But, you know, it's hard to know. it's hard to be right all the time um we try we try i mean i mean uh What you're speaking to perhaps does fit with, again, another critique I've heard, and we're kind of speaking about it where it's like it can become prescriptive.

a mindset idea. Like if, you know, if this, then do that, do this, then do that, then do this. And when I hear you talk about this post cognitive awareness, it's like, um it's kind of mediating and and um it's checking in isn't it it's like oh um like what what's happening now and what's wanting to emerge you know um like it's it's evaluating Like, is there the optimum fit between

kind of the inner and outer I don't know quite know how to phrase it but and that seems perhaps more aligned again you know forgive me Dave if I'm misrepresenting your views I'm trying to I'm trying to be the voice of Dave here a little bit he's a bright guy too so But, you know, it's more like, you know, this, then check, you know, then that, then check. It's a different, yeah. Right, right, right. Well, as I said in my paper, I agree with Dave on that.

to put it in a kind of more formal way, from the beginning of... my academic life I've worked with a notion that you've probably seen if you've seen any of my writing of the four territories of experience which you know I say that you know Everybody is concerned with what is the basic matter of the world. And most scientists nowadays say it's the material outside world. That's what's really real.

And some other people say, no, it's the mind that's really real. And it sort of constructs the world for us. And I say, well, they're both real. Not only that, there's an element in between the outside world and my thought, which is my practice, which is my bodily movement, my embodied practice, which most of us don't pay much attention to. That is the paying attention.

to what you're doing from moment to moment. And then in addition to mind beyond mind, so to speak, is this post-cognitive awareness, which you don't get. uh for free you actually have to to find it and allow it to develop as a as a capacity within yourself, which requires, in a sense, constant practice. Anytime I check in...

I tend not to be aware of all four of those territories at once. So what does it mean to come back in contact with them and then... and use that process to check to what degree I'm actually responding to the outside world and am in a good dance with it. right now, a good conversation with it. So yes, it's not just a cognitive check-in. It's a whole system. check in, and one is seeking a kind of congruity ultimately among those four layers, both in oneself.

And in political and organizational situations, one is engaged with.

You know, I think just what springs to mind is a moment that occurred years ago. Our department was meeting with the academic vice president because. He and other people had said we were going to get money for a PhD program. They'd already given money to the finance department, and they had said at the same time they would give us. Well, the finance department was making more money for the university. And we suspected that that was why the finance department came first.

And the vice president had already said once or twice, well, not this year in the budget, but next year. And it hadn't happened. So we met with him. And once again, at the end of the meeting, he said, well, next year you'll. will be able to make a budget. And everybody seemed inclined to just nod and accept this. But I said, well, look, you know, you've said this several times.

And it feels like there's more at stake now. I would really like to have a handshake on the matter. Will you do this next year? And he shook my hand and we did get them. PhD program the next year. So there was a moment there where I was... sort of trying to check the situation, the context, and were we likely to get the program if we just nodded our approval, or did it require a kind of confrontation to shake him out of the easy place?

was in. Now, I don't know if that's a very good example, but I certainly didn't plan to do that in advance. It arose out of the immediacy of how people were acting in the situation. Yeah, yeah. And I think, again, it fits with, you know, thinkings around, you know, complex systems and emergence that, yeah, in the moment you were able to... um kind of check what's happening here and in alignment with what's important to you and and then a next action arose you know like or uh you know uh

a test you know you were testing something out like what if what if i shake his hand and um right i mean that might have gone wrong of course he might say how dare you you know my word is my word and um get him out of here, you guys. Yeah, I think that also fits with a critique I've heard around some types of coaching. I mean, maybe this doesn't quite fit, but I'm fitting it together of like close the gap coaching, you know, which can also, I think, happen in developmental theory where.

You know, you kind of maybe get assessed and this is where you are. And then you kind of have an idea of where I want to go. And there's a kind of effort to make it to that place. You know, some kind of plan is created. and um you know that well actually how is that again overly simplistic and uh proposed by other people it's more like again starting where you are in the moment and there's certain enabling constraints and catalysts of of someone's development that emerges

And there's a more kind of organic, natural, perhaps, process involved than one that's like overly layered onto prescriptive and perhaps simplistic. Does that make sense?

Well, right. And one certainly has to be on the lookout for that all the time. And one has to be on the lookout for those elements of the clients. engagement and response that indicate whether such and such a possible path that the coach opens up or presents is really... finding a resonance with the client. I mean, if the client is just accepting the advice in a passive way, that

seems dangerous for the likelihood that the client will go very far in making that major move from one action logic to another. But I mean, it definitely is necessary once you get... Beyond Achiever, you get movement beyond Achiever, the main action logic. Societal action logic is orange achiever still in this age. And so the societal norms support development up to achiever to a certain degree and more for some people than others.

reaching the achiever action logic is a significant accomplishment still in the society. But then moving to redefining or transforming or alchemical. All of that is moving against the social climate and norm. Now, we've seen in the last 20, 25 years, there is a significant movement toward redefining because national and familial and all the norms in smaller. settings are being challenged by the

the globalization of everything. And nobody's action logic is quite as sacred as before. Iranian teenage girls risking death to not wear their headscarves. There's a redefining movement in very striking terms. So it is helpful to have. planning support from a coach about how to move from one to the next, but it has to be subtle. It has to connect with the person's real motivation.

or otherwise, they'll just drop it. And it's important to create a new sort of parallel environment to their everyday life, which may be a small group of colleagues who are working together on a biweekly or monthly evening meeting. to face up to the challenges they have, they each have in their corporate setting, let's say, assuming they are in a corporate setting, how can they take the difficult...

situations they encounter and handle them better. And to what degree does thinking about it at the next stage of development help them imagine an action which... you know, isn't so risky that they won't in fact take it when the time comes, but will inevitably be risky because it'll be based on a scenario that they don't naturally.

generate right yet. And yeah, terrible time expressing anger. Having grown up in a house where my father was a diplomat, literally, he always thought that maybe I had named the action logic after him. And I tried to persuade him that he was... beyond that action logic, even if his profession was diplomacy. But neither of my parents was conflict Well, they were both conflict averse, let's say. I never saw a fight between them.

in my entire youthful life. So I learned how not to conflict. And it happened, seemed to have to happen by my submerging. times when I might be angry. Even if I did get angry, I would get over the anger very quickly and not necessarily hold the other person to account. So I literally had to... A friend said, if nothing you've tried has worked, try the last thing in the world you would think of doing in this situation, which sounded crazy, but it's... in a sense, a perfect developmental hint.

Sometimes to break out of your current prison, developmental prison, you need to invent new action. You know, I remember a time when I was just, nothing was solving the problem I had with this person. And I finally remembered this. this advice, but I had no idea why I should be angry. In fact, I thought I was going to completely amate this person if I got angry.

But I just started to get angry without knowing what I was going to say. I just started to roar at the other person. And then words formed in my mouth without my cognitive supervision.

And I expressed how much I loved the person and how I didn't feel as though she... received my love or appreciated my love and immediately the dynamics were completely switched and we came out of the argumentative mode and into a much softer and loving mode and you know I was just astonished at what it did but it I was able to experiment with getting angry and in important organizational situations after that.

Perhaps because I'm so leery of getting angry, the times when I have gotten angry have been obviously developmentally useful, both to me and to the... to the other person or the organizational situation. So I guess that wandered from saying that somebody needs a lot of support.

Well, I guess I got support from my friend who told me to do the last thing I would ever think of doing. Yeah. And what I like about that is it's a kind of generative. uh invitation or generative ontology you know like to do the opposite of what you might do it's not it's not a prescription or i mean it could become a prescription couldn't it

But in that case, it was more of an invitation and you didn't know what was going to happen, but you tried it out. And that's where I... think about um you know like sometimes uh the critique can be that these stages then become stereotypes which are simplistic and um maybe You know, it reduces the opportunity for diversity of cognition or thinking. And even that people maybe try to game the.

the tests you know and they kind of know the answers and um there's a critique there but i also you know what you were sharing i was like and yeah it can be i found Sometimes like locating myself, you know, I'm doing that in inverted commas and kind of hearing about the next stage can actually help open up new possibilities. It can open up distinctions. and ways of seeing things which are empowering, which are generative as well. So I see that both ways. Yeah, well, it definitely can.

they can be reduced to stereotypes. And that's, in a way, a danger with almost any... kind of knowledge that begins to arise in the social situation. It first is full of new life, Black Lives Matter. And then it gets reduced to a slogan over a period of years rather than developed into a meaningful social movement. I'm not saying that Black Lives Matter hasn't developed into a meaningful social movement. I think to a certain degree it has. Me too.

would be a kind of example that has disappointed me because it seems to me that the first step, yes, is for women to be able to say how they have been mistreated by men. But, you know, then the next step ought to be, okay, men, what do you need to learn in order not to mistreat women? Well, that immediately gets characterized as political correctness.

And it's been hard for that octave of development to move ahead to the point where you have loving mutual relationships rather than hateful unilateral force. And we need to get the men more involved in self-examination. The women's movement back in the 70s went into consciousness-raising groups with one another, and they actually helped. one another develop beyond a kind of a diplomat agreeableness to the existing social norms to creating.

new norms. Once again, it would have been helpful if the men developed a men's liberation movement at that time. And there were various men's group and men's... men's movements, but they didn't reach a very large percentage of the population, not as large as the women's groups reached. Yeah, yeah.

yeah the value in um i think you know i'm hearing in this the the the value in again when things are born out of a genuine evolution emergence of something important in response to attention and then they become reified you know and simplified and they lose that kind of attunement and relationship

you know and then people become other the thing becomes this fixed thing and um and and i've got some other questions i want to make sure i ask you before you know we get to our time because you talked before about this post-cognitive consciousness. And I know that you wrote about that in your response, you know, that one of the critiques was that these theories can...

or people can conflate complexity of thinking with presence of embodied awareness and post-cognitive consciousness. And actually, I wondered if you could say more about... How you see that critique? What do you mean by presence of embodied awareness? And we've been speaking about post-cognitive consciousness. Yeah, because in one way, it seems like you're saying earlier that, oh, yeah, this.

This post-cognitive consciousness is actually, it is conducive to becoming more attuned, perhaps more complex. But the critique is saying that it conflates the two. Could you say something more about this point? Can I read it from the paper that you wrote? Okay, sure. Maybe that actually helps. Snowden's critique of adult development theory is conflating. complexity of thinking with presence of embodied awareness and post-cognitive consciousness is widely and importantly valid.

Uniquely, though, the CDAI approach posits four distinct but intertwined ontological territories of experience. I think we talked about this before, didn't we? Like post-cognitive conscious mind and bodied awareness in the material world. To be aware in the moment of... how one's own and others' strategy and practice are affecting the situation requires cultivating bare attention of post-cognitive consciousness. A person continually encounters this challenge and the oscillation between

the transforming alchemical action logic. Does that kind of bring up more stuff? We can always move on from that one. Yeah, I guess I...

You know, there are some versions of developmental theory, mostly associated with Michael Commons, that focus entirely, it seems to me, on... mental development and mental complexity, whereas I'm talking about a post-mental complexity. So, you know, can... The ability to be aware of what's going on in the moment, in this situation, in myself, in the particular persons I'm dealing with, in the umbrella, institutional. setting that we are in, and not just have thoughts about them, but to accept.

signals that one perhaps can't even turn into language immediately, like the example I gave of starting to shout in anger without knowing what I was going to say. I mean, one of the things that I have learned is that... I don't have to know what I'm going to say before I start speaking. In fact, most of us don't. We just take it for granted that we're going to be somewhat coherent.

in what we're saying, but to actually live with the awareness that I don't know what I'm going to say next can be difficult. And of course, many of us are. very busy in our minds trying to diagnose the situation we are in without reference to how we are acting in the moment. without reference to a quality of consciousness that goes beyond my body, that actually includes the situation. I'm not thinking about the situation, but I'm aware. situation. And the, you know, Western social science...

doesn't deal with that. It doesn't deal with first person or second person knowledge, really. It doesn't deal with what is the kind of knowledge that you're generating when you intervene in a particular moment. It's very good at knowledge that's created over time and analyzed after the fact.

But what about the huge realm of knowledge that can be known in the moment, can be tested for with... in a situation which is not going to get you new third-person knowledge right away, probably, but it may get you extremely important first- and second-person knowledge right away, which may be all that's needed in the situation.

what comes up for me is is like something i've been thinking around and again you know i'm aware like there's something implicit here and what i want to say it's not formulated It's actually emerging as I'm in relationship to you and we engage and I'm speaking now. And maybe this points to some of the critiques. Again, I'll try and keep weaving those in, you know, like Nora Bateson has been kind of.

You know, and again, I'll just because of time, I'm just going to throw in something like, you know, even she's been kind of looking at this from her perspective saying, have we have we held? uh what is the self basically and what what is the starting place of some of these theories and what they hold the self to be perhaps it points to that that um maybe it's focused on the individual too much but you know what where is the boundary of the self

How can we actually begin to define what that is? And, you know, how much has that emerged out of kind of European-American thinking? And what other ways of... thinking might exist around the world that have not been fully included inside it. I'm going to bring in a few people's perspectives here. So, you know, like, for example, more animistic.

ways of seeing, which have been, I think, when I've looked into it, the predominant ways of human beings have related to the world, not as dead, inert matter, but as a living. You know, things are living and I'm made of my relationships to those things. So, you know, people like Spring Cheng of them came in and said, you know, hey, these theories aren't honoring the great wisdom.

inside of these what we would call earlier stages of development, which, you know, from an European American perspective, it's so easy to say lower is worse, higher is better. There's just these implicit. biases but you know the the incredible complexity of um intelligence in some of these you know what are clusters like lower levels of you know like you know, like indigenous intelligence in jungles, you know, to navigate and commune and relate incredibly sophisticated.

And so, yeah, I've just been thinking about, therefore, yeah, how are we limited by how we hold what the self is, you know? Yeah, there's... There's other modes of knowing and perceiving and intelligence that are actually essential and that can inform us in the moment, such as awareness itself, you know.

Well, I think that, first of all, that the self... changes in nature through development. I mean, each action logic represents a different way of being a self. And as one moves... to the later action logics, the self is more and more inclusive of the outside world and the inside world. And I think the the early cultures put a greater emphasis on knowledge in practice.

on the practice level of the ontological spectrum and on the post-cognitive consciousness. So in the West, we have focused primarily on mind and matter. And there's these two other equally significant ontological territories that I think were more emphasized in indigenous cultures. And the movement toward alchemical is a movement beyond any fixed state of self.

fixed self-state, and it's quite a fluid one, is the transforming action logic. But the alchemical action logic, it really relates very, very strongly to indigenous forms of consciousness and awareness. So I do think that we need to transcend the Western emphasis on the expert and achiever.

stages, which have to do with manipulating the outside world. And I think my hope is that the notion of a fourfold monism... of ontological fourfold equality among these four territories of experience is a way of moving back toward a more inclusive. way of knowing and doing. I don't know. Yeah. No, because I love that because it feels it fits in with the...

transition we're in I mean you know what is the transition we're in it's hard to define it you know but something's going on but at least people are talking about meaning a lot and it does seem to me In my personal experience, there's a disconnection from experience that... you know might be emphasized in some of these theories where how some people hold it yeah not in the way you just described it it's very different but you know it's almost like that um we we grow in maturity and then

uh we become more and more sophisticated and abstracted in our thinking you know but actually in that abstraction there's a disconnection from the immediacy of our experience and nature and others. You know, Gaia, we synthesize certainly the whole, you know, world in this frame of Gaia, you know, which symbolizes so much for us. But does that term actually bring us?

closer to experience in a way that's meaningful and fulfilling and actually allows us to solve some of these crises and challenges we face. I'm not sure, you know. So I think I'm encouraged when I hear you speak about these four domains and the balancing out of them, because it does feel like, yeah, maybe there's different vectors that we can... we can kind of bring in that will bring more meaning and creative collaborative solutions and mutual power.

And feel free to kind of just challenge what I said, you know, it's just kind of me waxing lyrical. Or tell me how amazing it was. Now I feel I'm being forced into saying no, I'm just playing around now. I'm just playing around. Well, feel free to respond to what I said. We've got a few minutes left, and I just wonder if there's anything you want to share that we haven't.

spoken about. I'm really appreciating your willingness to just explore some of these things and share your experience. Well, I think I want to say... something that has been a little bit obvious in our conversation, which is that I'm starting to lose it. mentally. I lose my place in conversations from time to time, and it's pretty easy to remind me where I was, and I don't...

I don't feel fundamentally embarrassed about it, but it is obviously a little strange for an audience. There'll probably come a time when... when I'll need to judge that I can't be really as much help if I'm forgetting what's going on all the time. It also makes me feel... I'm sort of constantly questioning myself whether I am providing any value in what I'm saying. There's a sort of self-doubt.

At the same time as a desire not to get embarrassed about it. So I just want to let your listeners know that this. And so maybe to link it to what we have been talking about, you know, the question of what I'm trying to do moment to moment, this idea of reconnecting with all four territories at once. is a practice that has become even more important to me and more central to me. I feel like I'm doing the right thing when I...

try to be more aware of the four territories at once. And so I'm glad we got to that point in the conversation of sharing more about those.

I suppose it also is connected to the increasingly important question about death and what it means. It's a question that I have... actually thought I have been holding my whole life and with a kind of, well, first of all, not a fear of death. There's obviously something transformational that happens at death. And in a way, all the action logic transformations in life are many life and death experiences to go through more of those.

Action logic transformations may prepare one for the ultimate one of facing our own death and being, you know, being... facing our death in an inquiring manner. And Socrates did that, and other people we can point to have you know, found a way to die that dignifies them. Death with dignity seems to me to be an impact. incredibly important slogan for our global civilization. So I find that...

You know, what does it mean now in this latest stage where I'm sort of beginning to lose my mind to dementia? How can my preparation for death be even stronger? And, you know, what does it really mean? Yeah, well, I'm really touched by what you share, you know, the vulnerability of... you're sharing and, um, the way you speak about it and, um, yeah. And, and this, this notion of death. Yeah.

Yes, individually, yeah, we're going to die, you know, but yeah, it does feel collectively right now. Perhaps we're facing deaths, you know, collective deaths and all. forms and shapes from the climate to certain ways we've seen who we are and what the world is and how we can live together. Yeah, you know, for me, you're embodying something important, you know, in this whole conversation today, just the humility and your sincerity around.

this work. And so I just want to appreciate you, you know, and offer my love in this moment to you. That touches me in turn. And I really appreciate the quality of your questioning during this session. And I've really appreciated being able to be with you.

Would you like to point people in any direction to your work or to the work of others in this conversation? I'm sure they would love to explore more. Well, I mean, my numbskull in the theater of inquiry book, whose subtitle is Transforming Self. friends, organizations, and social science. It does try to bring together everything I've done in a, the main part of the book is a memoir.

but it tries to show how I eventually discovered that I myself seem to be going through these action logics. So it's a sort of an easy introduction to them through personal. stories. But it also includes a number of appendices, which I hope give a sense of the overall philosophy that... develops from the four territories of experience. Experience, not idea, but experience. So that book is probably...

the best way. And it tells, well, the story of the death of my grandmother, which is... very, very important moment in my life. And then it also describes the death of a man named Minor White, who was one of the leading photographers in the mid-20th century and who... became a pal of mine in the spiritual work that we were both in together in his death, I give its own.

not exactly chapter, but intermission or something for. So there are, you know, reflections about death and how to approach death in that book. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Well, yeah, then I just want to say thanks again. And I'm really happy to be sharing this. And yeah, just go well. Go well. All right. You too. And I hope this has been of some help to the people who may listen in. Yeah. Take care, Joel. Yeah, thanks, Bill. I'm sure it will be. Okay. Bye-bye. All right. Bye-bye.

Here we are, we're at the end of the podcast. Just a heads up again, if you're not on our mailing list and you want to stay in the loop about other things we create, then head to coachesrising.com. Put your name in the signup box there. You'll also find some of our other offerings, our online trainings for coaches there. And just want to end by wishing you well. And I'll see you again next time. Thank you.