Ep. 7 | practice, Practice, PRACTICE (with Bill Torbert)

2:48PM Nov 8, 2023

Speakers:

Heidi Brooks

Keywords:

numbskull

people

experience

students

learning

inquiry

unilateral

practice

work

theory

faculty

thought

context

call

log

part

rule

leadership

great

bill

This is learning through experience. I'm Heidi Brooks and today I'll be interviewing Dr. Bill Torbert, Bill Torbert, and his powerful ideas have guided me in teaching and advising adults about leadership and effectiveness in the world of work for many years. Bill is a professor of management emarat is at Boston College, as well as a co founder of global leadership associates. He received a BA in Political Science and Economics and a PhD in Administrative Sciences from Yale University. Bill is the author of at least 10 books. We're talking about two of these books, action, inquiry, and numbskull, a fear of inquiry. Interestingly, we're not going to talk about his 1973 book called learning from experience, but I just have to mention it here, given the underlying and overt similarity of the titles of the podcast and that book, so that it is no coincidence that I consider him a mentor and a guide. I'm glad you're here.

Well, as always, I'm delighted to be able to join you in something.

Yeah, I met you for the first time, maybe around 2008 or so as you were peeling out of Babson. And I met you in the context of the organizational behavior teaching society, faculty tea group, which you were joining with Esther, and you were one of my favorite parts of that experience just really introduced me into your version of adult development and collaborative inquiry was really exciting. And I've continued to do that work in direct and overt ways and in subtle and skilled and clunky ways. But I'm very much in the tradition. So thank you, and you not very subtly gave me your actual inquiry book at the time. And I still have the signed copy that I that is dog eared and well loved. And

well, as you know, I have super enjoyed my experiences with you. And I'm delighted to have this opportunity to share back and forth. I love what you do, how you organize yourself with these things.

So So Thanks for joining. So I have I have some questions that I would love to to ask you. And some things that I'd like to offer. And if you wanted to come with a few stories about things that you've learned through experience that you'd be willing to tell and talk about, and thought that'd be a fun place to start.

You know, I would like to hold up this.

So Bill is holding up a copy of his latest book, which is called numbskull in the theater of inquiry. What was your intention with that pace?

It was to first of all sort of bring together in the most comprehensive way that I could. My life's work and my life. It's a memoir in the main and and as I went along, I discovered that the theory that I use to help me think about managerial and leadership issues also applies to me. Amazing. So the endnotes to the chapters talk about how the events of that chapter probably represent a certain approach to leadership and management and how I gradually moved to more complex and mature approaches, perhaps, but also, as the title says, been something of a numbskull. And I've managed to create problems for myself amongst my many experiments. And in fact, it seems to me that, that in order to really learn something when can't much help but to go beyond what one knew before, and enter swamps that one didn't know was there. So I've tried to give a relatively honest recapitulation of those, but I've also tried to bring all the different aspects of the theories together in the appendices. It's both personal and professional. Okay,

well, so maybe we can kind of lace back to some of the personal is there something about who you were as a young child that would have predicted the path that you wound up following? This is the connection between this latest book numbskull and how he came to learn through experience who he is and how we use that in the world. There's a pretty concrete connection. Let's listen.

Well, you bring immediately one famous in my life incident, which is that when I was a boy scout, they apparently the troop or something acquired some land out in the country. And the idea was we're going to build a campsite there maybe eventually a sort of permanent campsite that we could return to And the first time we went out there it was winter. And there was some snow on the ground out there. And there was a little stream that ran through the middle of the land. And there were some logs that had fallen down on the other side. And there was a nice campsite building place on this side. So we wanted to get the logs from the other side to this side plus to make a bridge. One log was already lying across the river, the stream, and somebody needed to sort of clamber across that log and tie a rope to another log, and then, you know, have it drawn, then it would be easier for people to cross with to logs and so forth. So I immediately volunteered. And just to be sure that people understood how good my balance was, decided I should I keep my hands in my pockets, rather than putting everybody can see what's coming in the story. Except that the unreasonable way in which I did it, that is I got halfway across without any trouble. I did have pretty good balance. But that thought invaded my mind that if I were to fall in an entirely hypothetical motion, that would be embarrassing. And so what would be less embarrassing would be to dive in. So I turned around, and I dove in with my hands still in my pockets. Now, man, this was a shallow stream, with rocks sticking out from it. And my head here where the divot right here. That's where I struck a rock was using water of course, because it was winter, but I leapt out of the river, obviously, I guess in shock, but I said, this is great. I said, Now we have the opportunity to learn how to build a stretcher and take me to the hospital. And after saying that, I fell into convulsions and lost track of things, but they did build a stretcher and got me to the hospital for my stitches. So this is one of the reasons why my name is numbskull on the title of the book. Yes. It predicts my lifetime of doing kind of numb scaly and things emotionally, intellectually and physically,

with great enthusiasm and a kind of sophisticated plan, and great hopes for the outcome.

Exactly.

The reason I'm so delighted to hear that you hear my laughter is that this moment is a great example of learning through experience. And Bill Tolbert is a master of learning through experience. He fundamentally sums it up in what he calls action inquiry, which we're about to hear a lot more about. But this moment of actually telling his experience in such open and humorous ways with humility is an example of the process at work. I'm completely delighted.

Sometimes, of course, I had gratifying outcomes. But there were plenty of times when the initial outcome at least, was much less gratifying. But often that could be corrected.

And you went on to be drawn to a number of these kinds of experiences that were kind of like, we don't really know what we're doing. Let's make it up as we go. Let's build it as we fly. What were some more of those. So we're about to hear one story, one important story about how Bill learned about collaboration through experience and the mutual use of power in leadership and working together. Well,

I guess the the most striking one of all was to create the Yale Upward Bound program just after I had a year or so after I had graduated. And I was chosen to be director of it. I had written the grant for it. I was a graduate student, they really had assumed that a faculty member would be the director, but none of the Yale faculty members were stupid enough to take on this thankless task when they could be doing research during the summer. So eventually, it was deemed that I was a really good candidate, and I was appointed and I had educational ideas along with my friend Morris Kaplan, who was a philosophy graduate student. We wanted to create a school that would be the reverse of public schools, and would give the students a lot of empowerment, including having students on the discipline committee and we spent the whole first week designing the school with them out over camp but Yale's camp out in And then Eastern Connecticut, I

just want to take a moment out to notice that in this context that he's talking about they spend their first week co designing the program. It's really powerful way to craft learning where that also promotes engagement and commitment. I hope you'll listen to the nuance of what's happening here. And

although nobody got any sleep the first 48 hours because it was so exciting to be in the strange place. And, and because the kids actually were relatively frightened by the forest sounds, which were unfamiliar to them. But we had actually moved along and trying to create a structure for the school and we had a fierce international volleyball competition going on each evening, which was fun. And then on Thursday afternoon, I went into New Haven to collect the checks for people and I came back there was an ominous silence of an old place. And it turned out there had been a fight on the pier at the lake below, between faculty and students, or between the counselors who are college age students and the students who were 10th graders. And the faculty was sure that the students had started it. We did figure out that it was a real case of misunderstanding. The faculty thought the students were molesting one another because there were girls screaming, but the faculty are this counselor who went out to try to deal with it, brushed by one of the boys students knocking him off the dock, which is what the students thought started the fight. And so now we were faced with this, apparently irreconcilable hostility between those students who thought they were being blamed and thrown out of another school unjustly. And the faculty members who were personally upset and thought the students should be thrown out. At that moment, all of my hypothetical ideas about collaboration, were thrown up. On the one hand, we had to be collaborative, because we couldn't end up throwing people out when we didn't even have any rules yet, we hadn't yet decided on rules. So in a process, which I could only unravel later, I am the Peace Corps volunteer who was the man who knew the kids the best, came up with a series of actions which alternated between being collaborative and being unilateral, that got the students and the faculty involved in the fight outside to reconcile and shake one another's hands, which nobody believed would happen, while the rest of us inside, started to get ready for dinner. And 15 minutes later, in came the combatants and announced that they had shaken hands. And that we would have a rule in this community from now on of no violence. So that was an incredible non school experience. But that that really changed my approach to leadership, understanding that it wasn't a matter that unilateral was bad and collaborative was always good, but rather that most organizations and situations need more collaborative leadership. But don't think of it as always being the opposite of unilateral you can do something that is in the moment unilateral in order to create better conditions for collaboration. As time goes by, there

are a lot of pieces about what you the story that you just told that wound up in your writing and your way of guiding people to think about every day experience as a kind of inquiry into into the possible. Now, you know, since it might be possible to take the end of the story, the rule of no violence amongst young people as a kind of obvious conclusion that one might have come to to begin with, why is it that it's so important that it came about through a combination? And these are important words of both unilateral actions and collaborative discoveries?

Well, it would not have meant as much to anyone and particularly the students, if that had solely been a rule that we developed out of conversation, or, in fact, a rule that say that the faculty imposed at the beginning of the week, we're going to make our rules and structure together this week, but there's one basic rule that is we're all going to live by no violence. So

how much how much do you that kind of hold the perspective that not only you when you hold it gently? This you know kind of name calling prodding of yourself? office of a numbskull in a context of the theater of inquiry. How much do you have the perspective that actually we're all numbskulls? Ah

don't say it out loud. Don't get away in the secret. Yes, that is a perspective that I would be loved to have people consider and you know, love to have them. I mean obviously, the word numbskull is very predominantly a negative. Attribution woman first encounters it and you know, so it's part of part of the playful attempt to indicate how opposites are really kind of necessary to one another rather than so the mutual and the unilateral and numbskull and the wizard, they probably need each other or can't help but the entangled with one another.

Well, your work has consistently invited us to be able to have a perspective on ourselves and to understand that our perspective is not the same as as perspectives that other people might might bring. In fact, our perspective today and tomorrow and yesterday might be completely different and in conflict with one another. And so there's a really a spaciousness to the way that you're kind of inviting people to be able to hold these these kinds of opposites or paradoxes together, the sage next to the numbskull, you know, other people might consider these parts of ourselves. But you're you have a little bit of a different idea. How would you put it? What is the relationship of the wizard and the numbskull?

Well, they're, uh, one way of saying it is that they're both archetypes, and that we enact different archetypes at different times, even though developmental theory says we transcend particular ones of the archetypes in order to be able to embody a different one. But we also continue to embody the earlier ones at particular times, and there are particular times when they are effective, it's just when they're there, the only choice you have, it ends up emphasizing the fact that they're not effective a lot of the time. But the more you move to later action logics, the more choice you have about archetypes to use, and the more you have a perspective that can understand how it would fit in different contexts, you're more interested in looking at the context, not just that your ideology about what's a good thing to do, but how it fits in with the timing of the overall context. So I don't know the word archetype is one that I've used more.

I love that bill is talking about context, he's really pointing to this integration of self and skills that you bring to the table in the context of what makes sense for the situation. So listen into his ideas about how your ideology has to do what I call meeting the moment. Nice. And you're also suggesting then, then there's a time and a place and a wisdom of the numbskull as much as there is a time and a place and a wisdom of the wizard and sage, and that they're not so much in competition as they are in their own kind of collaboration and discovery.

Right? You know, you can't, you can't really develop without going outside the limits of what you know, and can do competently. And once you go outside those limits, what's the most likely first thing that's going to happen? You're going to get it wrong somehow rather. But that gives you the chance to learn how to get it right in this new territory. And so without being willing to endure the numbskull in oneself, one isn't likely to make transforming discoveries about oneself.

So the good news is that screwing up is actually part and parcel of excellence. Yeah, and of course, you're you're perhaps best known in academia for this kind of developmental theory of how humans work and think and interact with the world and the possibilities of being able to grow across the lifespan into ways that give us more choice and perspective.

Right? I mean, in a sense, that's the, that theory is the comparative statics of maturing in lifetime. And then the action inquiry phrase that I use is sort of about So what is the process that you engage in, in order to be effective and in a simple sense, but also be transformational, and that much more complex sense? So the notion that we can bring it isn't the ivory tower and the real world held apart? The inquiry of the ivory tower has to join with the action of the real world in every moment. If you're going to BFM.

This week I was asked, I started class and the students wanted to know, why does this class need so many hours? Why can't you just tell us what we need to know. And six weeks later with a stamp of approval of some kind of mastery of these concepts, and I said, Well, we could do that. And that's entirely uninteresting to me. Because the energy is all in the practicing into it. If this were simply cognitive and intellectual, actually, there are some great things that you could read in there on the syllabus. But the energy is really in learning, the kind of an affective and behavioral pathways that might emerge when you actually take a little bit of a different path. And I track this, a lot of this way of working back to some of your framing around what learning actually winds up looking like. And, of course, these are, for the most part MBA students or law students, I now teach in the law school as well. And they're in a world where they're kind of hoping that during their two or three years in school, what will happen during that time is that they will become masters of the universe or something that the Masters part of their degree will be meaningful in a concrete kind of way. And of course, the good and bad news that I have for them is that they're going to learn how to learn more. So then learn how to know everything that's possible. But can you can you speak a little bit to that to this idea of why it takes so long, to kind of give yourself a little bit more choice, and perhaps to come to some peace with that?

Here's one stab at it. In Western ontology, we acknowledge some people believe only the outside world is real, the material world, that's, you know, generally the scientific approach to it. Some people, however, in neuroscience and philosophy, think mind is the only real thing in the world, our thoughts. And of course, then people sort of try to go back and forth between the two, I have a theory I tested in practice, not not so much in practice, as in the field, or in the laboratory, not in my own practice, in other people's practice, so to speak. But I'm saying that's true. I think both are true, fundamental parts of reality. But there's two other equally fundamental parts of reality, which our culture, for the most part, doesn't pay any attention to whatsoever, although that's beginning to change one of them, is the realm of practice of embodied practice that I've got my own practice, and am I aware even of what it is? Do I understand what patterns I enact with bosses, and subordinates and friends? And then can I change my practice, it's not helpful to just change your theory, as my experience with collaborative inquiry indicated Upward Bound, I had to change my practice and in the process, learn something more complex than was available just in the theory. So there's that quality of reality that is in between the outside world and thought, and then there's what I call trans cognitive awareness. There's the capacity to build gradually an observer in oneself, that can be relatively detached, and non judgmental, both about my own practice and other people's practice. And can therefore more consciously and deliberately choose interventions than I would be able to, if I were just caught up in my thought and feeling, I am less likely to get panicked by situations if I have that. And of course, we you know, in recent years, there's been a lot of mindfulness courses and universities, which are the closest we've come to treating that post cognitive consciousness as real. And then there are courses like yours, which help people treat practice as real and important. And indeed, that is what we tell the world about ourselves is is through our practice. So being able to pay attention to that, which is very difficult, because when we engage with other people, we're kind of looking at them for their responses. We're not so aware of ourselves and just how we're doing it. So for a long time, I've loved the sort of image that I say, practice, practice, practice. The first practice is just lowercase. The second practice the P yet the beginning is capitalized. And the third case all the letters are capitalized, meaning that the practice never ends, once either practicing or one has fallen into habitual mode, and of course, most of us have fallen into habitual mode most of the time. And there are very few courses although of course, a lot of therapy is meant to help people get in touch with their practice and all the other forms of group learning.

Thank you so much, Bill, for your work and for joining me here. Today. I'm learning through experience.

Thank you, Heidi is great to talk with you.

Be well until next time. This has been an episode of learning through experience. I'm your host ID Brooks. This podcast is produced through the Yale School of Management. The editor is Miranda Shaffer. Please like and subscribe to learn more through this experience with me and the wisdom of the guests who join me to talk about our learning our way through the experience of life.