THIRTEEN
Creating Foundational Communities of Inquiry

In this chapter, we offer brief glimpses of what personal, communal, and institutional cultures of inquiry may come to look like, as we discuss the Foundational Community of Inquiry action-logic of organizing that parallels the Alchemist action-logic in personal development. We are hampered because we have only shadowy and fragmentary illustrations from the past to help stimulate our imagination. We believe that no fully embodied, public, society-wide example of this organizing action-logic has ever existed yet.

But because this is truly an action-logic of the future, we will call, before this chapter is complete, not just on shadowy memories from the past, and not just on some of the particular challenges and opportunities of the present, but also on a kind of social-science/fiction to help us begin to imagine more actively how each of us personally and all of us globally can envision and enact the future.

Table 13-1 shows the theoretical characteristics of the Foundational Community of Inquiry action-logic. The very name for this action-logic of organizing suggests two apparently opposite qualities—foundational stability and the transformational disequilibrium introduced by single-, double-, and triple-loop inquiry. It is the union of these opposites—the edge of chaos, as it is today sometimes named—that we are seeking in a Foundational Community of Inquiry.

If this sounds mystical, let’s make it sound mundane. For example, boards of directors function, by intent and at their best, as foundational communities of inquiry for their organization, testing the clarity of, and the congruity among, mission, strategy, operations, and outcomes and creating a learning community for the CEO. In 2001 and 2002, the U.S. economy reeled under the impact of companies, like Enron and Global Crossing, whose boards failed to function as foundational communities of inquiry. On the one hand, a board of directors is less likely to realize its potential if the chairman of the board is the CEO and if the majority of the board is employed by the organization. In such cases, the power asymmetry in favor of the CEO is likely to dampen both the sense of mutuality and the sense of inquiry on the board. On the other hand, outside board members are faced with a daunting task of getting to know just how the internal chemistry of the company works. In any event, our experiences of working both on and with boards of directors, as well as our developmental theory of organizing action-logics, suggests that building Collaborative Inquiry and Foundational Community of Inquiry processes into board activities will be at least as significant to their proper functioning as the roles their individual members play.195

Table 13-1 Characteristics of a Foundational Community of Inquiry

Having used an ideal version of boards of directors to help us get a first impression of a Foundational Community of Inquiry, can we now identify an actual institution that embodies the Foundational Community of Inquiry characteristics (Table 13-1) in its actual practice? Let us examine the organization called the Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers. The Quakers are a peerlike Protestant sect with no official or professional ministry. As illustrated at the end of Chapter 12, their meetings for worship (and their business meetings, too) are characterized by a silent, inquiring listening by each for an inner voice or Inner Light that may correspond to what we are calling in this book intuitive, multiterritory awareness. The occasional messages that participants offer to the gathered group gain dignity and resonance within this culture of intentional listening. Many people know of the Quakers primarily because of their pacifism. They refuse to engage in war, seeking to become conscientious objectors and peace mediators instead, thus placing themselves in powerful political tension with their own countries in times of war.196

Another spiritually oriented organization that is partial example of a Foundational Community of Inquiry is an organization conceived at a picnic one day in the 1500s. Six University of Paris students who did not all know one another before the picnic were brought together that day by a former Spanish soldier, Ignatius of Loyola. Together, they dedicated themselves to founding the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit Order. Within a decade, Jesuits were traveling, often alone, to the far corners of the world, in order to immerse themselves in the cultures of India, China, the Paraguayan natives, and others. Rather than seeking to impose the European structure of Catholicism, they sought to understand how the Christian spirit could be communicated in each distinctive culture. So influential and so controversial did the Jesuit Order become in global exploration, politics, education, and science, as well as within the Catholic Church itself, in theology and in its Ignatian spiritual exercises, that it has twice during its history been proscribed and later resurrected. These experiences reflect the degree to which the Order has generated political friction with dominant paradigms of faith and truth.

During the late 1960s, the Beatles, the British music group, also partially represented a Foundational Community of Inquiry. Exploring the meaning of life, both individually and corporately, the Beatles inspired a more far-reaching—certainly a more artistic and more comic—cultural revolution than Mao. For a time, each new album seemed to introduce a new musical/consciousness paradigm. Or was that the Rolling Stones who were the shadow community? Or is the Grateful Dead really the example that we are looking for? In any event, all of these groups are peer organizations with global impact in both economic and cultural terms.

Joan Bavaria, Trillium Asset Management, and Socially Responsible Investing—An Evolving Foundational Community of Inquiry?

Just in case our offbeat spiritual and musical examples of male-only institutions (the Jesuits, the Beatles, etc.) are making you a little queasy about the economic practicality and the generalizability of this organizational action logic, we now offer a for-profit, majority-woman organization as a contemporary example of a Foundational Community of Inquiry. This organization is the relatively small investment advisory firm named Trillium Asset Management, the first company dedicated to focusing entirely on socially responsible investing. It was founded by its continuing CEO, Joan Bavaria, in 1982, and our knowledge of Trillium comes not only from public documents and a doctoral dissertation on the company, but also from an insider’s view of Trillium’s development that one of the authors has enjoyed while serving on its board of directors since 1989. We have already described in Chapter 3 how socially responsible investing represents a way of conducting single-loop, double-loop, and triple-loop action inquiry in stock markets, in order to optimize three bottom lines that their clients value: profitability, social equity, and environmental sustainability. In this way, Trillium Asset Management engaged in the second characteristic of a Foundational Community of Inquiry—experiential and empirical research on all four territories of experience (see Table 13-1). Trillium’s clients receive not only financial returns comparable to the S&P 500, they also receive the satisfaction of knowing that their funds are predominantly supporting leadership companies in operationalizing the triple bottom-line concept.

Joan Bavaria has played a central coinitiating role since the early 1980s in creating the Social Investing Forum and the CERES Environmental Principles (serving as board chair for each), as well as the Global Reporting Initiative. Through these vehicles, socially responsible investing has grown despite being in continual friction with the dominant economic paradigm, the first characteristic of a Foundational Community of Inquiry listed in Table 13-1.

Bavaria initially conceived of Trillium Asset Management as a worker-owned company. She invited each employee who so wished—whether secretary, computer programmer, or president—to buy (at a nominal price) one share of stock and thereby gain an equal vote with the president at shareholder meetings. These annual shareholder meetings, in turn, elect the board of directors, including two employee members, and either confirm, disconfirm, or direct other board actions.198

Trillium’s history has not all been sweetness and light, however. As developmental theory predicts, starting with a late action-logic vision did not immediately springboard the company into late action-logic functioning. In its earliest years, many of its worker-owners tended to want to exercise the rights of owners, including the right to complain, while holding the president responsible for exercising all executive and ownership responsibilities (any parents of 17-year-olds recognize this archetype?). Then, during the early 1990s, the company experienced something like a prolonged “near-death” when it was harassed for several years by a lawsuit from one of its early investor-members. The silver lining in this cloud became the deep sense of unity that this challenge generated throughout the company and the board of directors. Only in the middle and late 1990s did the company attract significant new talent at the senior and board level and open new sites, thereby establishing multiple executive functions and a much truer parity in voice between Bavaria and her colleagues on a day-to-day basis (a parity that Bavaria had long been trying to cultivate).

Today, the one-employee–one-share structure has been modified to vest a larger proportion of ownership to those with longevity and with higher levels of decision-making responsibility. Also, about 30 percent of the stock has been sold to another company to create a friendly strategic alliance and to give the shares redeemable market value. In these ways, the original Collaborative Inquiry structure of the company died (as per the fifth characteristic listed in Table 13-1), and newer, more flexible collaborative structures have been generated. This collective ownership structure, along with the actual mutuality of day-to-day business relationships within the company has resulted in extraordinarily low turnover since the company’s founding. Meanwhile, the company has grown to four branches and leads its sector in developing social research, measurement, and advocacy functions.

The commitment to mutual peer relations that we believe will characterize Foundational Communities of Inquiry is evident at Trillium in more ways than just its collective ownership structure. Historically, the company has been unusually diverse: not only have women always been in the majority, but there is a higher percentage of African-Americans and other ethnic minorities among employees and on the board of directors than the typical U.S. investment advisor. This composition is one way in which company members are challenged to attain “peerlike mutuality among people of diverse backgrounds” (the third characteristic of Foundational Community of Inquiry in Table 13-1).

The company is also unusually mutual in its customer relationships and in its methods of analyzing whether companies represent good investment opportunities. Because its investment strategy directly contradicts the conventional financial wisdom that an investment portfolio ought to be determined solely on criteria of financial return, Trillium works to identify companies that take responsibility for their ethical impact on their employees and the environment while operating profitably. Trillium also engages in shareholder initiatives and dialogue with companies if their policies seem problematic from social equity or environmental sustainability standpoints. Thus, Trillium seeks a peerlike mutuality both with its clients (inquiring into their investment criteria rather than taking them for granted) and in companies’ relationships to their employees, communities, and environments. Trillium’s corporate vision is expressed in its motto: INVESTING FOR A BETTER WORLD.199

Bavaria’s ability to lead through these various difficulties and transformations, while maintaining an almost uncanny calm and good cheer, as well as ongoing tactical light-footedness and strategic creativity over more than twenty years, suggests, as developmental theory would predict, that she is likely operating at the Strategist or Alchemist action-logic. What her action-logic is today we are not sure, but when she completed the Leadership Development Profile in the late 1980s, she measured as operating at the Strategist action-logic. Before she became a banker and then a social entrepreneur, Bavaria was an artist. Today, Trillium Asset Management and socially responsible investing as a whole are the fruits of her artistic exercise of her own personal brand of action inquiry and collaborative leadership.

The United Nations as a Foundational Community of Inquiry?

On a still larger scale, can organizational and national leaders meet the unexpected emergencies of the international economic, political, and spiritual scene with action inquiry? Since the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, and during the debate on whether to wage a “preventive” war on Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003, the question of whether the United Nations (UN) can come to play a stronger role as a global foundational community of inquiry, or whether it will become weaker instead, became a more and more critical realtime concern. Given Saddam Hussein’s performance as an Opportunist-like, unilateral bully within his country and region, and given the UN’s history as a primarily Diplomat-like institution with little independent power, could the United States and the UN respond in a way that built a global community of inquiry and mutuality, rather than in a way that reinforced unilateral bullying?200

A year after the attacks and just prior to declaring war on Iraq, how would President Bush address the UN on September 12, 2002? And then again, how would the UN Security Council respond to Bush’s speech in the days that followed? Would a way of proceeding be framed or reframed that would deter and end the reign of unilateral bullies while simultaneously enhancing a sense of positive mutuality and interdependence among a wider and wider group of nations? As we have seen in this book, transformational leaders like Vaclav Havel and Joan Bavaria engaged their compatriots in dialogue to allow the emergencies of the moment to generate positive new visions for the future, grounded in action that marries principled firmness and joint openness.

Not too surprisingly, President Bush did not focus as strongly in his September 12, 2002, UN speech on the issue of constituting new degrees and kinds of global mutuality as the Franco-German Chirac Plan of that same time advocated. Indeed, Bush seemed to threaten U.S. action no matter what conclusion the Security Council reached. Nevertheless, the door was left open for a short time for the U.S. Congress and the UN Security Council to generate more mutual strategic initiatives. We all know today that neither Bush, nor Congress, nor France, nor Germany, nor anyone else on the world scene created new qualities of more mutual global authority in the year that followed.

Imagine, however, that in the two months following Bush’s speech, the Security Council had voted a resolution that prioritized the five top political/military/peace-keeping goals of the UN for the next year as follows:

1. Terminating the efficacy of Al Qaeda.
2. Creating peace and freedom for both Israel and a Palestinian state.
3. Enforcing UN resolutions in Iraq by military force if necessary.
4. Continuing the nation-building process in Afghanistan.
5. Developing an ongoing process for gradually reconstituting the UN as an increasingly empowered, increasingly democratic, governing body with some taxing authority.

Imagine further that this Security Council resolution had specified that several nations take the leadership on each of the top priority goals:201

1. That the United States, Egypt, and Pakistan coordinate the Al Qaeda initiative under U.S. leadership.
2. That France, Brazil, Syria, and Jordan coordinate a world peace conference on the Israel-Palestine initiative, chaired by UN Secretary-General Annan.
3. That Britain, Germany, and India coordinate the Iraq initiative, with possible U.S. troop support.
4. That China, Italy, and Canada coordinate the support for Afghanistan.
5. That Russia, Norway, and Mexico lead the process of visioning and strategizing a seven-year timetable for reconstituting the UN that includes one major operational change each year, along with an ongoing public assessment process for each operational change.

The point of this scenario is not to propose this specific solution—the time for that is now past. Rather, the point of this scenario is to highlight how a guiding concern for generating a global Foundational Community of Inquiry could have influenced real current affairs.

The question of how to gradually reframe the UN so that it can come to function more as a Foundational Community of Inquiry remains. There are many possible ways to accomplish this. For example, if the UN gains a modest initial taxing authority, it could create an Intercultural Inquiry and Investment Corps to do two things: (1) identify businesses and community projects in the poorest countries of the world that deserve microdevelopment investments and (2) provide consulting and training in leadership and assessment that would help those organizations develop later-action-logic cultures of inquiry and accountability.

The Inquiry and Investment Corps could be composed of six-person teams from six different countries assigned to a seventh country. Thus, the Inquiry Corps teams themselves would need to become cross-cultural, cross-paradigmatic Foundational Communities of Inquiry, basing their work in the host country on the vulnerable, mutual, transforming power of timely inquiry and action. The degree to which nations contribute to, and invite the presence of such teams would provide an immediate measure of their openness to inquiry and self-transformation. Veterans of the Inquiry and Investment Corps would represent a growing, global leadership cadre with transnational loyalties.202

Future Possibilities

It may take our global system hundreds of years of experimenting with new kinds of business, political, and spiritual institutions before we develop a consistent public mastery of the later action-logics that welcome not just single-loop learning, but also double- and triple-loop learning now.

The pre-modern period was preeminently characterized by Opportunist action-logic warrior cultures interspersed with class or caste hierarchies that represented the Diplomat action-logic. The modern period has been preeminently characterized by scientific progress emanating from the Expert action-logic and by market growth exemplifying the Achiever action-logic. In the past quarter century, we have seen a growth in individualism in the West that points toward postmodern relativism and the Individualist action-logic, along with a fundamentalist backlash in both the United States and Middle East.

In the so-called developed world, we have learned a good deal about how to lead our own lives and our companies on the basis of single-loop feedback during the modern period. Moreover, a small minority of particular individuals and organizations have transformed to later action-logics, as illustrated in this book. But throughout the world, in every culture, people and organizations still tend—personally, politically, and technologically—to defend against potential double- and triple-loop learning by using power unilaterally.

A New Organizational Form—The Not-for-Prophet

What if, over the next four generations of the 21st century, millions of institutional leaders, families, and scholars around the world begin to seek support for their own development toward the Strategist action-logic and beyond? What if they increasingly address themselves to the challenge of helping whole organizations develop toward Collaborative Inquiry and beyond? And what if they come increasingly to value integrity, mutuality, and sustainability in the transformational ways this book begins to illustrate? 203

We may, of course, project infinite possibilities, and the aim of the following social-science/fiction scenario is not to predict which particular future will occur. Whether you are inspired or repelled by the following unlikely scenario, its aim is to encourage each of you to go a step or two further in envisioning a qualitatively different future that you wish to co-create with others. (A number of contemporary consulting firms, like Generon and the Global Business Network, develop such future scenarios for companies and whole countries.)

The following future scenario offers a social vision of not-for-profit organizations in health care and in other institutional fields at the Foundational Community of Inquiry stage. This scenario is a slightly adapted version of one of a number of different scenarios constructed in the late 1990s as part of a year-long visioning and strategizing process of a leading U.S. health management organization, in order to provoke board members and senior management to reconsider the existing paradigm of medicine. The scenarios responded in different ways to the question: Where might a fundamental transformation in health care organizing lead, and how best might the organization play a leadership role in such a transformation?

Here is the scenario. Remember, the point of the scenario is not to make you believe it, but, rather, to get you inquiring. How will you feel in 2025 if this scenario plays out? What do you like about it and what don’t you like? Why do you feel that way? What future do you want to participate in creating?

Philadelphia Quaker Health in 2025

So ends this social-science/fiction scenario. As of 2003, the gap between the world-leading excellence of U.S. medical education and technology and the world-leading dysfunction of U.S. national health care organizing and financing yawns ever wider. The percentage of uninsured and underserved citizens grows annually, as does the percentage of dissatisfied doctors and nurses. And people increasingly die unconscious and unattended within days of having used more medical resources than ever before in their lives. As they age, the baby-boom generation is increasingly asking what kind of personal disciplines, communal arrangements, and health institutions will support dying calmly and in conversation with good friends. Will new kinds of global institutions evolve during the 21st century, as different from modern nuclear families, corporations, and democratic governments as they, in turn, have been from pre-modern extended families, war lord clans, and kingdoms or empires?206

Communities of Practice and Communities of Inquiry

As early intermediate steps between the small Active Health Triangles and the huge Not-for-Prophets envisioned in the previous future scenario, so-called communities of practice—voluntary and usually temporary networks of co-professionals who share know-how and invent leading edge practices, sometimes face-to-face but more often Internet-based—have received much attention in the business community during the past decade as vehicles for change and innovation. In the context of the developmental perspective introduced in this book, we wonder what action-logics such communities of practice may represent. An obvious candidate as the developmental action-logic both fueling and setting the limits for such professional, playful, yet resolutely work-oriented communities of practice is the Expert/Experiments action-logic.

When we begin to look at such voluntary communities of practice and business networks in a developmental light, we can see the more action-oriented CEO breakfast and luncheon clubs, where confessions are heard and deals are made, as representing the Achiever/Systematic Productivity action-logic.

Exercise, dance, psychodrama, and therapy groups, as well as the interpersonal self-study groups introduced in Chapter 2, and at least some of the Lifecare Communities for elders that now dot the landscape in the United States can be understood as communities of practice that represent the self-reflective Individualist/Social Network action-logic.

Voluntary groups that combine leading-edge invention, production of economic goods or services, and self-study—like the group of interdisciplinary faculty members and business partners at Boston College who invented its Leadership for Change executive program and have delivered it as an ongoing collaborative for 10 years, with monthly meetings that combine dinner, celebration, business, and reflection—can be understood as representing the Strategist/Collaborative Inquiry action-logic.207

The eleven associates who are co-producing this book may be taken as an illustration of a virtual group that is at once a community of practice and a community of inquiry for its members. Although we have never once met as an entire group, all eleven of us have engaged in many self-study disciplines over the past 20 to 40 years. Two of the associates have only been engaged with a few others of us for a couple of years, but personal and professional relationships among the other nine of us go back as long as 43 years and average 17 years. In addition, there are three different, but overlapping, subgroups among us who have worked and inquired together for 23 years, 9 years, and 6 years, respectively. Like a good soccer team or dance troop, we know each other’s strengths, foibles, and vulnerabilities very well indeed and delight in confronting and supporting one another in our common and individual enterprises.

Indeed, four of our associates belong to what one of us calls his “Constellation of Lifetime Friends,” a truly invisible, mythical organization that may count as an actual Foundational Community of Inquiry. This associate counts 24 persons (14 men and 10 women) among his Lifetime Friends, in relationships that average 29 years in length. At various points in his life, he has lived in the same home with 11 of these friends, and he anticipates a future sharing of homes with many of them as they age together, losing one partner or the other in the 11 ongoing first marriages within the constellation. As in the case of the associates in writing this book, not all the members of this constellation of friends know all the others well, but most have known most for many years. Perhaps such Constellations of Lifetime Friends will become more common in the future, will provide a similar kind of security, activity, and friendship among elders that Lifetime Care communities do for those who can afford them today, while continuing to perform as Foundational Communities of Inquiry for their members until their chosen moment of death.

Conclusion

How will these various examples of incipient Foundational Communities of Inquiry—past, present, and future—spiritual, political, and financial—affect you? How will this book as a whole, about the multiple personal and organizational transformations that you invite if you commit yourself to the path of developmental action inquiry, affect your life?208

We hope that the way this book is organized will help any of you who so wish to begin your own process of action inquiry little by little in your own work and personal life. If you do begin to try an occasional action inquiry experiment, you will soon want to get some help for continuing. We hope that Chapters 1 through 3 provide a number of clues about the sorts of small groups you may start or join to support one another’s action inquiry practice. Chapters 4 through 7 raise the action inquiry ante, from particular actions that may improve your effectiveness within your current action-logic, to longer-term transformations of action-logic—from the more common Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, and Achiever action-logics to the postconventional Individualist and Strategist action-logics that are more closely aligned at their heart with action inquiry’s moment-to-moment concern with timing, mutuality, and transforming leadership.

As, through your practice, you increasingly come to feel an internally motivated wish to move through such action-logic transformations, you will want to seek out mentors, teachers, schools, work organizations, forms of exercise and therapy, friends, and spiritual disciplines that can help you. Chapters 8 through 11 help to define the later-action-logic organizations that can help you transform. Those chapters also help you visualize how you can accelerate your leadership development by beginning to help meetings, projects, teams, and whole organizations to transform from one action-logic to the next.

The two final chapters, Chapters 12 and 13, that you are just now completing may repel you, or make you feel dizzy or queasy, because they project a degree of ongoing transformation that is endurable only to the degree that we are passionately, dispassionately, and compassionately anchored in four-territory experiencing now.

We imagine that creating an in-person or cyber reading and discussion group to engage in a slow second reading and in deliberate exercises and mutual coaching may be a useful next step for you. But, whatever you choose to do next, we thank you for your attention and wish you good questions, good friends, and good work for the future.