THREE
Action Inquiry as a Way of Organizing

In Chapter 1, we illustrated how we can each practice first-person action inquiry within ourselves. This is action inquiry in which we seek the attentiveness—the presence of mind—to begin noticing the relationships among our own intuitive sense of purpose, thoughts, behaviors, and effects. In this way we gradually generate increasing integrity within ourselves.

In Chapter 2, we examined some up-close illustrations of how we can practice second-person action inquiry in our conversations with others. In this action inquiry, we seek to interweave framing, advocating, illustrating, and inquiring to better name what is occurring from all players’ perspectives. Thus we gradually generate greater mutuality and mutual commitment to whatever conclusions we reach. Moreover, we noted that effective and timely second-person action inquiry requires the participant to exercise first-person action inquiry at the same time. In this chapter, we introduce action inquiry as a way of organizing people, knowledge, and resources across space and time, with the aim of sustainability. We call this third-person action inquiry, since it goes beyond ourselves to include others present in the current moment, as well as others who may never come to know one another. This latter group is related to one another over time through an organizational, network, or market structure, for example, the stock market. Toward the end of the chapter we will examine the stock market as a a third-person way of organizing through action inquiry that involves literally millions of people. But before we get to that, we will describe an organizational transformation on a much smaller scale, involving hundreds of people rather than millions—a change at a graduate school of management. And before that, we will briefly recount some of the experiences of a three-person partnership during its first year of establishing a business. And before that—indeed, next—we will explain how action inquiry functions as a way of organizing.39

The Basic Tasks, Temporal Horizons, and Power of Organizational Action Inquiry

We argue that effective, transformational, sustainable third-person action inquiry requires interweaving the same four territories of experience with the same opportunities for single-loop, double-loop, and triple-loop feedback and learning and change as we discovered in first- and second-person action inquiry. As we will show empirically in Chapter 7 when we examine which CEOs are capable of helping their organizations transform successfully, successful third-person action inquiry requires the practice of first- and second-person action inquiry as well.

In third-person action inquiry, we speak of the four territories as visioning, strategizing, performing, and assessing (see Figure 3.1). Profitability and growth in market share have long been primary forms of assessment for companies in market economies. A loss of profitability should lead either to a single-loop change in operations or to a double-loop change in strategy, or even possibly to a triple loop change in mission.

But, of course, there are other forms of organization than for-profit corporations (e.g., government, not-for-profits, universities, etc.); and there are other forms of assessment besides profitability (e.g., how the organization affects participants’ equity, and how sustainable the organizing process is in terms of its effects on the social and natural environment).

Figure 3.1 How the Four Territories of Experience Manifest Themselves in First-Person Attention, in Second-Person Speaking and Listening, and in Third-Person Organizing

Over time, we authors have come gradually to understand leadership and power in terms of action inquiry and the four territories of experience. We claim that organizational leaders at any level must become capable of accomplishing four very different types of leadership if they are to become fully credible and sustainably legitimate, as well as effective in conventional terms and supportive of the personal and organizational transformations necessary to become triple-loop learning systems. We believe leaders worthy of the name must be capable of:

1. Responding in a timely way to emergencies or opportunities in the external world, which may arise unexpectedly at any moment.
2. Accomplishing routine, role-defined responsibilities in the performing territory of experience in a timely way, typically requiring one week to three months to complete.
3. Defining and implementing a major, strategic initiative, typically requiring three to five years and ongoing coordination among the strategizing, performing, and assessing territories.
4. Clarifying organizational mission and encouraging continual improvement of the alignment among mission, strategy, operations, and outcomes, requiring 7–21 years because organizational members determine the value of this process and join proactively in the action inquiry process only gradually.

Because the four time spans connected with leadership capabilities interpenetrate one another and influence each other, effective management over any extended period of time requires juggling and balancing all four kinds of leadership all the time. Indeed, on closer observation, each of the four kinds of leadership has both long-term and short-term qualities (e.g., there will be occasions when the success of the longest-term mission depends on one’s immediate response to an unexpected opportunity).

Demands relating to the different kinds of leadership can be in considerable tension with each other because tasks relating to the two short-term kinds of leadership are more externally determined at any given time, while initiative toward the two long-term kinds of leadership are more internally determined (if they are being exercised at all). If, at the one extreme, a leader is at all passive in structuring time, the more immediate, more external demands will gain preeminence, driving out ongoing inquiry and strategic initiative. If, at the other extreme, an administrator fails to perform effectively in regard to the two shorter-term time spans, he or she comes to be regarded as unhelpful and unrealistic (in-credible) by children, students, subordinates, peers, and superiors.41

Most leaders tend to deal with the tensions among the types of leadership by choosing one activity to focus on as essential. Don’t we all know the “Firefighter” who is constantly battling (and often seems to cause) emergencies? And the “Bureaucrat” mired in routine, who resists every kind of change? And “Farsight,” the brilliant strategic planner who can’t get anyone to cooperate with him? The approaches represented by these caricatures are almost certain to generate greater incongruities among the territories of experience and reduce organizational effectiveness over time. We may find significant tension and incongruity across the four territories of experience when we enter any given leadership role because our predecessor is likely to have exercised a relatively lopsided leadership approach, like these caricatures.

If, however, a leader can actively and consciously juggle and balance the four kinds of leadership, the demands of each time span will increasingly come to complement and support activities relating to the other three time spans. Obviously, though, to do this juggling and balancing requires a continuing effort of awareness to embrace these four territories of organizational experience to begin with. This effort to generate triple-loop learning—super-vision—on an ongoing basis is, simply put, the secret of reliably timely leadership. But few, if any, organizational members may be making this effort. Instead, different members are likely to have radically different views of what is wrong with the organization and how to fix it.

The four time spans of leadership we have just discussed correspond roughly to types of power that different types of leaders customarily use:

1. Immediate opportunities and emergencies often, but by no means always, call for the temporary use of unilateral power (simply because there may be no time for anything else). Unilateral power is best at temporarily changing the outside world.
2. Routine, role-related tasks and short-term projects are typically accomplished through two types of power—referent power and logistical power. Reciprocal reference power or referent power is power generated, not by the power-wielder but by the power-yielder, by the “consent of the governed.” It is best at influencing colleagues’ specific performances in regard to a given project. Referent power recognizes that if you tell colleagues what to do, they may resist. If you ask them if they will (use their power to) help you, they are more likely to do so, so long as you reciprocate.42

   Alternatively, new projects dictated by the promise of greater efficiency within the existing structure (e.g., developing a new sales software system) require the logistical power to create a coherent new minisystem. Logistical power is the power to reason systematically within a given structure to create a new way of accomplishing a desired result.

3. Strategic planning and implementation requires something more complex. To implement a long-term strategy requires juggling logistical power, referent power, and unilateral power simultaneously. To develop a truly motivating strategic plan requires a kind of visionary power that is both intuitive and purposeful.
4. Finally, visioning or re-visioning a compelling organizational mission and generating ongoing action inquiry by members that increases alignment among mission, strategy, operations, and outcomes requires transforming power and interweaving all the types of power we have just mentioned in appropriately timely ways.

The Conception, Investments, and Incorporation of a Small Company

Elizabeth, a successful British Web site designer in her late twenties, chooses to do an action research graduate degree at Bath University that involves reflecting regularly for a year with her two new design studio partners about the kind of business they are creating and whether their day-to-day activities actually embody the spirit of their intent.

The three have rented space, networked their computers, and found several different types of business, all related to a theme they begin to develop when they first talked seriously about creating a business together. They coin the term “service design” to characterize a gap in the design world that they hope to fill.

Unlike “product design” or “graphic design” where discrete products are sold, “service design” concerns creating a sustainable (and adjustable) service that can be customized for each individual client. All three partners are attracted by the idea of natural capitalism—the idea of taking a customer-pull approach to business, seeking the best return on investment from all materials involved in delivering the service, and treating earth systems themselves as services we wish to sustain (e.g., “warming services” and “fresh water services”). Their service design aspiration is to play an ongoing role in gradually shifting the measure of affluence in their work and lives from the consumption of things to the continuous flow of value.43

These are grand mission visioning designs indeed, and the structure of journalizing and public reflection that Elizabeth has taken on as part of her graduate student work creates a heightened potential for engaging in single-, double-, and triple-loop learning—but what do the partners actually do? Although the partners use none of these action inquiry terms, they do begin asking right away how these ideas apply to their strategies and performances in their very earliest client meetings, which they follow up with immediate self-assessing meetings. For example, in meeting with a car manufacturer, whom they envision as potentially shifting toward becoming a “mobility provider,” they set a tone of informality and avoid jumping into a set presentation, on the grounds that a formal presentation is a “supply push” method rather than a “demand pull” method. (It is impressive that they are quickly able to see the analogy between the highly abstract “demand pull” idea and their actual sales practice.)

At the meeting, amid jokes and asides, a brief statement about the market gap in service design leads the potential client to whisper about the company culture of “selling metal” and its unsatisfactory attitude toward service. He confides that a recent attempt of his to change the brand culture has been rejected by the board, but that he still regards culture change as necessary for the survival of the business. The result is that in half an hour, the partners have generated a degree of mutuality that has gotten the client to confide in them a good deal about the company and himself. In effect, they have established a strategic ally at the company.

At a telecommunications company, Elizabeth and her service design partners find that the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) department is viewed as a public relations or risk management function, rather than as a positive contributor to the bottom line. The partners ask themselves how they can best serve the department and the company as a whole. They create an imaginary future Financial Times article reporting an agreement with a major phone manufacturer, initiated by the CSR department, whereby service profits will be shared between the two companies in return for manufacturing phones that can accept software upgrades, rather than requiring new phone handsets. This future product creates a nonthreatening basis for conversation across the company. It has three outcomes. It leads to reconceptualizing the role of the CSR department. It links CSR with profit rather than cost. And it recognizes that CSR is close to the heart of the business, not a public relations add-on.44

Reviewing her learning at the end of the first year of business, Elizabeth realizes that she and her partners experienced significant change. In their previous jobs, they were small pawns within large companies, passively riding a wave of change. Now they are actively making change both in their own business and in the role they take as they consult to other businesses. She is taken aback by who is willing to listen to her and by the respect she and her partners receive. She recognizes that this is related to the mutuality they practice in their meetings with clients. She is struck by how continuously fluid she must be in moving back and forth among the four territories of experience, if true interdependence and new value is to be created. Whereas at the outset of this new venture she often experienced considerable tension, wondering if the partners were compromising their mission as they adjusted to specific client demands and market realities, she later realizes that the very movement back and forth from the abstract to the concrete, from visioning through strategizing and performing to assessing and back again, is what keeps them from compromising their values. Although Elizabeth and her partners do not use our term “action inquiry,” they do appear to be intentionally practicing what we mean by it.

Managing a School of Management

Now we jump to a larger, more established organizational setting, where one of us (Bill Torbert) entered as graduate dean. So, he will now slip into the first-person to tell a bit of the story in order to illustrate more concretely the challenges of interweaving the different tasks, time horizons, and types of power associated with practicing organizational action inquiry.

By the time I accepted the position of graduate dean at the Boston College (BC) School of Management (now the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College) in 1978, I had extensively experimented with action inquiry at the margins of institutions. At BC, I was determined to discover how an environment of ongoing, transforming inquiry could be generated, institutionalized, and sustained over a generation’s time. Such inquiry, I knew, would involve a clear-sighted appreciation of power. It would also require an ethical artistry of enactment that not only questioned and challenged myself and others, but also truly accepted all of us as we are at any given time, not just as we might ideally become.45

Writing now, 25 years later, the result of the work at Boston College appears to be enough of a success to provide some concrete illustrations of the dilemmas one is likely to encounter in such an effort. I first offer a brief overview of what occurred in this organization over that period. Then I describe some of the critical incidents in greater detail in order to illustrate the interplay of the four time spans of leadership and the four types of power.

Historical Overview

Between 1978 and 1980, the school’s faculty invented and implemented a new model of MBA education. It focused on teaching students two types of skills. It taught action skills through team consulting projects, and it taught analytic skills that showed students how to integrate both types of skill under the pressures of live action. At the same time, it invited both students and faculty to examine and improve not just their own effectiveness, but also that of the program itself. In short, the program came to model “continual quality improvement” some time before many U.S. businesses began to try to accomplish the same thing. By 1982, the program rose from below the top 100 to be ranked among the top 30 in the country in a poll of management school deans. By 1987, the steady rise (even during the serious recession of 1980–1982) in average first-year salaries offered by businesses to graduating classes resulted in a ranking among the top 25 programs nationally on this criterion.

The dedication of students to the program was suggested by their successful initiative to create a graduate school seal, with the motto “Through cooperation and integrity, we prosper” (surely a unique sentiment among MBA programs in the first brief Age of Donald Trump). At the same time, recent alumni of the program successfully funded an endowment for the Diane Weiss Presentation Competition. To this day, this event concludes the first year. It is the culmination of team consulting projects with businesses, projects whose aim is the actual improvement of the business, not just a paper about the business. All first-year full-time students participate in this integration of theory and practice unique to the BC program. The competition was endowed in the name of Diane Weiss, a student who had led her team to a first place finish in those presentations, graduated first in her class, and then died of cancer only a year afterwards.46

Exercising Power to Generate Organizational Transformation

How did the simple theory of four leadership tasks, time horizons, and associated types of power, presented at the outset of this chapter, help me to play a constructive role in the developments at Boston College?

While acknowledging that there may have been additional factors involved, there is evidence that both my interest in inquiry-in-action and my sense of balancing the four types of leadership and power played a role in the positive outcomes just outlined. In 1978, the question of mission took my attention in search of an analogy that would best capture and interrelate:

1. What the MBA program ought to do for individual students.
2. What the MBA program ought to do for itself to become an increasingly effective organization.
3. What the MBA program ought to do to best represent the university, a Jesuit university.
4. What the MBA program ought to do to strengthen the wider arenas of professional education and of the global political economy.

Asking these questions led me to a series of interviews with faculty members about how their different fields defined effectiveness, how they viewed the school’s effectiveness, and how they viewed their own professional effectiveness. These interviews gave me an opportunity to become much better acquainted with my colleagues than I would otherwise have been and showed me how much commitment there already was within the faculty toward action-oriented courses for students at the school. The interviews also revealed a widespread but not heretofore publicly stated perception of institutional inertia at the school. Different faculty members called this atmosphere “a climate of not doing much,” “an organizational inferiority complex,” “a negative self-concept about research production,” and “a pervasive sense of mediocrity.” We clearly needed a transformation of this organizational self-concept if we were going to get anything else of consequence accomplished. But how?

I shared this vulnerable organizational self-perception at an open faculty feedback meeting, and the ensuing public discussion galvanized a number of faculty leaders to realize that pet projects and pet critiques of one another should be put aside and that the school should agree on some new initiatives. After years of failing to vote in any new programs, the faculty approved a major restructuring of the MBA program and five other new initiatives during the following six months. This is one example of how an institutional re-visioning inquiry can, at the same time, shape and support specific strategic initiatives and improve the ongoing operations of an organization.47

In the meantime, I had discovered that a key motto of the Jesuit Order is the phrase, “Meditation in Action.” This motto marvelously expresses a commitment to simultaneously cultivating wider awareness and effective action, and showed me that the Jesuit character of the university was in no sense irrelevant or a potential impediment, but, rather, a strong support for an MBA program that focused on how to cultivate effective action in oneself and others. This sense of mission—cultivating effective action—aligned a need in American management with a characteristic of a Jesuit university, with a need of our particular school of management, and with a perennial concern of students that their education be more practical. For me, this sense of mission provided a thread of meaning and an intentional focus throughout several long years of effort that might otherwise have appeared chaotic and disheartening.

Chaos did threaten from the outset, and emergencies did occur, as they so often do in managerial settings. These realities required the use of other types of power besides the benign power to gather people together to talk. From the day I entered my new position, I discovered that I had inherited a subordinate who was in such a career crisis that she could perform no work, nor reach a clear decision about what she should do. On the day that I had asked her to present me with a written statement of her intention to do the job or else to resign, she handed me a letter announcing the former. After we shook hands and she left my office, I discovered that she had dropped another letter on the floor which announced her resignation. I spent a sleepless night deciding whether for the good of the office and the school I must unilaterally insist on her leaving (since her announced decision to stay was clearly not a solid one), only to discover on arriving at the office the next morning that she had just had a fight with every other member of the office; whereupon the decision that she resign became mutual.

I remember approaching my first, informal public meeting with students looking forward to introducing myself and learning about them, only to discover a united front demanding that a particular teacher be removed from class in midsemester or that their money be refunded. There is no way, short of proving “moral turpitude,” to force a teacher out of his class in midsemester. But a series of very careful and very lucky conversations resulted in the instructor’s voluntary withdrawal and replacement by a much more competent faculty member. In each of these cases, a mutual inquiry, fused with a refusal to accept face-saving solutions that protected any participants from accountability, generated a solution.48

I remember my shock when I learned that one department at the school refused even to meet with me to begin a conversation about reform of the MBA curriculum, on the grounds that I did not have the authority to force any changes. I had no intention of forcing any changes, but that department was so adamant about not altering its priorities (or even examining them) that I did ultimately have to arrange a show of force, using both unilateral and referent power, to get a more mutual and, eventually, transformational conversation started. (Indeed, that department transformed from the worst to the best in the school over the next decade.)

As the preceding stories illustrate, my method for handling emergencies amounted to little more than opening my ears very wide, insisting on the scale of the challenge, and refusing to settle for compromises that did not respond to the challenge. But otherwise, I would listen as carefully as possible for plausible proposals and act as mutually as possible. If unilateral action seemed more and more indicated (as in the case of the department that would not meet with me), I discovered that one key was to be open with whoever seemed to be the antagonist about the factors that were leading me toward unilateral action. This tactic invited the antagonist to challenge my assumptions. If my assumptions were wrong, I was glad to give them up, and the other saw that I could be influenced. At the very least, I had offered the other the respect of a consultation and had eliminated the feeling of being surprised or knifed in the back. Thus I generated some sense of mutuality even if I did ultimately take what the other perceived as unilateral action. It took constant discipline and forbearance on my part to learn this lesson, and though it may sound incidental now, I believe this tactic alone increased my managerial effectiveness more than any other lesson I learned.

This approach led to results as diverse as a $100,000 grant from IBM and an agreement from the university administration to grant faculty who taught in a restructured core MBA program a one-course teaching remission for their work together as a team. Starting off with the use of vulnerable, mutually transforming power, but accepting all the types of power as conditionally appropriate, paid significant dividends. For example, there was no question in my mind that the reciprocal reference power represented by the consent and support of IBM and the university administration for this new initiative was undoubtedly more meaningful and persuasive to many members of the faculty at the outset than the internal logistical power of the innovation itself, or its visionary power in terms of meeting the larger challenges facing American management. How could we gradually generate greater commitment to the innovation by the faculty?49

An Action Inquiry Team to Champion Action Inquiry

To create a strong and coherent restructuring of the MBA program, I sought the commitment of highly credible members of each department to form a core team that would plan, seek support for, and initially implement the new program. The primary actor was to be a team, acting in a new way. Because there was widespread defeatism about the likelihood that the faculty would approve any proposal, I wanted to create the most competent, committed, and credible team possible. This team would not merely argue for, but, more important, model a new way of doing business together. In my consulting engagements with business clients in recent years, I have found that creating a team that enacts what it advocates is the most attractive and persuasive way to generate ongoing organizational action inquiry.

Through the revealing minutes we sent to the rest of the faculty, the core team meetings quickly became unprecedented demonstrations of mutual empowerment and mutual critique. We adopted a process of teaching one another and then receiving critiques of our teaching. The minutes of our second meeting, for example, included the following critique of my teaching effort:

So, although I had not set out to achieve this result when I taught that day, I ended up demonstrating the public vulnerability I believed a leader must show if he or she is to earn the transforming power to influence others in fundamental ways.

There is no doubt in my mind that the critical factor in securing approval of our final proposals was the fact that a highly credible faculty core team that believed in what it was doing interacted continuously with colleagues for the months prior to the vote, and that those colleagues had had abundant opportunity to influence the proposals (indeed, a preliminary design was rejected). Thus, the faculty team and I had exercised transforming power in a way that transformed both our proposal and the school. Also important to the result were many exercises of logistical power, such as the deletion of potentially controversial administrative issues from the proposals presented to the faculty. Thus, the team’s blending of different types of power—its exercise of transforming power, primarily, of logistical power, secondarily, and, finally, of referent power (implicit in its members’ preexisting credibility)—generated the successful outcome.

The Stock Market as Action Inquiry

Now let us turn briefly to a much larger organizing activity—stock markets. We will explore to what degree they represent a real-time, decentralized third-person action inquiry process.

How does the stock market reflect the four territories of organizing experience: mission re-visioning, strategizing, performing, and assessing? We can immediately grasp that the minute-by-minute changes in stock prices represent the aggregate assessment, by all stockholders who are buying or selling particular stocks at that time, of the effects of all current business and political actions of which they are aware. Most lay investors, as well as many professional investment advisors, focus the research that guides their choices of when to buy or sell what stock primarily or only on the assessing territory of experience. They base their decisions on today’s headlines, yesterday’s price changes, or companies’ most recent quarterly results. Also, their research is often not disciplined, cumulative, or self-referential (i.e., they don’t look at how they may improve their success by changes in themselves). However, disciplined, cumulative, self-referential action inquiry in the performing, strategizing, and mission re-visioning territories of experience is possible in relation to stock buying and selling decisions.51

In the performing territory, for example, one can adopt as a self-referential performance discipline the rule: “Sell any stock that loses 8 percent of its value.” In the strategizing territory, investment professionals can and do offer their clients choices among different investing strategies (i.e., large cap growth, mid cap value, bonds, etc.). And in the mission re-visioning territory, socially responsible investing (SRI) has since the early 1980s been offering an alternative vision of the very purpose of investing. The aim in SRI is not just to maximize the investor’s financial bottom line by choosing relatively reliably high-profit-margin companies, but also to optimize a triple bottom line that includes social equity and environmental sustainability as well as financial profit by investing in companies that give a broader attention to all three bottom lines (Waddock 2001).

Economists, finance professors, and Wall Street investment advisors were almost universally dismissive of SRI during the 1980s and early 1990s because it violated neoclassical economic theory and financial portfolio theory. According to short-term, individualistic, rational choice criteria, narrowing one’s investment portfolio on criteria other than shareholder wealth maximization could not help but reduce one’s financial return. Very few economists and finance professionals could seriously imagine a double-loop change in such theories. (The 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, Amartya Sen [1982, 1987], is one of those few [Klamer 1989].)

So, imagine the surprise of the professional academics and advisors as a majority of SRI firms began offering clients better financial returns than the average conventional investment advisor during the late 1990s (Becker 1999; Torbert 1999). Major investment houses suddenly began advertising so-called social funds as quickly as they could mount any facsimile of one. Moreover, between 1999 and the end of 2001, socially screened investment portfolios under professional management grew 1.5 times as fast as all investment assets, topping $3 trillion and accounting for more than 10 percent of all invested funds for the first time (Social Investment Forum 2001).

What has happened? The SRI movement has apparently managed to conceptualize variables that are not directly financial, but that nevertheless are associated with longer-term positive financial results. We can see how this can be so at this time in history in two different but related ways. First, because human economic activity is today measurably depleting our natural resources, the cost of “business as usual” is increasing. Therefore, companies that take the lead in discovering socially and environmentally friendly strategies can potentially reduce their costs. Second, marketing researchers have identified a growing market segment of “green,” “cultural creatives” who are relatively wealthy. Therefore, companies that take the lead in discovering socially and environmentally friendly strategies appeal to a growing consumer segment.52

Put differently, the socially responsible investing movement is practicing a form of single-, double-, and triple-loop action inquiry. At the triple-loop level, it has articulated a newly re-visioned mission for investing. At the double-loop level, it has generated new strategies for investment advisors, such as shareholder initiatives and dialogues with companies that offer the companies the opportunity to change various policies that will make them more attractive to the growing segment of investors who make decisions in part on such criteria.

Another ongoing double-loop change generated by the SRI movement is the development of new standards and measures to assess companies’ economic, social, and environmental performance. In the year 2000, the UN Foundation offered $3 million in support of the Global Reporting Initiative’s commitment to develop new global accounting standards and measures (Bavaria 2000).

It is, however, important to conclude this discussion of the stock market and of socially responsible investing with words of caution. There is no silver bullet answer for making money in the stock market. Because SRI funds tend to eschew big oil companies, they also tend toward high-tech companies. Thus, since 2001 the combination of war and recession has reduced SRI financial returns. Moreover, the entire SRI movement is still in its infancy, including all its methods of assessment (even straight financial accountants have been having a good deal of trouble cranking out the true numbers in the late 1990s and early 2000s!). Therefore, there is appropriate continuing controversy about all the claims made in these paragraphs on behalf of socially responsible investing, and the reader is invited to inquire further (e.g., Entine 2003; Waddock 2003).

In the meantime, the Socially Responsible Investing initiative serves as a useful example of how stock market investing activities can transform. From implicit action inquiries focused primarily on short-term assessment data, we are discovering through SRI that investment decision-making can evolve toward increasingly explicit action inquiries that begin to identify firms that proactively seek to optimize a triple bottom line.53

* * *

The interlude following this chapter offers summaries and exercises related to the first three chapters. Then, starting with Chapter 4, the next section takes us on a lifetime journey that each of us can potentially take toward the capacity for continually digesting and acting on the basis of single-, double-, and triple-loop feedback.