Emergent Action Inquiry

This is somewhat of a cross between coaching and facilitation and works especially for groups that are tackling complex and rapidly changing challenges. We help people identify key moments that they can learn from,  generate insights from those moments, develop ideas about what might work differently in the future and find/create opportunities to test those ideas in action. This process can be applied to a range of situations and at a variety of scales.

Action inquiry is a skill, a discipline and a process that focuses attention on our intentions, our plans or strategies for achieving those intentions, what we actually do and the results we achieve. It then goes one step further and deliberately explores what can be learned from reflecting on the way these four “territories of experience” align and inter-act in real-time. It is a powerful way of learning about the timeliness and effectiveness of of our own actions and the actions of others in the real world.

Action inquiry is powerful stuff, and therefore not for everyone. It concerns the very nature of who we are, what we know, what we do and how we expand our knowledge and capabilities. It challenges us to deliberately expand our capacity to pay attention more broadly and to practice doing so in the living present rather than after the fact. It is developmental because it has the capacity to bring more and more of what influences us, without our knowing it, into conscious awareness and to enable us to recognise and re-consider much of what we take for granted as unchangeable.

This simple yet profound technique has the power to transform what we see, how we interpret our experience and how we act.

That’s why hosting emergent action inquiry processes is central to the work we do.

Action inquiry is about discovering actions in real-time personal and professional settings that alert, a-tune, and sometimes even align self, immediate others, organizational strategies, and global vision and that encourage non-violent personal, organizational, and societal transformations.
Bill Torbert

Find out more about the benefits of developmental action inquiry.