Thoughts From William R. Torbert

Abstract

My story about the early years of my career leads to the advice: make big mistakes early and often, just be sure you reap some rewards from them later. More specifically, if we wish social science to make a transforming contribution to humankind, we will seek to triangulate among: 1) the third-person, objectified research of virtually all of today’s scholarly journals; 2) the first-person research/practices of researchers studying ourselves in action; and 3) the divergent second-person voices of intersubjective, interactive teams, families, and other meetings. I recommend that young scholars create their own changing/enduring communities of inquiry as developmental sites for improving their first-, second-, and third-person research research methods and teaching practices, especially methods for engaging in double-loop, transforming learning and change. Finally, I invite the field to give itself a real kick in the pants in terms of third-person research standards by requiring that principal variables in quantitative studies explain at least 25% of the variance, and that we treat non-parametric rather than parametric statistics as most meaningful.