Cultivating postformal adult development: Higher stages and contrasting interventions

For the last several years, the senior management at Pilgrim Health Care-the most rapidly growing Massachusetts health management organization in the early 1990s, ranked first nationally in customer satisfaction by the August 1992 Consumer Repons-has been engaging, as a team, in early episodes of action inquiry (an approach to organizational change, scientific research, and personal transformation described in this chapter, as well as in Torbert, 1987a, 1991, 1992a). The best articulated motive for this practice on the part of Pilgrim's senior management is its commitment to engage in continual quality improvement in terms of its own practice, as it simultaneously implements an organization-wide quality improvement program. During the same time period, the senior management of ABB-the highly successful Swedish-Swiss conglomerate that employs some 200,OOO-has been, as a team, practicing Vedic Transcendental Meditation (see Chapter 2 in this volume). As with any significant organizational initiative, many motives fuel this practice; one motive is to appreciate more deeply what ABB's espoused corporate commitment to "Life-Long Learning" for all employees means (Gustavsson, 1991; Philipson, 1992). As this chapter will discuss, the practice of action inquiry and the Vedic/TM method are the only two educational interventions that have empirically been shown to facilitate adult developmental transformation beyond formal operations. The primary concern of this chapter is to present experiential tastes, theoretical outlines, and empirical findings of the action inquiry approach to adult learning, adult development, and leadership. The