About Us

The Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM), founded by Otto Laske in 1999, is the world's leading provider of research-based adult-developmental education. Its theoretical as well as practical programs are open to consultants, coaches, HR strategists, facilitators, mediators, social workers, and psychologists. IDM teaching cuts through a large number of disciplines that are conventionally kept separate. It delivers a foundation for professional work in any service industry that is aware of the needs of adults.

The teaching at the Institute, conducted in English via teleconference, is supervised by a highly qualified Director of Education who oversees program quality and also bestows on graduates the reputed IDM Certificates. Teaching is directed to an international student body comprising participants from Australia, New Zealand, Asia, South America, North America, and Europe (including the UK).

In addition to being engaged in teaching and assessment, members of the IDM Research Group (IDMRG) are consulting to corporations, government institutions, and non-profit organizations in the matter of linking talent management to strategy design. This pioneering work is based on the theories of Elliott Jaques about Requisite Organization — an organization of work in which equal attention is paid to a company’s design of accountability levels and its human resources potential as an optimal basis of maintaining and expanding market share or public acceptance.

All activities of the Institute are based on the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF for short; methodology-cdf.php), put in place by Otto Laske in 1999-2000. Being an assessment instrument of great scope and subtlety, CDF supports many different kinds of process consulting through which clients’ mental process is supported and expanded from a social-emotional, cognitive, and psychological perspective. In CDF, which is taught in all IDM courses, research findings of the Kohlberg School about adult development are linked to, and by, dialectical thinking deriving from teachings of the Frankfurt School (1926-1976), especially M. Horkheimer and Th. W. Adorno.

The Institute teaches a decision science for organizational human resources that lends itself to being a foundation for executive coaching and leadership development. Adult developmental theory is seen as the crucial link between all organizational strategy and talent management concerns, as well as an empirical discipline dedicated to the Human Condition generally. It is a hallmark of IDM teaching that it does not treat the human mind as a black box, but rather as something that can be empirically understood through interviews probing adults’ use of natural language.

The IDM educational program, increasingly recognized internationally for its unusual scope and depth, comprises two main branches:

Both programs differ in the weight they give to pragmatic and practical concerns versus theoretical depth. Through the Certification Program, students learn in depth the CDF assessment methodology and its associated epistemology; they learn how to interview and converse from a social-emotional and, separately, a cognitive, perspective, as well as absorb enough psychoanalytical knowledge to make clients aware of the causes of energy loss and frustration in their professional work.

In Program One, students use live classes to master CDF assessment tools and, to complete their studies, write a single case study about an individual volunteer to whom feedback is given once the study has been accepted by the Director of Education.

In Program Two, students strengthen their practical CDF skills by writing 3 additional case studies to make their use of CDF become second nature. Overall students learn to think dialectically about their clients, meaning that they draw together different perspectives on clients. In the process, they acquire social deliberative skills strongly in demand the world over and taught nowhere else, not even at universities.

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The two professional development programs named above are entirely practice-focused and hands-on. In the Dialectics in Coaching Program, students use self study and subsequently attend live classes focused on thinking and listening developmentally, by acquiring knowledge of developmental levels, dialectical thought forms, and patterns of ineffective engagement with work. In the second program, students submit recorded coaching and/or consulting sessions to have them scrutinized by peers and an instructor expert in CDF. In this way, the two programs bypass academic niceties (such as scoring interviews), instead putting the emphasis on the practical use of CDF from the start.

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IDM owes its reputation as an educational institution to its pioneering efforts to lift leadership consultation and coaching to the highest possible level of quality and excellence. On this level, developmental knowledge about adults’ mental growth becomes part and parcel of professional work in organizations, bureaucracies, and communities. This entails more than acquiring a new set of interviewing and assessment skills. Rather, it requires of the professional him- or herself a developmental shift to the self-authoring level (Kegan, 1994), where consultations are firmly based on one’s own values and principles, rather than merely on “best practices” as taught by most other coach training organizations and business schools.

All IDM teaching programs serve professionals’ continuing education. Along both tracks — certification and professional practice — teaching focuses on frameworks, concepts and skills needed in process consultation, a consultation to clients’ mental process (E. Schein). Process consultation requires of the consultant a deep understanding of clients’ way of making meaning (social-emotionally) and sense (cognitively) of their work and life. From an organizational perspective, this kind of consultation includes leadership support as well as talent management, executive development, succession planning, team building and recruitment.

For IDM’s Certification program, go to Certification

For IDM’s Professional Development program, see Professional Development

For IDM’s Dialectics in Coaching program, see Dialectics in Coachingt
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