Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

integral thinking

IDM Practica in Dialectical Thinking

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IDM is the institution with the longest record of teaching dialectical thinking in the USA. Founded in 2000, IDM developed a now much refined curriculum for professionals of all kinds, to put to use their developmental resources for breaking the ‘logical thinking habit’, thereby moving toward a holistic and transformational way of encountering the real, social, and cultural worlds. In its newest form, IDM teaching has fully absorbed Critical Realism, with a focus on understanding and boosting human agency. Nothing boosts the latter more than having acquired a practice of dialectical thinking for structuring one’s concerns and the internal conversations needed to deal with them.

In addition to long-term case studies leading to the practice of dialectic in organizations, in 2022 IDM offers short-term, ten session Practica. These Practica are attended by up to 15 participants working together for up to 4 months, to acquire a professional grounding in the practice of dialectical thinking. Applications of this practice are found in areas such as permaculture, city planning, ecological rewilding, architectural design, art making, and others.

For more details, see The 2022 IDM Dialectics Practicum

A Description of IDM’s Program For Acquiring Fluency in Using CDF Tools

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The IDM program that leads to fluency in the use of CDF tools, now 20 years old, has unusual features that set them apart from other professional offerings. Among these features are: (1) professional learning closely linked to personal self-development, (2) comprehensive introduction into developmental and dialectical thinking, (3) exercises set in social contexts that make it easy to transfer them to professional practice, (4) teaching CDF tools in a social-ontology framework that opens participants’ eyes to the social and cultural constraints they encounter in launching life and work projects, (5) unremitting modeling of developmental and dialectical practice in all workshop sessions in which participants enable and coach each other at a high level of awareness of their own internal conversations.

For more details, see the description below:

Description of IDM’s CDF Program

CDF: A Social Science Framework for Understanding Human Agency

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In a presentation to the Center of Applied Dialectics of December 2021, made available in this blog, I share my recent thoughts about CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework, as an integral component of social ontology, established by R. Bhaskar and M. Archer since 1975. Rather than following conventional notions of “developmental theory” as a stand-alone psychological discipline, given that CDF is a synthesis of developmental theories bringing together the social-emotional, cognitive, and psychological profiles of social actors, I consider adult-developmental studies as part of social science at large, and thus working under the mandate of throwing light on societal change. With this move, the way in which people advance toward maturity over the lifespan becomes a central issue in understanding how society reproduces or transforms itself, given that maturity is a central aspect of what in social ontology is referred to as Human Agency.

I show, in particular, that it is cogent to see research using CDF tools as the endeavor to formulate mini-theories of human agency, and is therefore also a way of explicating Stratum 4 of Bhaskar’s Social Cube on which Social and Cultural Agents as Embodied Personalities are addressed as a dimension irreducible both to social interactions between people (Stratum 2) and enduring social structures (Stratum 3). With this move, I open social science discourse to engaging with the dialectics (linkages) of all strata of the Social Cube under the mandate to avoid, in one’s research, any kind of conflation, whether downward (Durkheim), upward (Weber), or central (Frankfurt School; Habermas). While what Archer’s “dual analysis” amounts to when addressing issues of adult maturity is just beginning to be debated, a first step toward understanding people’s internal conversations and reasons for action is therewith taken.

In conceptualizing CDF as a social science framework in the broad sense, I accomplish the following:

  • end the isolation of contemporary Kohlberg-School ‘developmental theory’ from the social sciences
  • open research in adult development to the thought-form dialectic pioneered by M. Basseches and O. Laske
  • open a pathway to understanding human agency beyond the steril abstraction of ‘reflexivity’ holding sway in Second Wave Critical Realism
  • pioneer a path of empirical research into people’s internal conversations and reasons for action.

Final Version No. 4 of Otto Laske’s CAD Lecture 12-21

Toward a Critical Realist Management and Consulting Framework Based on CDF

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In this article, Otto Laske emphasizes the lack of a social ontology in present managerial and consultative thinking. Such a discipline helps social and cultural actors understand the antecedent social and cultural structures their concerns and projects are embedded in, as well as strengthen the likelihood that executing their projects will come as close as possible to the intended organizational and social results they are envisioning. Social ontology, deriving from R. Bhaskar’s and M. Archer’s work since 1980, offers managers a sense of place from which to view their meaning- and sense-making stance, not just their perceptions, from an objective place. More than that: it helps them understand “where they are positioned when they open their mouth to speak” and listen to others.

In contrast to empiricist frameworks of individual decision- making (like the Cynefin model), a social-ontology (SO) framework treats decision-making as a response of social actors to antecedent social and cultural structures they are unaware of as determinants of their project designs. Decision-making is seen as derivative of project design which in turn is conceived of as rooted in concerns linked to vested interests associated with roles in a social role matrix that is open to change by role incumbents. Rather than viewing decision-making as a starting point of adaptive functioning, such a framework treats it as the endpoint of a more or less successful journey toward understanding antecedent social and organizational constraints and enablements that human projects inevitably encounter.

Importantly, in an SO framework roles are not assigned or taken but created through a team dialogue based on complex, dialectical thinking practiced by all participants, although at different levels of cognitive development over the life span. It is the goal of real-time dialogue to witness and document that people at different levels of cognitive development conceive of social situations differently, as well as more or less adequately attuned to how they structure decision-making situations in the first place. Decision-making is seen as the origin of intended, as well as unforeseeable unintended, consequences that may run counter to the project design the decisions made sprang from.

Within an SO framework, navigating the vagaries of complex and chaotic situations is a three-phase process:

  • Phase 1: Understand the social and cultural antecedents of situations encountered which provoke project design and invite decision-making according to it.
  • Phase 2: Design and implement projects in response to such antecedents so that decisions made in executing projects are ‘in tune’ with such antecedents.
  • Phase 3: Make sure that the organizational and social structures resulting from project execution are optimally intended rather than unintended, to avoid the reproduction of, rather than achieving a transformation of, the social and cultural antecedents initially encountered.

The author sees the reason for the absence of social ontology thinking in the predominantly empiricist orientation of managers’ and consultants’ thinking for whom ‘perception’, ‘experiences’ and ‘data’ are the loadstars of their methodology  As a result, they are committing the ‘epistemic fallacy’ of reducing social reality to thought, mostly in the form of iron-clad logical models. However, social reality is not a bundle of experiences and actualities as they presume. Its enduring structures are emergent properties that are formed by social actors’ response to antecedent social and cultural structures which co-define their internal conversations about projects. Needed therefore is a re-education of both managers and consultants in the direction of becoming aware of the benefits of thinking twice, namely ontologically, that is, in terms of a pre-existing social reality they are embedded in and are responding to without being aware of it. Ontological awareness is strongly enabled by DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework, that is modeled after R. Bhaskar’s Four Moments of Dialectic.

In sum: the absence from managers’ and consultants’ thinking of both adult development and social ontology (which is centered around human agency, and thus adult development) defines the double burden of their social mandate.

The article below points to a first Social Ontology Practicum that was designed to pave the way toward better informed management and consultancy thinking, and carried out in the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021 at the Interdevelopmental Institute based on DTF.

Toward a Critical Realist Management and Consulting Framework

An Intense Five-Month Practicum in Dialectical Thinking

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Increasingly, the issues on which the survival of our civilization depends are ‘wicked’ in the sense of being more complex than logical thinking alone can make sense of and deal with. Needed is not only systemic and holistic but dialectical thinking to achieve critical realism. Dialectical thinking has a long tradition both in Western and Eastern philosophy but, although renewed through the Frankfurt School and more recently Roy Bhaskar, has not yet begun to penetrate cultural discourse in a practically effective way. We can observe the absence of dialectical thinking in daily life as much as in the scientific and philosophical literature.

To begin to change this situation, Otto Laske, who comes from the Frankfurt School and has renewed dialectical thinking in Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems (2008) and Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders: A Primer (2015), is offering an intense practicum for thinkers and members of think tanks inside and outside of organizations, as well as members of organizations and consultants. He is using a mentoring approach in which mentees take responsibility for each other’s work as in an organizational team, offering a safe and open space in which practical as well as visionary people can come together to tackle issues of common concern that require a re-thinking of problem foundations using DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework he has taught since 2000.

It is one of the benefits of the practicum to let participants viscerally experience that, and in what way, logical thinking — although a prerequisite of dialectical thinking — is potentially also the greatest hindrance to dialectical thinking because of its lack of a concept of negativity. To speak with Roy Bhaskar, dialectical thinking requires “thinking the coincidence of distinctions” that logical thinking is so good at making, being characterized by “fluidity around the hard core of absence” (that is, negativity, or what is missing or not yet there).

For thinkers unaware of the limitations of logical thinking, dialectical thinking is a many-faced beast which to tame requires building up in oneself new modes of listening, analysis, self- and other-reflection, the ability to generate thought-form based questions, and making explicit what is implicit or absent in a person’s or group’s real-time thinking. These components are best apprehended and exercised in dialogue with members of a group led by a DTF-schooled mentor/facilitator.

The complex thinking exercised in this practicum is beneficial far beyond those working in or for organizations. A wide range of professionals including members of think tanks, politicians, interdisciplinary researchers, graduate level educators, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, social workers, life and executive coaches, and theologians equally benefit from going beyond mere logic-bounded systems thinking.

The practicum takes the following six-prong approach:

 

  Learning Targets Associated Activities
1 Foundations of Dialectic Understand moments of dialectic and classes of thought forms and their intrinsic linkages as the underpinnings of a theory of knowledge
2 Structured dialogue and communication Learn how to use moments of dialectic when trying to understand a speaker’s subject matter and issues, or when aiming to speak or writing clearly
3 (Developmental) listening and self-reflection Learn to reflect on the thought form structure of what is being said by a person or an entire group in real time
4 Text analysis Learn to understand the conceptual structure of a text (incl. an interview text) in terms of moments of dialectic and their associated thought forms as indicators of optimal thought complexity
5 Question & problem generation and formulation Learn how to formulate cogent and visionary questions (including to yourself), and give feedback based on moments of dialectic and their associated thought forms
6 Critical facilitation Learn how to assist others in understanding what they are un-reflectedly saying, thinking, or intending

Acquiring these six, mutually supportive capabilities takes time and patience with oneself and others. It goes far beyond ‘skill training’ since participants need to engage in revolutionizing their listening, way of thinking, structure of self-reflection, and attention to others’ mental process, — something that logical thinkers for whom the real world is “out there” (not “in here”) are not accustomed to.

 

Workshop Logistics

Preconditions: none

Participation: minimally 4, maximally 6 participants

Teaching mode: REAL-TIME DIALOGUE on Zoom

Workshop structure follows the 6 learning targets outlined above

Duration: 5 months

Session structure: weekly sessions with instructor, plus independent meetings of cohort members as needed for homework (recommended)

Number of sessions with instructor: 5×4=20 sessions of 1.5 hours duration, a total of 30 hrs

Scheduling: four 1.5 hr sessions per month allowing for holidays

Tuition: US$3,750 (US$125/hr), with US$250 discount in case of 6 sign-ups

Payment: ½ prior to start, the remainder 3 months after start

Session Mode: Zoom, with session recordings for review

Instructor Assistance: email (answers to questions, attention to personal needs)

Certification: IDM Certificate in Dialectical Thinking, Level I.

 

References to Otto Laske’s work on & with dialectical thinking since 1966:

  1. IDM Tribute of September 17, 2020: YouTube https://youtu.be/KrS2nW_AZpc
  2. Lecture on cognitive coaching based on DTF: YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By6xD8kZU_Q&feature=youtu.be
  3. Text on dialogical dialectic, “A New Approach to Dialogue: Teaching the Dialectical Thought Form Framework,” https://interdevelopmentals.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Laske-Introduction-to-the-DTF-Manual-final-version-1.pdf
  4. Frankfurt School Hauptseminar Teachings from the Perspective of DTF, https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=6763
  5. Dialectical Thought Form Manual (DTFM), https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974 (Publications), Section C (US85.00 via Paypal).

Suggested Workshop Preparation       

  1. read “2017b introduction to DTF” found in Social Science Archive V, Section V, at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7286
  2. attend a first zoom info session in Otto Laske’s Personal Meeting Room
  3. buy Laske’s 2015 book Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders: A Primer at https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=dialectical+thinking+for+integral+leaders (Amazon US$14.96)
  4. attend a 2nd info session and set a workshop start date for the study cohort
  5. pay ½ of tuition (US$1,875) prior to starting the workshop
  6. attend first workshop session.

EMAIL CONTACT: otto@interdevelopmentals.org

Applying Bhaskar’s Four Moments of Dialectic to Reshaping Cognitive Development as a Social Practice using Laske’s Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF)

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In this chapter for volume 2 of Meta-Theory dedicated to the memory of Bhaskar, delayed in its publication since 2014 and forthcoming at Routledge at the end of 2020,  I outline a dialectical epistemology and CDF teaching method for absorbing Bhaskar’s legacy into integral thinking. I do so since both are presently absent from the integral community’s work that has shown itself immune not only to dialectical thinking based on Baskar’s MELD itself, but also to new developments in adult-developmental theory set forth at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7469 on this site.

In nuce, in this text I outline the IDM ‘Case Study Cohort Method’ taught since 2005 and geared to educating professionals for the sake of becoming a ‘master developmental coach or consultant’. In this chapter, I suggest that adopting this method or a suited variant of it would facilitate integral training and practical interventions in society and organizational work.

See for yourself.

Laske Chapter on Application of Bhaskar’s Meld 2020