Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

Distributed leadership

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

Twenty Years IDM: Tribute to Otto Laske

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On September 17, 2020, 110 professionals from 35 countries met to pay tribute to the power of developmental and dialectical thinking as taught at the Interdevelopmental Institute by Otto Laske. 15 practitioners of international provenance spoke about how the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF), established by Otto Laske in 1998-1999, has been instrumental in their professional work as consultants, managers, and coaches, and has in addition influenced their adult-developmental journey. Gathered through efforts by Jan De Visch, a Master Developmental Consultant and Coach who graduated from IDM in 2010, the speakers demonstrated that CDF has emerged as a powerful tool for aiding companies on their way to fully distributed leadership and to reaching a requisite level of agility and dynamic collaboration. The application of CDF to psychiatry and theological leadership education was also a topic.

Otto Laske would like to acknowledge how inspirational it was for him to witness that and how CDF “lives” in its practitioners’ daily work. He is honored by their tribute, which in his view is also a tribute to initiatives aiming to expand the narrow limits of present-day adult development research and consulting into the broader realm of real-time dialogue and dialectical thinking, on the path paved by Roy Bhaskar and his Frankfurt School predecessors. More generally, these are initiatives transcending the ‘object relations’ and ‘self-psychology’ limits of the Kohlberg School at Harvard which are due to its blindness vis-a-vis the interpenetration of social-emotional meaning making and cognitive sense making.

The YouTube link to the recording of the 1 1/2 hr Zoom meeting is as follows: https://youtu.be/KrS2nW_AZpc

The topics chosen by each of the 15 speakers — all graduates of IDM — is found in the pdf below.

Scenario Otto-IDM Tribute

Closing Words by Otto Laske

CLOSING WORDS for Tribute OL 9-2020

 

 

Cognitive Coaching as a Tool for Building Enabling Environments in Distributed-Leadership Organizations: An Introduction to the Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF)

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In the set of slides attached to this blog, the reader finds my presentation on cognitive coaching of January 2019, presented to a London consulting firm, MDV. The purpose of my workshop was to teach consultants a new form of developmental assessment and, based on it, of developmental thinking that is increasingly in demand in distributed-leadership organizations striving to become self-organizing. The workshop’s distinct purpose was to contribute to augmenting the quality of team dialogue, as well as of critical facilitation of team dialogue, by scrutinizing the dialectical structure of human movements-in-thought, both in life and at work.

The Table of Contents of the presentation is as follows:

1. The New Coaching Environment

2. Resources for Developmental Coaching

3. Essentials of Team Coaching

4. The Mental Space of Coaching in the Three Houses

5. Overview of Cognitive  Coaching Tools Provided by DTF

6. A Developmental Look at Organizations

7. Exercises: The Three Managers

8. The Art and Science of Cognitive Interviewing

9. Appendix: Thought Form Tables

10. Short Bibliography.

Cognitive Coaching London def 2019

 

Fuehrungsvorteile aufgrund der Benutzung von CDF, des Constructive Developmental Framework

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Obwohl das Programm des diesjaehrigen Wiener Leadership Kongresses (https://www.wienerleadershipkongress.at/) keine Einfuehrung in CDF — das Constructive Developmental Framework –umfasst, werden viele Kongressteilnehmer die sich aus der Benutzung von CDF ergebenden Fuehrungsvorteile wahrscheinlich kennenlernen wollen.

CDF ist eine von Otto Laske erstellte Synthese von Forschungsbefunden der Harvardschule hinsichtlich Erwachsenenentwicklung seit 1975, die Dimensionen des kritischen Denkens der Frankfurter Schule mit denen des dialektischen Denkens von Roy Bhaskar verbindet.  Diese Methodologie ist seit dem Jahre 2000 am IDM, dem Interdeveopmental Institute, internationalen Studentengruppen in der Form von Zertifikatskursen angeboten worden. Sie wird heute von Otto Laske vorwiegend in der Unternehmungsberatung mit Fokus auf collaborative intelligence in teams  und neue Konzeptionen von ‘human capital’ eingesetzt.

Der Leser findet unten (in downloadable form) eine kurze Auflistung von Vorteilen, die sich aus der organizationsweiten Benutzung von CDF ergeben, der auch eine kurze historische Vignette ueber die Entstehung von CDF beigefuegt ist.

Geschaeftsvorteile und Anlass von CDF

Updated Editions of Laske’s Research on Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems

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Effective immediately, Laske’s research on developmental and dialectical thinking, found in two titles of ‘Measuring Hidden Dimensions’ called “volume 1” and “volume 2”, is available in updated pdf form at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974. These titles can be purchased via Paypal, upon which they will be sent out by the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) within 48 hrs. of receiving notice of purchase.

All English volumes were edited by Alan Snow, Sydney, Australia, for easier reading. Laske’s ‘social-emotional’ research reported in volume 1 is available in several languages; his ‘cognitive’ research comprises volumes 6 and 7 below, where the Manual of Dialectical Thinking (no. 7) is now a stand-alone volume independent of volume 2 (no. 6), as seen below:

  1. MHD, Measuring Hidden Dimensions: The art and science of fully engaging adults, vol. 1, 3rd edition (English), US$50
  2. MHD vol. 1, 2nd edition (French), US$95
  3. MDH vol. 1, 1st edition (German), US$55
  4. MHD vol. 1, 2nd edition (Spanish), US$75
  5. MHD vol. 1, 2nd edition (Japanese), US$75
  6. MHD vol. 2, Measuring Hidden Dimensions: Foundations of Requisite Organization, 2nd edition (English), US$75
  7. DTFM (stand-alone Manual of Dialectical Thought Forms, formerly included in MHD vol. 2), 2nd edition, US$85.

In the author’s view, these 7 volumes present the most comprehensive outline of social-emotional assessment, developmental listening, dialectical thinking, and cognitive coaching available in the literature today. These volumes formulate a synthesis of developmental research between 1975 and 2000 nowhere else found, and most recently incorporated into the book by Jan De Visch and Otto Laske entitled ‘Dynamic Collaboration: Strengthening Self-Organization and Collaborative Intelligence in Teams’ (2018).

In particular, publications nos. 6-7 provide the backbone of cognitive coaching which has become indispensable in organizations under distributed leadership, especially for self-organizing teams which can be “self-organizing” only when they achieve meta-thinking beyond mere expertise, and thus can deliver quality dialog.

Laske’s work is unique because of a single fundamental distinction carried through all of it: a strict distinction between Kegan’s ‘social-emotional’ dimension and Basseches’, Jaques’, and Bhaskar’s ‘cognitive’, dimension of adult development. Making this distinction is the crucial precondition of being moved, and able, to inquire into the intrinsic relationship between the two dimensions (in CDF referred to as ED and CD) that are the crux of work delivery. Not making this distinction creates a bottleneck both in research and practice. For instance, team failures cannot be accurately diagnosed without a grasp of a team’s cognitive maturity relative to its assigned task, nor can it be determined whether a team’s composition in terms of majority and minority leads to an upward- or downward tendency in its dialog and work process.

***

CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework, is increasingly important for companies and institutions transitioning to distributed leadership. These companies discover that it is a mistake in designing work environments, to separate work assigned or volunteered for (‘Job 1′) from the contributor’s own developmental agenda and psychological needs.  All CDF tools are tools for integrating Job 2 into Job 1 and avoiding a situation where Job 2 — contributors’ developmental profile — is insufficient for carrying out Job 1, the work to be done. For this reason, CDF is becoming a preferred methodology for strengthening ‘deliberately developmental’ work in organizations, especially since it centrally positions the overriding importance of cognitively deep dialog in team work. Gradually, companies discover the lop-sided nature of Kegan’s work in which cognitive development plays a subordinate role and therefore remains merely ‘therapeutic’.

***

Beyond mere research, Laske’s work has produced a large number of practical tools, not only of assessment but of effective intervention with individuals and teams. These tools have been taught to an international student body since 2000. They are embedded in what is called CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework.

There are presently few teachers mastering CDF in all of its three dimensions. However, Otto Laske himself continues to teach these dimensions —  social-emotional, cognitive, and psychological — in English, German, and Spanish. Parties interested in this teaching are consultants, coaches, senior managers, and team-leads. They are welcome to connect by writing to ‘otto@interdevelopmentals.org’.

A Greatly Delayed Departure: Notions of Competence Are Finally Fading since They Are Seen as Pernicious in a Distributed-Leadership Environment

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It is almost 20 years ago that, following Argyris’ research on theory-in-use vs. espoused theory, I began to show that both of these personal ‘theories’ are rooted in adult development over the life span. I began to take these personal ideologies apart into their social-emotional and cognitive dimensions and showed that they are intrinsically related.

Today, what Argyris was addressing is seen rather differently, namely as the core of what Jaques (1998) called Role vs. Self and what nearly 20 years later Kegan/Lahey (2016) called Job 1 vs. Job 2. In both cases, a person’s organizational role and functioning is set against the person’s integrity and developmental agenda. While Jaques saw Self (Job 2) as cognitive, Kegan/Lahey see it as social-emotional. And the two never met!

I and my co-author, Jan De Visch, show in a recent book on teams (see https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=6422), that Job 1 and 2 are intrinsically intertwined. We shall further that wherever Job 2 — the individual’s or team’s concern with their own integrity and safety — overwhelms Job 1, distributed leadership, which is based on work in circles, breaks down.

It never occurred to the worshipers of ‘competence’ that this concept is intrinsically linked to that of ‘hierarchy’ and ‘command-chain’, nor did they notice that it was derived from the notion of organization charts rather than actual work flow.

***

Below, I re-post the two articles that first made clear the limitation of competence models, both regarding coaching and consulting, by introducing Jaques’ notion of ‘capability’ and linking it, as he had done, to adult development in both of its dimensions.

The first article, published in Consulting Psychological Journal in 1999, focally deals with what became ‘evidence-based coaching’. It foreshadows CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework, then called DSPT (developmental structure/process tool). The second article, published in the same journal a year later, deals with scholarly consulting, my term at the time for evidence-based consulting. Both of these, evidence-based developmental coaching (especially cognitive coaching) and developmentally aware consulting, have remained a rarity, easily mopped up by the loud-mouthed fashions that abound.

CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework, is the most stringent theory of Job 2 presently in existence.

The reader may welcome the reminder of how long it takes for narrow-minded ideas to quit the stage.

CPJ #1, 1999

CPJ #2, 2000