• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

  • Home
  • The IDM Approach
    • DDO: The Deliberately Developmental Organization Is Coming
    • The Constructive Developmental Framework
    • The Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF)
  • IDM Services
  • IDM Publications
  • Otto Laske
  • Blog
  • Links
  • Contact

Culture Critique

IDM Practica in Dialectical Thinking

April 27, 2022 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, CDF Mentoring, Cognitive Dimension, Culture Critique, Dialectical Thinking, education, integral thinking, meta-thinking, Social Ontology, Uncategorized Tagged With: Deep Thinking, Dialectical Thinking, DTF, Thought Forms

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

February 23, 2022 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, CDF Mentoring, Collaborative Intelligence, Consulting, Consulting to Executives, Culture Critique, Developmental Coaching, Dialectical Thinking, Distributed leadership, integral thinking, Social Ontology, Team Development, Workshops Tagged With: CDF, DTF, Otto Laske, Team Development

Architectural Work as Environment Making: Why Should Architects Acquire Tools Comprised by CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework?

December 29, 2021 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

Professional work is typically viewed as based on ‘expert’, that is, logical knowledge and systems thinking. I show in this blog that such a view is mistaken since it encourages doing professional work within the confines of closed systems geared to efficiency and control. In the blog, I see such systems as self-serving and ideological in that they stand against an ‘open systems’, social-ontology view of human agency as a causal power bringing about societal change. Architectural practice is used as an example. Following Prof. Freek Persyn’s inaugural lecture at the ETH, Zurich, I demonstrate what it looks like to view architectural work as an expression of human agency in the sense of Bhaskar’s and Archer’s  social ontology, thereby consciously placing it within the Social Cube. What in this blog is said about architectural practice can easily be extended to any professional practice one is involved or interested in.

Architectural Work as Environment Making

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, Consulting, Culture Critique, Dialectical Thinking, Social Ontology, Team Development Tagged With: CDF, Otto Laske

CDF: A Social Science Framework for Understanding Human Agency

December 24, 2021 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, Culture Critique, integral thinking, irrealist social theories, meta-thinking, Social Ontology

Steps Toward Developing a Dialectical Thinking Practice: The Structure of the IDM Dialectics Practicum

November 8, 2020 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

The way we encounter the world is anchored in our ways of attending to it. They not only change the relationship we have to the world we unceasingly construct; they also fundamentally determine the world we encounter. Thinking in language when untutored in dialectical linking puts us under the control of left-hemisphere, logical, thinking, — a mode of being now rampant that constrains the quality of our life and creative work. For this reason, we are in need of re-socializing ourselves through building up in our mind new ways of listening, speaking, writing, ‘thinking’, reading, communicating, coaching, and facilitating.

To further re-socialization in adults, IDM is launching 5-months long practica of dialectical thinking.  The next Practicum starts at the end of November 2020. For details, see https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7563 and https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7641.

Since nobody can learn news ways of being from books but only through supervised practice, IDM Practica are structured in terms of a sequence of activities carried out by members of small cohorts of 4-6 participants mentored by Otto Laske, originator of the Dialectical Thought Form Framework. Have a look at the structure of the Practicum at the first link below and learn about the correspondence of Practicum Activities and Learning Targets at the second link.

Structure Proposal for Dialectics Practicum

Correspondence of Learning Activities & Targets

For viewing the Jaamzin Special Edition of Otto Laske’s dialectics-based visual artwork, go to https://issuu.com/jaamzin/docs/otto_laske. You can place an order for a copy of the print edition by transferring $35 at smediazin@gmail.com via Paypal (which includes shipping to you from an Amsterdam printer).

For additional information on the structure and flow of the Practicum, go to:

From “Organizational Development” to Self-Development: An Insiders’ View of the IDM Dialectical Thinking Practicum

An Intense Five-Month Practicum in Dialectical Thinking

 

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, CDF Mentoring, Cognitive Dimension, Collaborative Intelligence, Consulting, Culture Critique, Developmental Coaching, Dialectical Thinking, Distance Learning Course, meta-thinking, Uncategorized, Workshops Tagged With: Cognitive Dimension, Deep Thinking, Dialectical Thinking, DTF, Otto Laske, Thought Forms

From “Organizational Development” to Self-Development: An Insiders’ View of the IDM Dialectical Thinking Practicum

October 25, 2020 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

Self-development, in capitalistic society a mere appendix of professional education for the sake of playing an organizational role, is increasingly making a comeback as a personal goal. This come-back seemed out of the question until recently, being an outcome of attempts to consciously reverse the demise of liberal education by which universities reduced themselves to trade schools and job preparation camps. The factors involved in the re-emergence of me-first education are many, including the pandemic’s destruction of the conventional work world and gains in the social media/AI link. While still acknowledged only half-heartedly as to their importance, these factors together form the springboard from which new self-developmental curricula will emerge. Job and role holders, whose skills’ half-life is shrinking by the day, are gradually realizing that managerially supported schemes of self-development are ploys intent on hindering taking full responsibility for one’s own development in the normative sense of adult development.

Research at the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) since 2000, as well as the Institute’s teaching practice of “develop yourself first” have made visible the deep interweaving of emotional and intellectual maturity, referred to in its Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF) as the interleaving of social-emotional and cognitive levels of adult development. That research has also shown that role holder’s psychological profile — in the corporate world often the exclusive focus of behavioral job interventions, as well as of coaching and training — is only a lesser ingredient of a person’s inter-culturally valid adult-developmental profile.

While books are still being written about “professional education” and “job education”, often with the goal of enhancing fluidity of thinking and taking responsibility for one’s assigned organizational role in terms of ‘competences’, for nearly two decades IDM has educated individuals with foremost attention paid to the learner him- or herself and attention to their clients and their goals a far second. The raison d’être of this approach is the insight that being of help to others is one of the most difficult accomplishment achievable since a person can be of help to others (as well as him- or herself) only to the degree that s(he) is presently developed both emotionally and cognitively.

Putting the client or the team first has long been seen at IDM as a (Kegan Level 3) subterfuge meant to aid avoiding to address one’s own development realistically and head-on first and independently. At IDM, managerial topics such as “employee learning and development” have long been suspected of being a trap into which to fall is too costly for an individual in terms of his/her own mental growth as a person. Equally, the much-touted notion of enhancing problem solving has been suspected of being just another subterfuge to evade self-development since “problems” to be solved institutionally always come already packaged in terms of an un-reflected world view that makes them unsolvable from the start, especially if they have become institutionalized as our problems “understood by all”.

Having sprung from the conviction that every individual composes his or her own unique ‘world’, IDM abides by its mission to put self-development first, and consider all other “development” as a far second and a lesser transformation. In this context, have a look at its current Practicum offering, described at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7563, meant to assist participants revolutionize the internal dialogue by which they construct their own real world as something “in here” (in my own internal world), rather than submitting to the illusion that their real world is an “object out there” they have no alternative but to accept.

The focus of pedagogical and developmental attention on the “in here” of world construction follows the insight that the real world shows up for everybody exactly in terms of what a person presently manages to grasp cognitively and is able to experience social-emotionally, in an intense interpenetration of ‘how I feel about the world’ and ‘what I presently manage to understand about the world’.

That is why Practicum topics such as learning to attend to:

  • the thought form structure of what is said by others
  • the level of meaning making from which something is spoken (told, interpreted, obfuscated, etc.)
  • how one responsibly formulates a thought or question in real time dialogue
  • how one gives feedback to a loved-one, colleague, or client
  • how one becomes able to help another person reach a higher level of self-awareness

are equally of existential and professional relevance.

The Practicum described at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7563 is shaped by all participants, not the instructor alone who is playing the role of mentor and challenger who himself is open to be challenged in unforeseen ways.

The Practicum requires taking initiative regarding one’s own self-development in such a way as to equally honor others’ self-development and the level at which it presently stands. “We are all in the same adult-developmental boat together” is the motto. The Practicum’s curriculum comprises mastering the following set of dialectical tools, by working with thought forms in sober Bauhaus fashion:

  • dialogical listening tools
  • dialogue analysis tools, including tools for analyzing one’s internal dialogue
  • question and challenge generators
  • tools for broadening a conceptual field (including in an inquiry into one’s own emotional ‘inner’ world)
  • tools for finding/imagining alternatives to escape TINA (‘there is no alternative’) configurations
  • tools for understanding the implications and absences of a text, news story, biographical reflection
  • tools for redesigning policy scenarios in institutions and think-tanks
  • holistic causality tools
  • tools for following one’s own movements-in-thought in an untrammeled way
  • tools for a creative disregard of established conventions in one’s work, office, art studio, and writing practice
  • tools for understanding and analyzing one’s own and others’ creative work, including art work.

For further details on mastering dialectical thinking, go to https://interdevelopmentals.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Laske-Introduction-to-the-DTF-Manual-final-version-1.pdf

Inquiries based on this and the previous blog (https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7563) to otto@interdevelopmentals.org are welcome.

 

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, CDF Mentoring, Cognitive Dimension, Courses, Culture Critique, Dialectical Thinking, Distance Learning Course, education, meta-thinking, Nature of Work, Uncategorized, Workshops Tagged With: CDF, DTF, Otto Laske, Thought Forms

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Twitter

Otto LaskeFollow

Educated at the Frankfurt School & Kohlberg School; directs Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM); New publication "Dynamic Collaboration" with Jan De Visch 2018

Otto Laske
LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
29 Dec

Architectural Work as Environment Making: Why Should Architects Acquire Tools Comprised by CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework? https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=8159

Reply on Twitter 1476321918357811201Retweet on Twitter 1476321918357811201Like on Twitter 1476321918357811201Twitter 1476321918357811201
LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
24 Dec

CDF: A Social Science Framework for Understanding Human Agency https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=8142

Reply on Twitter 1474466950080344076Retweet on Twitter 1474466950080344076Like on Twitter 14744669500803440762Twitter 1474466950080344076
LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
8 Nov 2020

Get Re-socialized by Developing a Dialectical Thinking Practice https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7690 You'll find at this link a way to take a revolutionary step for the sake of self development. #IDM

Reply on Twitter 1325566371581845505Retweet on Twitter 1325566371581845505Like on Twitter 13255663715818455051Twitter 1325566371581845505
LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
27 Oct 2020

From “Organizational Development” to Self-Development: An Insiders’ View of the IDM Dialectical Thinking Practicum at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7641 is written to remind you of your responsibility for your own development that no job offer or job can be a substitute for. #IDM

Reply on Twitter 1320891694112477189Retweet on Twitter 1320891694112477189Like on Twitter 13208916941124771891Twitter 1320891694112477189
LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
25 Oct 2020

The End of “Organizational Development” is the Beginning of Self-Development: An Insiders’ View of the IDM Dialectical Thinking Practicum https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7641. Have a look at why this should interest you whose skills half-life are shrinking by the day.

Reply on Twitter 1320440662236504066Retweet on Twitter 1320440662236504066Like on Twitter 1320440662236504066Twitter 1320440662236504066
LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
21 Oct 2020

The half-life of your skills is rapidly shrinking. To maintain your work life, you need complex thinking to generate new skills quickly. Go to https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7563 to learn about an intense dialectical thinking practicum at IDM; it's not taught at a university for sure!

Reply on Twitter 1318904448421384192Retweet on Twitter 1318904448421384192Like on Twitter 13189044484213841921Twitter 1318904448421384192
LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
18 Oct 2020

Are you the best thinker you could be? Probably not. Consider learning complex, dialectical thinking in an intense practicum with Otto Laske, the originator of DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework. https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7563, #IDM

Reply on Twitter 1317839936935104512Retweet on Twitter 1317839936935104512Like on Twitter 1317839936935104512Twitter 1317839936935104512
Retweet on TwitterOtto Laske Retweeted
jandevischJan De Visch@jandevisch·
13 Oct 2020

Next Monday, on 19 October, at 8am (-9am) CET, I organize a free information session on the Dynamic Collaboration Webinar Series, which will be held starting in November/December.

The four two hour Deep-Dives not only inspires you to look at work in a co…https://lnkd.in/dVUb-UG

Reply on Twitter 1315924605014605826Retweet on Twitter 13159246050146058261Like on Twitter 13159246050146058262Twitter 1315924605014605826
LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
13 Oct 2020

An Intense Five-Month Dialectical Thinking Practicum for Logical Thinkers https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7563 Increasingly, mere logic-bound systems thinking is not good enough for dealing with 'wicked' problems. You can help yourself in this predicament by acquiring dialectical skills #IDM

Reply on Twitter 1316102279108362244Retweet on Twitter 1316102279108362244Like on Twitter 1316102279108362244Twitter 1316102279108362244
LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
12 May 2020

Check out "International Book Discovery Session ‘Practices of Dynamic Collaboration'" https://www.eventbrite.be/e/international-book-discovery-session-practices-of-dynamic-collaboration-tickets-104313668992?utm-medium=discovery&utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&aff=estw&utm-source=tw&utm-term=listing @Eventbrite

Reply on Twitter 1260275765406466048Retweet on Twitter 1260275765406466048Like on Twitter 12602757654064660481Twitter 1260275765406466048
Load More...

Post Archives

Post by Category

Trending topics

Active Listening Application Articles Guests Brendan Cartmel Bruno Frischherz CDF Coaching Cognitive Dimension cognitive Fluidity collaborative intelligence Course Deep Thinking Development Developmental Assessment Developmental Listening Dialectical Thinking Dialectic for Children Dialectic in the Logic of Commerce dialog DTF Executive coaching Finding Talent Free Teleseminar Green Economy Integral Integral Leadership Introduction Jan De Visch Karin Ulmer Nick Shannon Otto Laske Practical uses primer sources Psychological Profile reorganizing work self-development Shared Leadership Socio-emotional Dimension Team Coaching Team Development Text analysis Text development thinking Thought Forms Video

All Content Copyright © 2022 Otto Laske · Powered by WordPress

Posting....