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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

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

Otto Laske Poetry Publication ‘Silesian Language Smithy’ (Schlesische Sprachschmiede) in a Bilingual Edition at Amazon

January 3, 2022 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

Those who know Otto Laske as a social scientist, composer, and visual artist will be interested to see at Amazon, https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/books/detail/-/art/otto-laske-schlesische-sprachschmiede-silesian-language-smithy/hnum/10792942, that his early German poetry has appeared in a bilingual edition at Frieling Verlag, Berlin, Germany. The translation of the work into English is the author’s own; it carries the title ‘Silesian Language Smithy’. (Those who know his work more deeply realize that it is his poetry that is the foundation of much of his creative work.)

The back cover of the book states:
Otto Laske’s poems originate in a lifelong coping with experiences that led him from Silesia and Northern Germany to the United States, and from poetical to musical composition.

It is the art of composition that is evidenced by these poems which, in compact form, render the tonality and melody of his internal conversations. Over time, these internal conversations were crafted by memory into verses one will not easily forget. They speak with syntactic, gestural, and musical clarity of a life between escape and arrival. The book’s title image is taken from Laske’s digital paintings called ‘Promise’ (Versprechen) and refers to one of the poems in the book.

The three commentaries on the poetry found on the book’s back cover are as follows:

„Otto Laske opens doors not only to the literary forge where he
hammers life into verse but to the experiential crucibles where
remarkable events and responses took place. „
(Martin Ray, photographer)

„Laske’s Gedichte zeigen uns das Helle und Dunkle seiner Seele,
die Farben seiner Wortbilder, die Tonart und Melodie seiner Verse,
die durch die Kraft seines Intellekts in das gedichtete Wort
geschmiedet wurden.“
(Roland Baumgaertel, Schriftsteller)

„Laske’s poetry historically connects to Germany’s search for self-identity
after WWII; it is worth taking note of.“
(Donald Gropman, writer)

Cover_O. Laske’s Sprachschmiede,

Those interested in Otto’s visual work are invited to go to https://www.saatchiart.com/olaske. They will find 50 Collections of art work, produced since 2012.

The latest publication of his work, called ‘Condensations’, in Jaamzin Creative, Hon Kong, is found at https://www.jaamzin.com/condensations

and https://www.jaamzin.com/post/visual-artist-otto-laske-1

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

Toward a Critical Realist Management and Consulting Framework Based on CDF

May 5, 2021 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

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

Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

Otto Laske Poetry Publication ‘Silesian Language Smithy’ (Schlesische Sprachschmiede) in a Bilingual Edition at Amazon

Toward a Critical Realist Management and Consulting Framework Based on CDF