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Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

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CDF

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

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

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, Dialectical Thinking, Distance Learning Course, integral thinking, meta-thinking, Workshops Tagged With: CDF, Cognitive Dimension, Dialectical Thinking, DTF, Thought Forms

How to Obtain Otto Laske’s Social Science Writings

December 31, 2020 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

Otto Laske’s contributions to social-science, process consultation, and the teaching of & mentoring in developmental and dialectical thinking and listening extend from 1999 to the present day. While his two books on ‘Measuring Hidden Dimensions’ are presently out of print, they are available in their newest edition under Publications (https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974) as pdf.

In addition, almost all of his articles, keynotes, and teaching materials in English and German, as well as translations into Spanish and Italian, are found on this website under Blogs as downloadable pdfs (https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=4831). Look for the Laske Social Science Archive No. I to VI of 2020, starting with https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7185.

Materials in the six archives are organized in the form of thematic collections. Licensing of Laske’s teaching materials is available; so far, it has been adopted in Malaysia.

The prominent topics in Laske’s writings are:

  1. Embedding of CDF, a social-science instrument, in Bhaskar’s basic and dialectical critical realism.
  2. Adult development as comprising a social-emotional, cognitive and psychological dimension as irreducible to each other and intrinsically linked.
  3. Complex, dialectical, thinking as the peak of adult cognitive development, and its relevance in society today.
  4. Pedagogy of dialectical thinking (methodology of learning complex dialog), exercised, taught and certified at the Interdevelopmental Institute, IDM, since 2000.
  5. Theory and practice of evidence-based developmental coaching; its missed chances caused by neglecting adult cognitive development in individuals and teams by all those who boarded the social-emotional triumphalism train in the 1990s.
  6. Team Coaching framed by Laske’s social-emotional team typology (2005) and based on dialectical thought form tools, for unlocking team members’ internal dialog (the basis of external team dialog as well as of team self-organization).
  7. Theory and practice of linking the social-emotional (Kegan), cognitive (Basseches; Bhaskar), and psychological (H. Murray) dimensions of an adult’s profile through case study (interviewing and scoring) following Constructive-Developmental Framework.
  8. German writings (original and translated, including by IDM guests).

Philosophical Orientation of Laske’s Writings

The treatment of these topics in Laske’s writings bears the imprint of both Frankfurt School Critical Theory and R. Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and exemplifies dialectical thinking based on DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework. It is based on the insight that much of social science, including developmental science, is guilty of committing the ‘epistemic fallacy’ by which real world issues are reduced to thought and issues of thinking. This judgement is based on Bhaskar’s basic as well as dialectical realism and specifically applies to purely logical thinking separating subject from object, and neglecting holistic causality of social and developmental issues.

A major point in Laske’s writings is that Mind is complexly stratified and that its social-emotional, cognitive, psychological, and spiritual dimensions cannot be reduced one to the other, nor can they be seen other than intrinsically — not simply externally — related.

On a philosophical level, Laske deals with la condition humaine in the 21st century which in CDF is addressed by way of synthesizing three dimensions of adult development and focusing on effects of their intrinsic relationship. Where these dimensions are not distinguished, their intrinsic relationship naturally cannot be made the topic of research, which leads to the stark impoverishment of the developmental sciences we witness today.

***

Availability of Laske’s Writings

Laske’s writings about the Constructive-Developmental Framework (CDF) derive from his 1999 dissertation entitled Transformative effects of coaching on executives’ professional agenda with Robert Kegan (Proquest order # 9930438). Articles and slide sets aside, his writings comprise 3 books: 1 on social-emotional development, and 2 on cognitive development and dialectic. 2 further books are co-written with Jan De Visch, entitled “Dynamic Collaboration” (2018) [Connect & Transform Press] and “Practices of Dynamic Collaboration” (2020) [Springer].

Books published under the imprint of IDM Press (Medford and Gloucester, MA) are presently out of print but can be purchased from this website as pdfs in their newest editions (https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974, Section C). In addition, teaching materials supporting an understanding of these books, are found in Sections B1 (English), and B2 (German and Spanish).

Below, you’ll find some pointers to how to obtain them. Translations of his work exist in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. There are two volumes, one social-emotional, the other cognitive.

  • The social-emotional volume exists in 5 languages:
    • English (2005; 2nd edition 2011), Measuring Hidden Dimensions: The Art and Science of Fully Engaging Adults, Amazon; 4th edition (2017) in pdf form)
    • German (1st edition 2010, Humanpotenziale erkennen, wecken, und messen: Amazon; pdf at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974)
    • French (1st edition 2012; A la decouverte du potentiel humain, Amazon; 2nd edition: pdf at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974)
    • Spanish (1st edition 2015; Reconocer, despertar y medir el potencial humano; 2nd edition: pdf  at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974).
    • Japanese, 心の隠された領域の測定成人以降の心の発達理論と測定手法 (2nd edition 2015, pdf, https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974).
  • The cognitive volume, Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems: Foundations of Requisite Organization, is available only in English, in two editions:
    • 1st edition 2008 (Amazon).
    • 2nd edition 2017 (Alan Snow, ed.), comprising 2 parts: Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems and the Dialectical Thought Form Manual (DTFM) which can be purchased separately or together at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974.
  • Dialectical thinking for integral leaders: A Primer (2015; Integral Publishers) is available at Amazon. The book shows why teams composed of members with significantly different levels of cognitive development cannot self-organize, and what to do about it.

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, Book Publication Tagged With: CDF, DTF

CDF: The Latest Reworking of the Adult Developmental Literature of the Harvard Kohlberg School

November 16, 2020 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

As time elapses, research findings get updated, consolidated, and what was originally left out or stayed unseen is clarified. An example of this historical process is CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework created by Otto Laske between 1999 and 2000.

25 years after Kohlberg School research began, CDF brought together what this research separated or left standing in isolation. CDF is a synthesis that connects all that this research brought to light about the human self. So far, the CDF synthesis has been treated as separate from, and other than, Kegan’s, Basseches’ and Fowler’s research. The time has come to acknowledge that CDF transcends ideology, however well defended, and is a step beyond the original research of the Harvard School.

Convince yourself by reading the actual texts that constitute CDF, which has three components:

  1. a refined version of Kegan’s research on the social-emotional self
  2. a refined version of Basseches’ research on the cognitive self, with inclusion of Roy Bhaskar’s updating of the notion of adult cognitive development
  3. an integrated component regarding the psychological self as seen by Moris Aderman, student of Henry Murray’s, called ‘Need-Press’ (see www.needpress.com).

Texts on these components of CDF have been made available in pdf form found at https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974, at very reasonable prices (US$20 or 30), in three sections:

A. Free publications found under Blogs (https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=4831)

B. ‘Gateway’ (to CDF) Self Study Materials, in English (B1) and German & Spanish (B2)

C. Books on the social-emotional, psychological, and cognitive profiles of the human self, in five languages.

Laske CDF Publications

 

Filed Under: Book Publication, CDF Mentoring, Self Study Materials Tagged With: CDF, Cognitive Dimension, Otto Laske, Psychological Dimension, Psychological Profile, Socio-emotional Dimension

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

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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

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LaskeOttoOtto Laske@LaskeOtto·
24 Dec

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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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

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