In the book and consulting project sketched in this blog, Otto Laske shows how to facilitate societal transformations by elaborating Margaret Archer’s work on “Structure, Agency, and Internal Conversations” (2003). He thereby extends both Bhaskar’s “The Possibility of Naturalism” (1979) and Archer’s work into dialectical practice. To deepen Archer’s logical approach, Laske introduces adult-developmental and… [Read More]
Otto Laske
CDF: The Latest Reworking of the Adult Developmental Literature of the Harvard Kohlberg School
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… [Read More]
Steps Toward Developing a Dialectical Thinking Practice: The Structure of the IDM Dialectics Practicum
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, —… [Read More]
From “Organizational Development” to Self-Development: An Insiders’ View of the IDM Dialectical Thinking Practicum
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… [Read More]
An Intense Five-Month Practicum in Dialectical Thinking
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… [Read More]
Twenty Years IDM: Tribute to Otto Laske
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… [Read More]