Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

Socio-emotional Dimension

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

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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

 

Laske Social Science Archive, Section IV: Writings (2010-2017) on CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework

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The Laske Social Science Archive gathers Otto Laske’s writings on organizations written between 1999 and 2019, many of which have retained their value vis a vis new fashions of management thinking. Its sections are numbered chronologically. The Archive makes available both texts and slides, the latter for pedagogical purposes. The articles gathered are bundled according to topic. They can be downloaded free of charge.

Archive IV gathers explanatory as well culture-critical papers on CDF as an empirically grounded epistemology (theory of knowledge), including Wikipedia articles on CDF in English, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, and comprehensive introductions to CDF for diverse audiences. There are also articles on work design and shared leadership seen from a perspective of CDF, including an article on developmental listening as the crux of using CDF expertly. Learning such listening by itself leads to a revolution of thinking, not only about the social world, but about the ‘real world’ as well.

Wikipedia Articles

2013 English Wikipedia article

2014c Spanisch Wikipedia article on CDF

2016a Italian Wikipedia article

2016n Japanese Wikipedia 構成主義的発達論のフレームワーク

Culture Critique

2012 CDF – End of developmental absolutism

2013 On the ethics of process consultation

2016d Human Systems in the Anthropocene

2016j What is everybody losing out on

2017e The Impact of German Idealism on Laske’s Work on Adult Development

CDF as an Empirical Epistemology

2010 Wirtschaftspsychologie Intro to CDF

2014a From developmental theory to epistemology

2014b On the CDF Epistemology

2015c From Dev. Theory to Epistemology

Comprehensive Introductions to CDF (for diverse audiences)

2015d Warsaw Keynote

2015e What is CDF, An tntroduction

2017d Process Consultation Revisited

CDF as a Methodology of Work Design and Leadership Development

Those who think monologically rather than dialogically and dialectically — which is the case for the majority even of ‘developmental researchers’ — are destined to miss that the crux of CDF is listening, either social-emotional or cognitive. Developmental listening above all requires listening to oneself in real time which is best learned by very closely listening to others with structural intent. Whoever misses the CDF requirement of listening, thus of internal dialogue, is likely to reduce it to a mere assessment tool, which it is only secondarily. In the following article, the reader finds an exhortation to learn to listen.

2012 Beyond active listening

2016b CDF as a Talent Finder and Work Design Methodology

2016g Shared Leadership, original version

2016k Four Skill Areas of CDF Based Coaching

2017c Shared Leadership, published version

2017d Process Consultation Revisited

 

 

Announcement of the ‘Otto Laske Archive of Social Science’, Parts 1 and 2

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Over the next month, due to increasing demand, Otto Laske will make available a large number of his unpublished social-science papers on this site.

The majority of papers is unpublished, but some important papers published more than 10 years ago will also be made available. Only very few papers are incomplete.

The Archive is divided into two parts: Decade 1 (1999-2009) and Decade 2 (2010 to 2019) of IDM. Each part of the Archive will be in the form of a single blog and will comprise both papers and sets of slides, the latter used for teaching CDF in both English and German. The articles will be posted in chronological order and will be annotated to various degrees in order to make them accessible.

Writings of the first decade of IDM begin with a critique of behavioral mindset generally, whether in management, coaching, or consulting. They extend the critical approach to organizations initiated by Chris Argyris and Elliott Jaques. These writings reconceptualize the tayloristic shibboleth of “Human Resources” on grounds of developmental thinking, a critique that finds its clearest expression in the forthcoming book by Jan De Visch and Otto Laske on collaborative intelligence (see https://interdevelopmentals.org/?p=7089). To me, these writings show an optimism regarding the openness to learning of HR managers that I find thoroughly depleted at the time of this writing.

Writings of the second decade of IDM increasingly draw consequences from DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework, and in their focus veer from cognitive coaching of individuals to  critical facilitation of team work. Their central source is the work on dialectics by Roy Bhaskar (1993) who provides the ‘ontological’, truth-claim, aspect of dialectical thought forms that Basseches saw as skill-related. In my use of Bhaskar’s work, I establish an Applied Epistemology of and for work in organizations. On these grounds, I increasingly emphasize the dialogical character of dialectical thinking (and interviewing) and focus on issues of team development. As to my optimism found in these writings, I still hold on to some of it, knowing that at least under the strain of becoming an endangered species, organizations can at times begin to ‘think twice’ if skillfully provoked to do so. (My hero for doing so is Jan De Visch).

All of my writings are characterized by the introduction of new vocabulary for speaking about human work in organizations, taken from the adult-developmental sciences. There is no way of introducing new ideas without new nomenclature.

Thank you for your interest in my work.

 

 

A Social-Emotional Team Typology for Self-Organizing Organizations

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Teams are increasingly in focus as carriers of corporate culture. Collaboration and self-organization have become key- and buzzwords. New notions of what makes an organization ‘humane’ relative to A.I. and other kinds of ‘business software’ are emerging, but, alas, without an understanding of levels of adult development, thus without the possibility to differentiate in pragmatic ways how different team members at different levels of adult development relate to, think about, and use new technologies and thereby contribute to team work.

Under these circumstances, enabling managers and HR departments to think more complexly and realistically about the integration of technology into human work is of high importance. The 2019 revision of chapter 11 of Measuring Hidden Dimensions, volume 1, of 2005, posted below, will contribute to a better understanding of how different levels of meaning- and sense making influence, if not determine, team members’ capability to collaborate and integrate new technologies into their work.

The team typology presented here, while ‘only’ social-emotional, not also cognitive, is a first step toward clarifying issues organizations increasingly grapple with: how role identities and work agreements, meeting practices and corporate culture are shaped by different systems of interpretation grounded in levels of adult development, and how social-emotional maturity is strongly co-determined by cognitive development.

Cognitive adult development has remained a step-child of developmental research. It has been stuck with purely logical-analytical thinking for a long time and does not seem to be able to move out of its corner of irrelevance. For a fuller presentation of cognitive issues, I would like to point the reader to the 2020 publication of the book Practices of Dynamic Collaboration by Springer, authored by Jan De Visch and Otto Laske. See also our 2018 book on dynamic collaboration at www.connecttransform.be, a first step of bringing cognitive-developmental issues into focus for their contribution to creating cohesive corporate cultures centered on self-organization.

CDF Team Typology OL 2019

How Mature is Your Team?: Learn How to Find Out in the Set of Slides Below.

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More and more, teams carry the organizational workload. The extent and quality of their collaboration is becoming a focus of practical and theoretical attention. However, a developmental theory of teams, whether social-emotional or cognitive, does not exist. What is clear is that the hidden (= developmental) dimensions of team performance are now defining companies’ competitive edge and chances of survival.

The slide set on developmental process consultation, below, written almost 15 years ago, gave the first hint that team maturity is a fruitful subject of research. Developmental research, over-focused on the individual, was making it clear that ‘maturity’ was not a psychological, but foremost a social-emotional and cognitive-developmental issue. From this insight emerged Laske’s social-emotional team typology outlined in chapter 11 of volume 1 of Measuring Hidden Dimensions in 2005 (see https://interdevelopmentals.org/?page_id=1974).

Aside from the lack of social-emotional data on teams, an even greater gap in public knowledge is the lack about teams’ cognitive status, regarding their fluidity of thinking and complexity handling capability. This issue is even more arcane to most since contemporary developmental theory continues to reduce cognitive performance either to logical task performances (as in M. Commons’ work) or to social-emotional stage positions (as in work by the Kegan tribe).

But the cognitive ability of teams is a self-contained and irreducible issue, and without investigating it teams will never be understood. This holds all the more since, as Laske’s (confidential) assessment work since 2000 has shown, there is an intrinsic and close link between social-emotional and cognitive maturity, however different the empirical scores attesting to them may outwardly look.

Below, the reader finds a set of slides on developmental process consultation which refines Edgar Schein’s work by extending it to the social-emotional domain.

Jan De Visch and myself first carried out the extension of E. Schein’s work into the cognitive-developmental domain in our book DYNAMIC COLLABORATION (see www.connecttransform.be). We do so in greater detail in our book entitled PRACTICES OF DYNAMIC COLLABORATION (Springer 2020). In these more recent books we make the ramifications of developmentally divided team minorities and majorities even more clear by reversing the meaning of the notions of ‘upwardly’ and ‘downwardly’ divided teams (as found in the slides of 2005). We do so in order to emphasize our hypothesis that teams whose majority is more highly developed than its minority follow an ‘upward’ directed tendency, while teams of the opposite constitution follow a ‘downward’ spiral in their performance. In addition, we show in detail that these tendencies occur on three levels of successively higher work complexity whose task focus is on (a) continuous improvement, (b) value stream management, and (c) business model transformation, respectively. In this we follow the further hypothesis that the quality of team performance manifests itself in the quality of the dialogue, external and internal, a team is capable of maintaining.

In a further step we can say that what holds for teams also holds for groups that are not teams, or strive to become teams. Organizational groups are developmentally diverse, comprising members at different levels of social-emotional meaning making. Frequently, such groups comprise an even broader developmental range than teams, in which adjacent levels such as T-2/3, T-3/4, and T-4/5 are the norm. It is this diversity, especially once cognitive-developmental diversity comes into play as well, that accounts for the difficulty in group conversations to achieve true dialogue. In fact, this difficulty is at the core of organizational ‘culture wars’.

Intro Dev. Process Consultation

An Artificially Intelligent CDF Coach: Considerations regarding App-Based Executive Coaching

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In this blog, I briefly sketch a coaching app based on CDF. I detail an elementary design of the app and outline its purpose, function, and main benefits.

Since learning CDF through workshops takes dedication and a level of concentration rare in present times, the blog suggests that:

(a). learning to build apps for CDF-based coaching may be the optimal and quickest way to learn CDF;

(b). since the majority of coaches is stuck in logic-based behavioral coaching, executives can expect a value-add from being coached based on the CDF-app designed in this  blog.

Of course, building such an app requires people who simultaneously have experience building apps as well as a strong interest in delivering quality coaching.

Two kinds of CDF workshops seem to be needed:

1. App-free: conventional, 2-4 day, workshops introducing students to the basics of CDF and providing opportunities for practicing developmental thinking with a client, also in preparation for building CDF-apps.

2. App-focused: a workshop geared directly to building a CDF-app.

The first kind of workshop focuses on learning to embody a “CDF-stance” and “persona”; the second kind, on bringing CDF basics into a programmable form and shaping them in terms of the requirements of the organizational environment in which it is meant to be deployed.

We look forward to seeing a basic proto-type built!

An Artifically Intelligent CDF Coach