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Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM)

Creating Collaborative Intelligence

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thinking

A Problem-Driven Mentoring and Teaching Program for Learning Complexity Thinking

April 27, 2017 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

This blog introduces the new IDM Program for learning complexity thinking based on critical problems brought forward by the client. Client-proposed problems serve as a procedural and behavioral guideline for a 5-step acquisition of cutting-edge solution approaches that have been tested in previous IDM teaching and are grounded in Roy Bhaskar’s work on dialectic (1993). In contrast to earlier IDM offerings, the present one progresses in clear steps from module to module to facilitate learner progress.

Emphasis in the course is put on “doing” over passive listening. Lecturing is kept to a minimum. A progressive sequence of mandatory “meta-thinking” exercises is in place.

The program comprises 5 steps taking 9 months to 1 year to complete, depending on the learner’s present level of cognitive development and mental habits. It concludes with three successively higher-level certifications in complexity thinking for use in life and work.

Course materials are module-specific and are enriched by IDM publications on sale at www.interdevelopmentals.org under Publications, or taken from recent blogs by Otto Laske.

A discount applies to registering for 4 of the 5 modules upfront, after writing to otto@interdevelopmentals.org to discuss the learner’s agenda.

In coming months, the program will move from its present test-phase in one-on-mentoring to a group- and team-offering.

Inquiries are welcome. Skype calls are invited and will be used to discuss client needs and preferences.

A mentoring program for learning complexity thinking

Filed Under: Cognitive Dimension, Courses, Dialectical Thinking, Distance Learning Course, integral thinking, meta-thinking, one-on-one mentoring, webinar Tagged With: Cognitive Dimension, Deep Thinking, Dialectical Thinking, DTF, Otto Laske, Team Coaching, thinking, Thought Forms

A New Approach to Dialog: Teaching the Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF)

March 24, 2017 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

Can you imagine being part of a dialog in which you not only listen to what your interlocutor is saying but also to the underlying structure of his or her thinking?  If you had knowledge of the thought form structure of human sense making, this way of listening, called “dialectical”, would enable you to point to what is missing (absent) both in your own and others’ verbal communication. It would thereby help you deepen your and others’ thinking in real-time dialog. Your critical listening would then not be restricted to content but would equally focus on underlying thought structures used by your interlocutors.

In a team and group context, you would be able to point to interlocutors’ thought gaps in a compassionate, inter-developmental, way. Such gaps are not “academic”. They are more serious than that since they translate into gaps between how people think and how reality works.

It is this kind of dialog that the present article introduces. The article paves the way for an intelligent reading and teaching of the Manual of Dialectical Thought Forms (DTFM), which in the near future will become available in pdf form on this website under Publications. The article introduces cutting-edge thinking tools for use in organizations and educational institutions. In contrast to “hyperthinking” (http://www.hyperthinking.net/) which never transcends formal logical thinking, the manual enables you to learn complex thinking from a tradition now 2,500 years old. (Mentoring in this art is available at IDM.)

Why is this noteworthy?

It’s noteworthy in a culture of pervasive downloading based on logical thinking in which more and more people never get to experience the dynamic of their own untrammeled thinking, and thus lose their best potential for making sense of the world in a critical and realistic way. This experiential loss is endemic in a culture that, while claiming to be dialogical, is actually monological (e.g.,Wilber’s quadrants). Despite its ubiquitous talk about “change”, this culture is pinned to a (static) status quo simply because without knowledge of thought forms, one cannot understand transformations which are by nature dialectical. They simply do not happen in logical thinking where they are only, and endlessly, talked about.

Dialogical thinking is today disavowed in philosophy, the sciences (including the management sciences), and our culture in general. Experts in these fields see the real world as something “out there”, thus misconstruing the nature of human sense making (and meaning making as well). From a perspective of dialogism, the real world cannot be separated from how minds construct it here and now, everyone in a slightly different, but ultimately convergent, way.

***

The present article seems to make a “philosophical” argument, but not really. There is nothing more practical than a good theory. The management sciences especially need fresh thinking, and that’s precisely what the manual introduced here leads to.

The DTF manual is noteworthy for another reason: it is a critique of the simplistic transfer model of communication followed in the social sciences, according to which making sense happens by “transferring” cognitions from one single mind to others by way of language. Nothing could be further from the truth! Sense making is not a transfer of any kind but a process of interactive construction — through thought forms — of the real world.

The present article helps you understand why the transfer model (pinned on formal logic) is so hard to overcome if one does not have knowledge of universal thought paradigms called thought forms. These forms are not unfamiliar to you, but you have never been asked or helped to recognize them in your own mind. So, here is your chance to begin getting to know them!

This introduction to DTFM is structured in three parts:

  1. Foundations of real-world dialog
  2. Dialoguing tools of dialectic
  3. Teaching programs for, and applications of, dialogical dialectic.

Your feedback sent to otto@interdevelopmentals.org is most welcome.

Laske Introduction to the DTF Manual, final version

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, Book Publication, Cognitive Dimension, Consulting, Consulting to Executives, Dialectical Thinking, education, integral thinking, Team Development Tagged With: CDF, Cognitive Dimension, cognitive Fluidity, collaborative intelligence, Deep Thinking, Dialectical Thinking, dialog, DTF, Otto Laske, primer sources, Team Coaching, Team Development, thinking, Thought Forms

Nick Shannon on “What Can IDM Offer the Integral Movement?”

March 14, 2016 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

In this article, written in response to the 2nd ITC conference (2010), Nick Shannon outlined four main vantage points from which teachings at the Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) elucidate and strengthen integral thinking: (1) upper left quadrant, (2) dialectical unfolding of concepts, (3) moving from contextual to transformation language, and (4) cognitive development and higher levels of consciousness. Shannon thought that in all of these regards, Otto Laske’s teaching clarifies and advances integral thinking. To this day, the promise of this teaching, more recently reinforced by Bhaskar’s dialectical writings (1990s), has remained largely unknown or unnoticed. We are reprinting N. Shannon’s thoughts here to invite further engagement of integral practitioners with dialectic, a recent topic of Laske’s book entitled “Dialectical thinking for integral leaders: A primer” (Integral Publishers, 2015).

Shannon, What can IDM offer the Integral Movement

 

Filed Under: Articles by Guests, Cognitive Dimension, Dialectical Thinking, integral thinking Tagged With: Cognitive Dimension, cognitive Fluidity, Deep Thinking, Dialectical Thinking, DTF, Otto Laske, Text analysis, Text development, thinking, Thought Forms

CDF Works on Many Levels

February 25, 2015 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

In this short post, I want to draw attention to the fact that what we call CDF — short for Constructive Developmental Framework (see Wiki) — is a multilevel methodology, not only a methodology comprising three interrelated modules. What I mean by that is that a CDF user can use this methodology on at least four levels if not more:

1. The real-time interviewing and assessment level

2. The scoring, interpretation, and feedback level

3. The role design level

4. The human-capital level where CDF is a decision theory, both practical and teachable, regarding what is the requisite match between contributors’ developmental profile (size of person) and their accountability level (size of role).

Up to now, CDF has mainly been taught at the first two levels, under the label of “case studies”. These are focused on individual contributors and team members. Jan De Visch has developed theories about the role design level, spelled out in his two books, especially in “Minds Creating Value” (2014, see www.connecttransform.be).

I find level 1 highly important because at this level CDF functions in real-time, and what it un-earthes through interviews are DTF generative mechanisms creating movements-in- thought. This is the level of dialog, and also of “dialogical OD”, as the fancy new name goes.

While levels 1 and 2 are those of CDF experts, the higher levels easily reach into the “ideological” domains of business models where one model is better or more apt than another. Work on these higher levels requires dialectical thinking on the part of CEO’s and executive teams because role design and what I called the “human-capital level” cannot be separated from creating new value systems regarding the future of a company and entire societies.

At an even higher level, we get into issues of leadership development in a society as a whole, and the attendant issues of building new educational systems (not just in business schools).

It would seem to hold that for work on all these levels a solid grounding in CDF interviewing and scoring is still the best preparation for handling the more “ideological” issues. I think one must have witnessed how movements-in-thought create deep-thinking dialogs to appreciate the generative mechanisms of thought that especially DTF — the dialectical thought form framework — makes accessible through observation in the form of concept behavior graphs. Such picturesshow how thinking moves from one thought to another over time in a manner uncurtailed by formal logical thinking at the same time that such thinking is used as a handmaiden to dialectical thinking, a near-perfect marriage.

I wish executives would take the time to obtain their concept behavior graph, in order to better understand why and how they fail to handle the complexities they are grappling with. Certainly logical models and theories are no help whatsoever in this. And because people tend to be over-fixated on the content, the WHAT, of their thinking, concept behavior graphs actually show you the STRUCTURE of your thinking, in other words, HOW you think.

Let me know if it interests you to learn about this in greater depth.

 

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, Assessment, Coaching, Cognitive Dimension, Consulting, Dialectical Thinking, Team Development Tagged With: CDF, Developmental Assessment, Dialectical Thinking, thinking

From “Developmental Theory” to a Dialogical and Dialectical Epistemology

September 19, 2014 By Otto Laske Leave a Comment

By Otto Laske – In this text, I focus on the central relevance of interviewing skills for being able to lead a structured developmental dialog in the sense of the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF), whether social-emotional or cognitive. I want to make it clear that the certification as a Master Developmental Consultant/Coach at the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) is not a certification in practicing “developmental theory”, but rather an independent discipline derived from it, namely, a dialogical and dialectical epistemology. Developmental theory per se is taught at IDM only in applied courses which serve as a basis for learning the CDF epistemology, and in this sense are mere teasers for learning to think and listen developmentally, dialogically, and dialectically. What matters is not the theory, but its applications in work with human resources (“human capital”). This has always been the focus of IDM teaching.

Abbreviations: CDF = Constructive Developmental Framework (Laske); DCR = Dialectical Critical Realism (Bhaskar); DSF = Dialectical Schema Framework (Basseches); DTF = Dialectical Thought Form Framework (Laske); IDM = Interdevelopmental Institute (Laske).

***

When I started writing my two books on Measuring Hidden Dimensions in 2005, it was clear to me that the most progressive part of Kegan’s and Basseches’ theories is found in the empirical interviewing methodology they grounded their theories in (and have remained entirely silent about ever since). Rather than engaging primarily with the abstract concepts these theorists put forward, what interested me primarily was how through an interviewing dialog evidence could be gathered about individuals’ and groups’ present way of meaning and sense making. This is because understanding individuals’ frame of reference (in NLP the “map”) is the crucial thing in human resources work. What I saw as the gold of developmental theory, namely the interviewing required to obtain developmental evidence by listening to individuals, laid buried until CDF came into being in the year 2000, and still remains buried for the majority of developmental practitioners after 15 years. This is because of the huge amounts of “theory” and ideology that have been heaped upon especially Kegan’s conceptual interpretations of interview-based empirical findings, without any clear reference to the empirical basis of his insights (even in his own later work). My prior training equipped me for focussing on interviewing in a unique way. My reading of both theorists (who were my teachers) derived from several different sources: being a composer 2 and musician; my schooling in dialectical philosophy in the 1960’s and in psychological protocol analysis (H. Simon) in the 1970’s, the organizational interviewing I practiced as member of a big US consulting firm (ADL) in the 1980’s, as well as my training as a clinical psychologist (Boston Medical Center) in the 1990’s. As a result of my training in these various modes of dialog with clients and patients, in my two books I moved, I would say today, from developmental theory to a new kind of epistemology (theory of knowledge), one that is based on dialog and thus has the potential of becoming a broader social practice, in contrast to argument-based dialectical epistemologies such as Adorno’s and Bhaskar’s which put themselves at risk of remaining elitist. In this short paper, I want to highlight some of the outstanding features of this transition from developmental theory to dialogical epistemology that occurred in CDF. Eventually, this transition allowed me to bring together the main tenets of the Kohlberg and the Frankfurt Schools, something nobody had either consciously attempted, or stumbled upon, before.

***

While others read especially Kegan’s, but also Basseches’, work for the sake of constructing either abstract or applied theories of adult development or bolster their notions of “human nature”, I was most impressed by the qualitative research on individuals they had done. They had wanted to explain how adult consciousness develops over the life span, knowing that knowledge about this development could be of momentous importance for working with people in a practical and emancipatory way. Through their empirical work on what I call social-emotional and cognitive development, respectively, they had indirectly also provided key insights into why it is that adult development has a huge impact on how people deliver work in the sense of E. Jaques. All three researchers shed much light on the vital issue of frame of reference as something that determines not only how one lives, but also how one delivers work. Their lessons still have not been understood in organizations in which people are still talking about “competences” as if they were not merely the tip of the iceberg of human work capability. In short, I found myself aiming for a new theory of work that would go beyond Marx, who never thought about the internal workplace from which work is delivered (Laske, 2009).

***

In focusing on interviewing and the scoring of recorded interviews (which I always saw as inseparable), I implicitly took to heart what is conveyed in the quote below by my teacher Adorno: 3 Social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the large historical categories, after all that has meanwhile been perpetrated with their help, are no longer above suspicion of fraud. …The individual has gained as much in richness, differentiation, and vigour as, on the other hand, the socialization of society has enfeebled and undermined him.In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia In this quote he basically says that rather than be guided by abstract concepts about development (such as “stages” and “phases”), one can gain deeper insight by delving into the frames of mind of individuals, as he himself did in “Authoritiarian Personality” (1950). Given my psychological training, I thought that the main issue in teaching CDF-interviewing as a dialog method would lie in making clear the separation between the focus on “how am I doing” (a psychological issue) and either “what should I do and for whom?” (the social-emotional issue) or “what can I know about my options in the world?” (the cognitive one). This triad of questions for me defines the mental space from within which individuals deliver work and lead their life, without ever quite knowing how to separate them in order to reach full self insight.

***

Serendipitously, I got to know Bhaskar’s work just at the right time, when I was in the midst of writing volume 1 of Measuring Hidden Dimensions and preparing for volume 2. Reading his “Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom” (1993) challenged me to reflect on the DTF-dialectic I had been teaching, but also to reflect on its relationship to my teacher Adorno’s work. Although a declared enemy of ontology which he accused of sealing the oppressive status quo of capitalist society, Adorno had viewed social reality, as well as the human mind, as intrinsically dialectical. He demonstrated that view in the analysis of musical works, but also through philosophical text analysis in both of which he was a master. I noticed right away that Bhaskar’s MELD, the four moments of dialectic, were not only a step beyond Hegel and Adorno, but also equivalent to Basseches’ empirically derived and validated four classes of thought forms, and that Bhaskar’s ontology was only feebly developmental and epistemological, mainly in his theory of eras of cognition and types of epistemic fallacies. His main issue was to overcome nominalistic post-modernism which is a flat denial of any kind of ontologically real world, and do so for the sake of human freedom. In this endeavor, 4 epistemology – where the freedom was to be experienced — had only minimal chances to revolutionize itself. I began to see that, from Bhaskar’s vantage point, the CDF-based cognitive interviewer was centrally dealing with “epistemic fallacies” and “category errors” committed in society, and that the interviewer’s central task was therefore to “retroduce” these errors, that is, show them to be fallacies by interpreting arguments found in texts. Bhaskar was very aware of the stark consequences for society of these errors, which he saw as supporting oppression. As I did in CDF, he saw that category errors people make in society derive from their strictly logical thinking (analytical reasoning). These errors lead to gross distortions of the reality of the world people are dealing with in their work and life.

[…]

Download: Laske_2014-08_From_developmental_theory_to_epistemology

Filed Under: Articles by Otto Laske, Coaching, Consulting Tagged With: CDF, Development, dialectical, dialog, epistemology, IDM, Otto Laske, resources, thinking

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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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