Author: Otto Laske

The first workshop on the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF), in Spain took place in 2012 in Girona, Spain.  It was co-sponsored by Instituto Ben Pensante, founded by Daniel Alvarez Lama in Santiago de Compostela. Below, the reader finds texts on the use of CDF (Marco Constructivo Evolutivo) in individual coaching written by Daniel Alvarez Lama between 2012 and 2015. Since 2013, Otto Laske has taught a 4-day workshop on CDF at Academia Inpact, Santiago de Chile. The first two seminar days center on social-emotional, the last two on cognitive, coaching. This workshop is part of the renowned Inpact Coaching Program founded by Paul Anwandter, where it is referred to as the Pensamiento Dialectico Program.   Aportaciones al Coaching de la Obra de Otto Laske (2012) Sobre el Marco Constructivo Evolutivo (Wikipedia 2013) El Coaching para el Desarrollo (2014) Precauciones sobre el Uso de la Teoría del Desarrollo Adulto (2014) Qué es el IDM? (2015)   Read More...

in the four entries below, the reader finds four Wikipedia descriptions of CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework, in Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and German, respectively.The English version of the Wikipedia article on CDF is found at: The original Wikipedia text, written in German, is  owed to Prof. Bruno Frischherz, Hochschule fuer Wirtschaft, Luzern, Switzerland. Nick Shannon, London, UK, translated the German version into English. The translations of the English version were made by my students Yohei Kato (Japan), Daniel Alvarez Lama (Spain), and Marco Di Monte (Italy). Matthias Lehmann, Germany, was the coordinator. While it is outwardly a suite of assessment instruments that support semi-structured social-emotional and cognitive interviewing in organizations, respectively, CDF is more than a methodology of research. It has developed into a consulting approach, a teaching approach, and a coaching approach, all of them favoring a dialogical over a monological strategy for working with clients, whether individuals or teams. CDF is therefore best viewed as a methodology for developmentally deepened process consultation in the sense of Edgar Schein's work. 構成主義的発達論のフレームワーク (Yohei Kato) CDF Wikipedia Article, Español (Daniel Alvarez Lama) CDF Wikipedia Italian (Marco Di Monte) CDF Wikipedia Article original  (Bruno Frischherz) *** Writings about CDF -- articles and... Read More...

Cognitive interviewing is an art as well as science nowhere taught or practiced today. It is a kind of evidence-based interviewing that is anchored in dialectical listening. In focus in such listening are the thought forms a person uses as soon as s(he) opens her mouth, which are thus inescapable. Only a listener/thinker schooled in DTF (or an equivalent frameworks of complex thinking) can catch them, for a wide variety of purposes ranging from consulting and coaching to political debate and the comparative analysis of texts. Thought forms reflect the structure of mind-in-action in dialog, which is the only medium in which mind is truly mind (rather than a kind of control system). As this implies, cognitive interviewing is dialogical, meaning that while witnessing an individual's or team's social-emotional and cognitive process in real time, it is simultaneously guiding these processes from a detached and critical point of view informed by being aware of thought forms. Thought forms are patterns that guide "movements-in-thought" as they spontaneously and often unconsciously arise. But instead of focusing on the content thought forms carry (the "What" of speech), dialectical attention remains focused on the thought forms themselves (the "How-it-is-thought" of speech). As a consequence,... Read More...

Starting in 2014, coach education at IDM shifted to team coaching. In this blog, the reader finds materials that form the basis of my collaboration with Jan De Visch on the book "Dynamic Collaboration: Strengthening Self-Organization and Collaborative Intelligence in Teams" of 2018. One of the basic tenets of this book -- that organizations comprise different team levels or 'We-Spaces' -- derives from my social-emotional Team Typology found in volume 1 of "Measuring Hidden Dimensions: The Art and Science of Fully Engaging Adults" (2005, chapter 10). Below, the reader encounters some of the seminal ideas presented in the form of sets of slides and texts, each of them briefly commented upon as to its main topic. *** Introduction to Team Coaching based on CDF (2014) In this short text, I outline the IDM team coaching program. Based on an introductory 'Gateway' course, the program focuses on two main types of coaching: social-emotional and cognitive. Certification is based on undertaking a case study. Team Coaching for Maturity: IDM Gateway (2014) In this set of slides, I introduce coaches to the CDF perspective on organizational teams. The slides emphasize that teams are developmentally mixed (comprise divergent levels of adult development) and, in terms... Read More...

In this paper of 2011, I explain why the dominance of purely logical thinking is pernicious in its effect on life and work, including political life, since it has over the last 200 years become a discipline of control and thus no longer serves the purposes of enlightenment and understanding. I therefore propose to society members to learn a more complex kind of thinking to which I variously refer as 'transformational', 'deep', and 'dialectical'. (A manual for this kind of thinking, called the 'dialectical thought form manual', is found at under Publications.) The paper was written under the influence of Roy Bhaskar's work (which I was privileged to get to know in 2006): 'Dialectic: The pulse of freedom' (Verso 1993). Lamentably, while Roy's work has been adopted 'wholesale' by the integral community, his extraordinary work on dialectic has not been taken up since this community prefers to engage with purely logical thinking despite its pretending otherwise. The integral community privileges Bhaskar's visionary work on what he called the 'ARA' moments of dialectic to his work on 'MELD', the four moments of dialectic proper on which ARA is based. Bhaskar himself would have said that one cannot deal with ARA moments... Read More...

The papers collected in this blog center around the topic of complex thinking as a hallmark of individual freedom, organizational effectiveness, and societal well-being. They all focus on Lebensbefreiung, the unburdening from needless linear clutter in the mind and the obfuscation of communication. The articles point to, and explicate, a tradition of deep thinking that in the Western tradition began with Plato and survived to the time of Hegel and Heidegger, but through the onslaught of social media and simplistic 'agile' tool kits is presently at risk of being disavowed and forgotten, not only in education, but in training and management. The research reported in these papers is based on DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework (Laske 1999, 2008, 2015, see publications at https://interdevelopmentals.org/publications/). DTF is a synthesis and refinement of work done by Basseches (1984), Bhaskar (1993), and Jaques (1994). It was born of the need to gain a comprehensive concept of adult development that has gone missing in the work of Loevinger, Kegan, and other 'developmental' researchers and their followers (like Wilber) by one-sidedly focusing on social-emotional, not also cognitive, development. By contrast, DTF transcends meaning-making toward sense-making both of which are needed to understand adult development in... Read More...