Author: Otto Laske

When it comes to acquiring developmental and dialectical thinking, "philosophies of the mind", "theories", and "world views" are insufficient. They are all abstractions that can be moved around like pieces of furniture, and in dazzling ways. What matters are PRACTICES based on them, and such practices require METHODS. The Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF), which includes DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework, is a set of practices and associated methods. They have little to with "adult developmental theories" and "developmental models" in the conventional sense, although they synthesize and refine the latter for greater evidential power and effectiveness in real time work. Practically speaking, CDF and DTF are TOOL SETS people learn by doing, viz., working as members of a cohort in IDM workshops. In addition to long-term (1-2 year) case study workshops, beginning in 2022 IDM also offers shorter-term, ten session (15 hour) Practica. These Practica are attended by up to 10 participants working together for up to 6 months, to acquire a professional grounding in the practice of dialectical thinking and developmental coaching. Applications of this practice are found in areas such as permaculture, city planning, ecological rewilding, architectural design, art making, not solely organizational or institutional work. For... Read More...

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 Read More...

Those who know Otto Laske as a social scientist, composer, and visual artist will be interested to see at Amazon, that his early German poetry has appeared in a bilingual edition at Frieling Verlag, Berlin, Germany. The translation of the work into English is the author's own; it carries the title 'Silesian Language Smithy'. (Those who know his work more deeply realize that it is his poetry that is the foundation of much of his creative work.) The back cover of the book states: Otto Laske’s poems originate in a lifelong coping with experiences that led him from Silesia and Northern Germany to the United States, and from poetical to musical composition. It is the art of composition that is evidenced by these poems which, in compact form, render the tonality and melody of his internal conversations. Over time, these internal conversations were crafted by memory into verses one will not easily forget. They speak with syntactic, gestural, and musical clarity of a life between escape and arrival. The book's title image is taken from Laske's digital paintings called 'Promise' (Versprechen) and refers to one of the poems in the book. The three commentaries on the poetry found on the... Read More...

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 Read More...

In a presentation to the Center of Applied Dialectics of December 2021, made available in this blog, I share my recent thoughts about CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework, as an integral component of social ontology, established by R. Bhaskar and M. Archer since 1975. Rather than following conventional notions of "developmental theory" as a stand-alone psychological discipline, given that CDF is a synthesis of developmental theories bringing together the social-emotional, cognitive, and psychological profiles of social actors, I consider adult-developmental studies as part of social science at large, and thus working under the mandate of throwing light on societal change. With this move, the way in which people advance toward maturity over the lifespan becomes a central issue in understanding how society reproduces or transforms itself, given that maturity is a central aspect of what in social ontology is referred to as Human Agency. I show, in particular, that it is cogent to see research using CDF tools as the endeavor to formulate mini-theories of human agency, and is therefore also a way of explicating Stratum 4 of Bhaskar's Social Cube on which Social and Cultural Agents as Embodied Personalities are addressed as a dimension irreducible both to social interactions... Read More...

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... Read More...