Author: Otto Laske

For anybody who has worked with teams  or larger groups --  including teams thinking of themselves as 'agile'  -- it's clear that team members don't often consider that what ultimately makes them 'agile' is the quality of their dialogue. The importance of real-time dialogue has to do with the fact that thinking precedes action, and speaking precedes doing. Dialogue quality is mainly a matter of the concepts team members bring forward and articulate in their dialogue, and these concepts are different at different levels of team work. Concepts, abstract and therefore multi-dimensional and ambiguous as they are, 'mean' different things for people active at different levels of work complexity; one and the same concept even means something different for different individuals in function of their specific level of adult cognitive development. As a result, no verbal statement can ever be accept as 'the truth'. Even less considered, especially in 'visionary' designs, is that every person is viewing the world from his/her own present COGNITIVE PROFILE which is part of a larger 'developmental profile' of the person. Empirically, this profile can be accurately assessed through DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework, also for gauging a person's capacity of listening to others... Read More...

In this new publication, the authors extend their thinking about the adult-developmental foundations of organizational work beyond their 2018 book on collaboration, by putting their focus on 5 specific organizational practices that together constitute the mainstay of organizational work. They directly address managers' thinking at three successively higher levels, providing them with a large number of recommendations and practical exercises for upgrading the functioning of their teams. Starting from a critique of conventional management thinking as an outflow of strenuously 'logical' Taylorism, they unfold implications of adult cognitive development over the life span for how individuals and teams collaborate in real time. They see this "how" as a function of the quality of dialogue between individuals and in teams, in three distinctly different dialogue spaces or "We-Spaces": (1) continuous improvement (the work level 90% of contributors are placed on), (2) re-thinking value streams, and (2) business model transformation. The book closes with an outline of a humane organization as one that makes room for the unfolding of individual flourishing out of strategic necessity, suggesting six humanistic principles to follow when embedding algorithmic intelligence in human capability and work delivery. Based on Laske's team typology (2005), the book provides a unique,... Read More...

Attached to this blog, the reader will find a set of slides presented in a workshop held in Vienna, Austria, in February of 2019, for a company called Four Dimensions Consulting. It was the purpose of the workshop to introduce a German-speaking audience to the cognitive-developmental dimension of organizational work, especially team work. The workshop introduced participants to methods of cognitive interviewing associated with DTF, Laske's Dialectical Thought Form Framework of 2008. The focus of the workshop was shedding light on the close interweaving of the social-emotional and cognitive strands of adult development over the life span. The immediate pragmatic focus was assistance in learning about the four moments of dialectic and their associated thought forms. The workshop's Table of Contents is the following: Einstimmung • Einleitung in das Entwicklungsdenken • Teil Eins : Die interne Struktur von Humankapital • Teil Zwei : Im dialektischen Denkformrahmen arbeiten • Teil Drei : Methodologische Grundlagen des kognitiven Interviews • Teil Vier : Einfuehrung in die Praxis des kognitiven Interviews • Anhang A: Die vier Manager • Anhang B: Dialektik in Bildern erkennen Kurze Bibliographie Komplexes Denken Wien def3 2019 Read More...

In the set of slides attached to this blog, the reader finds my presentation on cognitive coaching of January 2019, presented to a London consulting firm, MDV. The purpose of my workshop was to teach consultants a new form of developmental assessment and, based on it, of developmental thinking that is increasingly in demand in distributed-leadership organizations striving to become self-organizing. The workshop's distinct purpose was to contribute to augmenting the quality of team dialogue, as well as of critical facilitation of team dialogue, by scrutinizing the dialectical structure of human movements-in-thought, both in life and at work. The Table of Contents of the presentation is as follows: 1. The New Coaching Environment 2. Resources for Developmental Coaching 3. Essentials of Team Coaching 4. The Mental Space of Coaching in the Three Houses 5. Overview of Cognitive  Coaching Tools Provided by DTF 6. A Developmental Look at Organizations 7. Exercises: The Three Managers 8. The Art and Science of Cognitive Interviewing 9. Appendix: Thought Form Tables 10. Short Bibliography. Cognitive Coaching London def 2019   Read More...

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... Read More...

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 ). 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... Read More...