Category: 1-year leadership program

Team collaboration has become a pivot of organizational success. If people had an intuitive awareness of the structure of their thinking, team work would be a lot more effective since a greater mutual understanding and decision making would prevail. Such an awareness being absent, what meta-cognitive strategies can we use to heighten such an awareness? As the book 'Practices of Dynamic Collaboration' shows, a very effective strategy consists of  intentionally listening and speaking based on dialectical 'thought forms'. Discover how the collaborative intelligence paradigm derived from Laske's Dialectical Thought Form Framework works when applied in five crucial organizational practices seen as dialogue practices. Sign up for partaking of introductory sessions on team dialogue practices at: Also view literature links at , Section A, and pertinent teaching materials in Section B. For IDM Services, go to https://interdevelopmentals.org/services/ Read More...

This year, the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) turns 20. Conceived of as a virtual teaching, consulting, and coaching institute, it has outlasted 2 decades of neglect of the cognitive dimension of life as well as work, today the focus of 'cognitive coaching' and/or 'critical facilitation'. Over 20 years, the institute has educated close to 100 individuals in developmental thinking, both in its 'social-emotional' (Kegan) and 'cognitive' form (Basseches, Jaques, Bhaskar, Laske). The 3 documents here posted, written between 1999-2001, together form the historical foundation of work with CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework. The first is entitled "An Integrated Model of Developmental Coaching", the second  "Foundations of Scholarly Consulting: The Developmental Structure/Process Tool (DSPT)"-- DSPT, the 'developmental structure/process tool' being the original name for CDF. (In the original name, 'structure' stands for the social-emotional, and 'process' for the cognitive, profile of an adult.). The third paper highlights the -- still unusual -- merger of two lines of adult development which is the highlight of CDF. While the first paper is an extensive introduction to the Three Houses as the mental space of developmental coaching and consulting, the second paper details adults' CDF profile in both of its dimensions. The 2nd paper reviews... Read More...

In this blog, I problematize the question of how to teach dialectical thinking effectively in a world experienced as 'VUCA'. Specifically, I summarize my experience with teaching DTF at the Interdevelopmental Institute, with a focus on educating Critical Facilitators. Thought Form Theories def Read More...

In this article, the author proposes structural, rather than behavioral or emotional, measures of team connectivity and introduces the notion of "cognitive" or "structural" systems constellations. These measures are derived from DTF, his Dialectical Thought Framework, a methodology rooted in cognitive developmental research since 1975. In contrast to the contemporary team literature, and in a follow up of an article co-authored with Graham Boyd on Distributed Leadership found in a book forthcoming at Palmgrave Publishers, UK, (#aboutBook), the author focuses on measuring team connectivity based on a team's cognitive behavior graph in real time. The author teaches DTF to both individuals, especially as coaches, and teams, in hands-on workshops in English and German, and with the help of a translator also in Spanish and Italian. TF Constellations 2 Read More...

Shared or distributed leadership in holacratic environments is often more of a hope or an advertisement than a reality. This is so because leadership is an adult-developmental issue that behavioral training methods are not equipped to handle. However, tools originating in adult-developmental research (since 1975) are still unknown or else eschewed in behaviorally thinking companies, to their own detriment. This article describes the purpose, structure, goal, and outcomes of a workshop based on the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF). It is an initial offering for preparing a company for undertaking a series of advanced team work sessions. Parties interested in evidence-based deliberately developmental approaches to leadership are invited to contact otto@interdevelopmentals.org. Proposal for systemic constellation work   Read More...

As the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) enters a new era, it wants to communicate what it has learned and what, based on its learning over nearly 20 years, it can now deliver to CEOs and Boards. Find out how the Institute's main methodology, called Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF), addresses contemporary issues such as the digital transformation of businesses in all of its facets. Take note of the critical realism CDF tools embody (thanks to Roy Bhaskar's work on a dialectical ontology), and IDM's critical theory practice that now provides a new home for Frankfurt School insights just in time ... Sincere thanks to the international community of students who have made IDM widely known through their own work over many years! A New Beginning at IDM Read More...