Category: Articles by Otto Laske

Otto Laske's contributions to social-science, process consultation, and the teaching of & mentoring in developmental thinking and listening extend from 1999 to the present day. Many of his articles, keynotes, and teaching materials in English and German, as well as translations into Spanish and Italian, have recently been posted on this website under individual BLOGS as downloadable pdfs. They are organized in the form of thematic collections. These writings are 10 or more years ahead of our time. Licensing of his work is available; so far, it has been adopted in Malaysia. The prominent topics in Laske's writings are: 1. Complex, dialectical, thinking as the peak of adult cognitive development, and its relevance in society today. 2. Pedagogy of dialectical thinking (methodology of learning complex dialog), exercised, taught and certified at the Interdevelopmental Institute, IDM, since 2000. 3. Theory and practice of evidence-based developmental coaching; its missed chances caused by neglecting adult cognitive development in individuals and teams by all those who boarded the social-emotional triumphalism train in the 1990s. 4. Team Coaching framed by Laske's social-emotional team typology (2005) and based on dialectical thought form tools, for unlocking team members' internal dialog (the basis of external team dialog as... 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...

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...

In diesem Blog stelle ich die wichtigsten der von mir seit 2004 deutsch geschriebenen sozialwissenschaftlichen Texte und Lernmaterialien zusammen. Sie betreffen thematisch, was ich Lebensbefreiung nenne, in dem Sinne, dass sie es dem Leser ermoeglichen, sein oder ihr eigenes Leben entwicklungsmaessig in tieferer Weise als bloss psychologisch zu verstehen, naemlich auf 'epistemische' Weise, die die Art und Weise betrifft, in der sich jeder von uns seine eigene Welt schafft. Die Texte zeigen, wie jeder von uns eine lebenslange Entwicklung durchlaeuft, welche die dramatischen Veraenderungen unserer Erfahrung der realen Welt ("Wirklichkeit") als von uns selbst konstruiert, und also auch als von uns selbst verantwortet, darstellt. Sie enthalten zudem eine Ideologiekritik sowohl positivistischer wie spiritualistischer Ansaetze zur Erklaerung unseres Lebenslaufs und unserer Lebensprobleme. Methodologisch gesehen betreffen diese Schriften meine Arbeit mit dem Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF, 2000), einer sozial-wissenschaftlichen Methodologie, die human resources insofern revolutioniert, als sie erstmalig empirische Daten zum persoenlichen Entwicklungsstand von Mitarbeitern in Unternehmen zur Verfuegung stellt, die eine Grundlage nicht nur von Coaching, sondern auch von Karriereberatung und Team-Aufstellung werden koennen. Zudem leisted CDF auch im Privatleben Hilfestellung einfach deswegen, weil es zu einem Verstaendnis des persoenlichen Entwicklungsverlaufs und Entwicklungsstandes beitraegt, das weder von der Psychologie noch von... Read More...

Developmental  coaching, announced as a breakthrough in the form of an evidence-based discipline in 2003, has had a sorry history ever since. Since this discipline never acknowledged the -- empirically validated --  distinction between the social-emotional (Kegan 1982) and cognitive development of individuals  (Basseches 1984), its impact was reduced to half by its practitioners' fixation on "stages" (whether Loevinger's or Kegan's) and the rampant speculative ideologies derived therefrom. Coaching organizations defensively pushed empirical research evidence into the background while in the meantime co-opting the term 'developmental'. Only a tiny number of coaches learned developmental interviewing and listening, and then only in the social-emotional, not the cognitive, domain. Consequently, developmental coaching was unable to withstand the onslaught of purely behavioristic coaching lore that increasingly gained the field in the form of ICF. the international coach federation. As a result, developmental coaching -- dignified by Wilber's writings in which he only paid lip-service to cognition -- became a misnomer. Having failed to integrate existing research into the unfolding of complex thinking in adults, today (2018) this discipline is only a shadow of its original potential. Relegated to a perspective of 'continuous improvement' -- the lowest level of cognitive functioning in organizations and... Read More...