Category: Assessment

The topic of 'spirituality' has a huge literature. Empirical findings about it are rare. We looked at spirituality from an adult-developmental perspective and, using a semi-structured interview, came to some interesting conclusions. The interview is modeled after the social-emotional interview that is based on prompts. If you, the reader, find our conclusions to be of interest, let us know by writing to [email protected]. Perhaps you want to volunteer to be interviewed? Insights into Spirituality Read More...

The Laske Social Science Archive gathers Otto Laske’s writings on organizations written between 1999 and 2019, many of which have retained their value vis a vis new fashions of management thinking. Its sections are numbered chronologically. The Archive makes available both texts and slides, the latter for pedagogical purposes. The articles gathered are bundled according to topic. They can be downloaded free of charge. Archive V gathers articles written  DTF-based dialectical thinking as the developmental peak of adult cognitive development, seen from the ontological perspective of Roy Bhaskar's work on 'Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom' (1993). The emphasis in these writings falls on the intrinsic relatedness of 'dialectical' and 'dialogical' thinking and the hypothesis that speaking in real time makes ontological truth claims regarding how the real world works (rather than being a mere behavioral activity). These articles pave the way from monological and logical to dialogical and dialectical thinking, for purposes far beyond organizational management. Cognitive assessment through case studies is seen as the royal road to mastery of critical facilitation in teams and social forums more generally. 2015 Creating Integral Collaborations 2016a An Integral Epistemology 2016c Dialectic Interpreted in the Logic of Commerce 2016e Laske on Bhaskar 2017a... 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...

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...

The blog reviews the personal, experiential and historical, roots of the Constructive Developmental Framework as a tool for systematically exploring movements-in-thought through empirical data capture in real time. Its main purpose is to highlight the need for establishing a systematic training sequence geared to educating critical facilitators working in organizations and institutions, for the sake of promoting self-organization and transparency at work. Exploring Movements 8-2019 Read More...