Category: Book Publication

It is almost 20 years ago that, following Argyris' research on theory-in-use vs. espoused theory, I began to show that both of these personal 'theories' are rooted in adult development over the life span. I began to take these personal ideologies apart into their social-emotional and cognitive dimensions and showed that they are intrinsically related. Today, what Argyris was addressing is seen rather differently, namely as the core of what Jaques (1998) called Role vs. Self and what nearly 20 years later Kegan/Lahey (2016) called Job 1 vs. Job 2. In both cases, a person's organizational role and functioning is set against the person's integrity and developmental agenda. While Jaques saw Self (Job 2) as cognitive, Kegan/Lahey see it as social-emotional. And the two never met! I and my co-author, Jan De Visch, show in a recent book on teams (see ), that Job 1 and 2 are intrinsically intertwined. We shall further that wherever Job 2 -- the individual's or team's concern with their own integrity and safety -- overwhelms Job 1, distributed leadership, which is based on work in circles, breaks down. It never occurred to the worshipers of 'competence' that this concept is intrinsically linked to that... Read More...

Much is made of teams these days, and rightfully so: they are the backbone of putting in place distributed leadership in organizations. New research offers a very straightforward hypothesis consisting of 3 parts: teams comprise different developmental levels, thus are "developmentally mixed" teams 'think': their work is based on analyzable and coachable movements-in-thought teams follow behavioral needs (and associated pressures on them) that are anchored in the psychological profile -- self concept, approach to tasks, emotional intelligence -- of their individual members. teams' 'meaning making' is more strongly "social" than "emotional", compared to individuals, and thus more strongly intertwined with the fluidity of their cognitive functioning. When you put these seemingly simple pieces together, as Jan De Visch and I have done in our recent book entitled "Dynamic Collaboration" found at --  you reap very sophisticated insights not only into how teams function but also into what you can do to make them work better. Read More...

This blog makes accessible, and comments on, a 2010 publication of the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) on the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF) that is still largely unknown in Europe and the US. The publication is in the form of an issue of Wirtschaftspsychologie, a Swiss-German magazine focused on the psychology of work delivery, and referred to as Themenheft. The publication was assembled upon the invitation of Prof. emeritus Theo Wehner, Institut fuer Arbeitswissenschaft, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. The Themenheft articles introduce a new conception of human resources and, related to that, new ways of supporting organizational work by way of consulting, coaching, team and leadership development. The articles anticipate what later would be called by Kegan & Lahey the "deliberately developmental organization." As in Jaques's conception of "requisite organization", the assumption is made that there is ultimately no conflict between work force development and client and stakeholder satisfaction. Viewed from a broader, methodological, perspective, CDF represents a novel approach to carrying out  qualitative and quantitative research in the social sciences. It promotes empirical research of a kind that overcomes the positivistic tendencies of purely logical thinking, and thereby avoids reifying social and psychological processes rather than making them transparent in their unfolding... Read More...

For the longest time, teams have been managed, as well as researched, based exclusively on behaviorist tenets: the notion that by focusing on how team members "behave", their collaboration can be made more effective, even 'self authoring', or whatever the latest fad dictated. For the same long time, managers have spoken rather than listened, and if they listened, they only listened to the content of what team members were saying, -- rather than to the structure of team members' thinking, as well as their own, on which speaking is based. What is more, teams have been addressed only by way of purely logical thinking that turns whatever it encounters into an inert object (rather than acknowledging it as a living entity). As a result, the meaning of team work has been driven out of it, and only what team work descriptively "is" has remained standing, yielding predictably shallow team interventions. To change this counter-productive state of affairs is the purpose of Jan and Otto's book, entitled Dynamic Collaboration: Strengthening Self-Organization and Collaborative Intelligence in Teams (ConnectTransform & IDM Press 2018). They succeed at this by demonstrating in detail that behavior is only one dimension out of three that are relevant... Read More...

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...

Since 2015, webinars and courses at IDM have addressed the developmental structure of teams and central issues of team coaching. Specifically, they have clarified notions such as 'self organization' in teams and their ability to develop 'collaborative intelligence'. The perspective taken has been adult-developmental, to the effect that self organization of teams is anchored in the self organization -- thus the maturity -- of individual team members, rather than being a mysterious quality of whatever team. The perspective greatly differentiates interventions that make sense with teams from a merely behavioral vantage point. Team coaches need to address two dimensions of self organization: the social-emotional and cognitive one which broadly overlap and influence each other. The teaching of team coaching has been based on Laske's social-emotional team typology that distinguishes three levels of team maturity. On each of these levels, a team is either downwardly or upwardly divided as a function of the relative maturity of team minority or majority. Clearly, each such team necessitates taking a different approach to intervention. The attached set of slides details the CDF team typology. The typology distinguishes 6 types of teams, or 'We-Spaces', 3 of them up-, and 3 of them down-wardly divided. The... Read More...