Category: Coaching

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...

This blog contains a downloadable copy of Laske's Psy.D. dissertation of 1999 (2 volumes). The thesis was submitted to William James College, Newton, MA. Readers were Robert Kegan, Ph.D., of Harvard Graduate School of Education; Samual Moncata, Ph.D., of William James College, Newton, MA. (then called 'MA School of Professional Psychology'); and Tim Hall, Ph.D, of Boston University's Business School. The dissertation is a comprehensive social-emotional and cognitive study of 6 executives from the Boston, MA, area, the first of its kind. The dissertation comprises 2 parts: 1. volume 1 (5 chapters): methodology and findings 2. volume 2 (Appendices A to D, focused on the relationship of executive and adult development, and including interview data as well as  coaching recommendations based on interview scoring outcomes). On this blog, a third part comprises the volumes' figures. In nuce, the dissertation undertakes to show the limitations of theories of executive development given their neglect of the 'vertical development' axis, both in its social-emotional and cognitive dimensions. It introduces the distinction between 'ontic' and 'agentic' development barely acted upon in organizations even today, as well as the issue of the linkage between the social-emotional and cognitive dimensions still unacknowledged in today's developmental research.... Read More...

In this blog, I draw conclusions from two previous blogs, found at and , both focused on teaching and learning dialectical thinking. I show that teaching dialectical thinking needs to address, and draw practical conclusions from, the distinction between 'thinking' and 'cognition', seen as counter-movements between the four moments of dialectic, CPRT, in the sense of Bhaskar's MELD. I trace DTF dialectical thinking back to Plato's Socrates, respectfully acknowledging Hannah Ahrendt's tremendous insight into 'the thinking ego' as remaining 'absent', which she owes to her  deep knowledge of Greek philosophy transferred to reading I. Kant's work. I tend to think that Roy Bhaskar would have been pleased to have his MELD epistemologically elucidated as happens in this blog. On Letting Thinking Appear   Read More...

There is, at the present time, an enormous lack of complex thinkers in the world, especially thinkers who are also doers and have the power to address the predicaments we are presently in as a species. So the idea that it is worthwhile to acquire complex holistic thinking abilities is a natural one for anybody who is a reflective practitioner. I have long written about the fallacies of logical thinking, and its rather pernicious limits. But that rather negative message is not really negative enough. There is also an enormous lack of teachers of complex thinking in the world, and that is big cultural issue, not to speak of the growing denial of the relevance of science. Since what we call 'thinking' precedes 'doing', that lack is truly of staggering importance. In this blog, I describe in some detail counter-measures that can be taken, positively speaking, for the sake of educating dialectically savvy critical facilitators who can act as teachers of  those who have fallen victim to fallacies that logical thinking embodies (such as that A can never be B). I do so by describing in some detail what a cognitive case study is, what kinds of effort it requires,... Read More...

The Frankfurt School is well known, liked or not liked, due to its pervasive influence in the domain of culture critique. As on account of increasing threats to democracy its legacy is once more coming to the fore, there is a strong tendency to focus on the products and results of the school's activity while totally bypassing quite another legacy of the school, namely, rigorous teaching of complex, 'dialectical' thinking. In this blog, a veteran attendant of Frankfurt School Hauptseminars, directed by Max Horkheimer and Th. W. Adorno, from 1958 to 1966, Otto Laske, speaks up to remind those interested in the school of its huge promise for helping (young and young remaining) minds achieve new depths of reflection and circumspection, not only about society, but also about the cosmos at large and about themselves in their societal and ecological predicament. Otto Laske reviews the teachings of the school's Hauptseminar which focused on Hegel's Logic of 1812-16 as a vehicle for achieving fluid and holistic systemic thinking, more than ever needed in the world we live in, which we created without much further thought about the consequences of our actions supported by fabulous technologies. Taking a measure of Hauptseminar teaching... Read More...

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...