Category: Developmental Coaching

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...

The first workshop on CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework, was held in Rome in 2011, carried out in collaboration with the Italian Society for Coaching Psychology (Ida Sirolli organizer). In the texts below, Italian readers find teaching materials and commentary for learning CDF. Translations are by Marco Di Monte and Dr. Alessandro Rossi, both students of the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM). So far, attempts to bring knowledge of CDF into Italian organizations have failed despite a good understanding of humanistic approaches in Italy (manifest, e.g., in Marco Minghetti's work).   Forme di Pensiero Dialettico (Sirolli 2011) Sirolli's translation of CDF slides for the Rome seminar is too large for upload.   Italian Wikipedia Articel on CDF (Di Monte 2012)   L'Interdevelopmental Institute (Di Monte 2012)   Introduzzione a CDF (Di Monte 2014)   Nuove Strutture di Pensiero (Rossi 2016)   Como Sviluppare Nuove Strutture di Pensiero (Rossi 2016)   A Methodology for Creating a Developmentally Aware Society (Laske 2016) This text was written by Otto Laske as part of preparations for the seminar 'sviluppare nuove strutture di pensiero' (2016).   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...

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...

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...