Category: Dialectical Thinking

For anybody who has worked with teams  or larger groups --  including teams thinking of themselves as 'agile'  -- it's clear that team members don't often consider that what ultimately makes them 'agile' is the quality of their dialogue. The importance of real-time dialogue has to do with the fact that thinking precedes action, and speaking precedes doing. Dialogue quality is mainly a matter of the concepts team members bring forward and articulate in their dialogue, and these concepts are different at different levels of team work. Concepts, abstract and therefore multi-dimensional and ambiguous as they are, 'mean' different things for people active at different levels of work complexity; one and the same concept even means something different for different individuals in function of their specific level of adult cognitive development. As a result, no verbal statement can ever be accept as 'the truth'. Even less considered, especially in 'visionary' designs, is that every person is viewing the world from his/her own present COGNITIVE PROFILE which is part of a larger 'developmental profile' of the person. Empirically, this profile can be accurately assessed through DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework, also for gauging a person's capacity of listening to others... Read More...

In this new publication, the authors extend their thinking about the adult-developmental foundations of organizational work beyond their 2018 book on collaboration, by putting their focus on 5 specific organizational practices that together constitute the mainstay of organizational work. They directly address managers' thinking at three successively higher levels, providing them with a large number of recommendations and practical exercises for upgrading the functioning of their teams. Starting from a critique of conventional management thinking as an outflow of strenuously 'logical' Taylorism, they unfold implications of adult cognitive development over the life span for how individuals and teams collaborate in real time. They see this "how" as a function of the quality of dialogue between individuals and in teams, in three distinctly different dialogue spaces or "We-Spaces": (1) continuous improvement (the work level 90% of contributors are placed on), (2) re-thinking value streams, and (2) business model transformation. The book closes with an outline of a humane organization as one that makes room for the unfolding of individual flourishing out of strategic necessity, suggesting six humanistic principles to follow when embedding algorithmic intelligence in human capability and work delivery. Based on Laske's team typology (2005), the book provides a unique,... 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...

In this new book to be published by Springer in the Spring of 2020, the authors deepen insights shared in 'Dynamic Collaboration' (2018) focusing on the adult-developmental foundations of 5 crucial organizational practices. A brief outline of the structure and content of the new book is posted below, together with pertinent contact information. The central topic of the book is how by strengthening the quality of team dialogue at three different developmental levels -- continuous improvement, value stream management, and business model transformation -- companies can increase their agility and integrate artificial intelligence methods into their functioning. In the concluding chapter, the hypothesis is advanced that to become 'humane', organizations need to be 'deliberately developmental' throughout to begin with. This entails that they need to resolve the Taylorism-inspired worker/IT dichotomy they have been living with and acting up since 1900. The book is in 7 chapters, each of them outlined in its content below. Parties interested in the book may contact the authors as indicated in the pdf below. High-level summary of Springer 'Practices' rev3 OL Read More...

In this blog, I briefly sketch a coaching app based on CDF. I detail an elementary design of the app and outline its purpose, function, and main benefits. Since learning CDF through workshops takes dedication and a level of concentration rare in present times, the blog suggests that: (a). learning to build apps for CDF-based coaching may be the optimal and quickest way to learn CDF; (b). since the majority of coaches is stuck in logic-based behavioral coaching, executives can expect a value-add from being coached based on the CDF-app designed in this  blog. Of course, building such an app requires people who simultaneously have experience building apps as well as a strong interest in delivering quality coaching. Two kinds of CDF workshops seem to be needed: 1. App-free: conventional, 2-4 day, workshops introducing students to the basics of CDF and providing opportunities for practicing developmental thinking with a client, also in preparation for building CDF-apps. 2. App-focused: a workshop geared directly to building a CDF-app. The first kind of workshop focuses on learning to embody a "CDF-stance" and "persona"; the second kind, on bringing CDF basics into a programmable form and shaping them in terms of the requirements of... Read More...