Category: education

When it comes to acquiring developmental and dialectical thinking, "philosophies of the mind", "theories", and "world views" are insufficient. They are all abstractions that can be moved around like pieces of furniture, and in dazzling ways. What matters are PRACTICES based on them, and such practices require METHODS. The Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF), which includes DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework, is a set of practices and associated methods. They have little to with "adult developmental theories" and "developmental models" in the conventional sense, although they synthesize and refine the latter for greater evidential power and effectiveness in real time work. Practically speaking, CDF and DTF are TOOL SETS people learn by doing, viz., working as members of a cohort in IDM workshops. In addition to long-term (1-2 year) case study workshops, beginning in 2022 IDM also offers shorter-term, ten session (15 hour) Practica. These Practica are attended by up to 10 participants working together for up to 6 months, to acquire a professional grounding in the practice of dialectical thinking and developmental coaching. Applications of this practice are found in areas such as permaculture, city planning, ecological rewilding, architectural design, art making, not solely organizational or institutional work. For... Read More...

Self-development, in capitalistic society a mere appendix of professional education for the sake of playing an organizational role, is increasingly making a comeback as a personal goal. This come-back seemed out of the question until recently, being an outcome of attempts to consciously reverse the demise of liberal education by which universities reduced themselves to trade schools and job preparation camps. The factors involved in the re-emergence of me-first education are many, including the pandemic’s destruction of the conventional work world and gains in the social media/AI link. While still acknowledged only half-heartedly as to their importance, these factors together form the springboard from which new self-developmental curricula will emerge. Job and role holders, whose skills' half-life is shrinking by the day, are gradually realizing that managerially supported schemes of self-development are ploys intent on hindering taking full responsibility for one’s own development in the normative sense of adult development. Research at the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) since 2000, as well as the Institute's teaching practice of “develop yourself first” have made visible the deep interweaving of emotional and intellectual maturity, referred to in its Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF) as the interleaving of social-emotional and cognitive levels of adult development. That... Read More...

Increasingly, the issues on which the survival of our civilization depends are 'wicked' in the sense of being more complex than logical thinking alone can make sense of and deal with. Needed is not only systemic and holistic but dialectical thinking to achieve critical realism. Dialectical thinking has a long tradition both in Western and Eastern philosophy but, although renewed through the Frankfurt School and more recently Roy Bhaskar, has not yet begun to penetrate cultural discourse in a practically effective way. We can observe the absence of dialectical thinking in daily life as much as in the scientific and philosophical literature. To begin to change this situation, Otto Laske, who comes from the Frankfurt School and has renewed dialectical thinking in Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems (2008) and Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders: A Primer (2015), is offering an intense practicum for thinkers and members of think tanks inside and outside of organizations, as well as members of organizations and consultants. He is using a mentoring approach in which mentees take responsibility for each other's work as in an organizational team, offering a safe and open space in which practical as well as visionary people can come together... 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 III gathers teaching slides, most of them focused on developmental coaching in the sense of CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework. For the most part, the slides should speak for themselves. They are copyrighted and should be used accordingly. 2005a HR Interpreter Course 2005b Intro Dev. Process Consultation 2006a Insights-into-Coaching 2006b London Insights into Coaching 2006c Post-Bureaucratic Management 2006d The Right Coach at the Right Place 2007a Brussels Coach Meeting Feb. 07 2007b Building Out Human Sigma 2007c HR Innovation with CDF 2008a Invitation to Cognitive Consulting 2008b Invitation-to-Cognitive Process Consultation 2008c Insights into Coaching 2009a Lisbon Keynote O. Laske 2009b Nad Philip's seminar introduction to CDF (French) 2009c Stuart-Vurdelja Prague presentation 2015 ICC-IDM Webinar 2016 ICC-ICM Social Emotional Course 2016 ICC-IDM Cognitive Course This paper begins a long series of workshops on dialectical thinking a... 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...

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...