Category: education

Until quite recently, the notion that adults develop over their entire lifetime has been a well kept academic secret. It still is. Attempts at establishing “deliberately developmental organizations” (DDO’s; Kegan & Lahey 2016), based on 40 years of research in adult development, are quite recent. This article introduces to the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF), a synthesis of adult-developmental research since 1975 that has been taught as well as practiced at the Interdevelopmental Institute since 2000 (). CDF is a new tool for understanding how people experience life and work, mostly without full consciousness. This qualitative understanding emerges from semi-structured 1-hour interviews which shed new light on how people construct their workplace internally, both individually and in teams. CDFs main strength in business lies in providing new tools for boosting, through dialog, two human capabilities: making meaning of experiences (called “social-emotional”) and making sense of the real world conceptually (referred to as “cognitive”), as further explained below. Viewed more broadly, CDF comprises a political dimension as well. It is a framework for coaching for society, in the sense of developing self-authoring citizens who can think independently, rather than in dependence on internalized or external others. At the present time, where algorithms... Read More...

This short text explains what is important about crafting new forms of dialog in organizations and institutions seeking to be innovative. The text points to DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework (2008, second edition 2017), that was introduced in a previous post entitled “A new approach to dialog.” In a time of deliberately developmental organization and organizations transcending rigid managerial hierarchies, the dialogical approach to thinking and managing here highlighted becomes an essential part of innovation. Short Preface, A new approach to dialog OL 3-2017   Read More...

Can you imagine being part of a dialog in which you not only listen to what your interlocutor is saying but also to the underlying structure of his or her thinking?  If you had knowledge of the thought form structure of human sense making, this way of listening, called “dialectical”, would enable you to point to what is missing (absent) both in your own and others’ verbal communication. It would thereby help you deepen your and others' thinking in real-time dialog. Your critical listening would then not be restricted to content but would equally focus on underlying thought structures used by your interlocutors. In a team and group context, you would be able to point to interlocutors’ thought gaps in a compassionate, inter-developmental, way. Such gaps are not “academic”. They are more serious than that since they translate into gaps between how people think and how reality works. It is this kind of dialog that the present article introduces. The article paves the way for an intelligent reading and teaching of the Manual of Dialectical Thought Forms (DTFM), which in the near future will become available in pdf form on this website under Publications. The article introduces cutting-edge thinking tools... Read More...

Copyright 2016 by Graham Boyd & Otto Laske In this article, the authors put forth a new approach to distributed leadership based on research in adult development and the pedagogical thought of Vygotsky, originator of the notion of zones of proximal development. The article attempts to re-totalize the issues neglected, or fragmented, by theories of holacracy and other models of shared leadership, in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of contemporary attempts to redesign organizational work in the direction of “organizations without managerial hierarchies”. In so doing, the authors leave behind present notions of “individual coaching”, “team coaching”, “managerial hierarchy”, and “organizational behavior”, among others, focusing squarely on contributors’ frame of reference (FoR; world view) that determines how they put their capabilities to work collaboratively and what their needs for developmental support are. The article’s essential argument is summarized in Tables 2a and 2b, one for each dimension of adult development. The authors come to the conclusion that for holacracy and similar models to succeed, much more attention must be paid to the fact that unconventional organization designs challenge contributors’ self-identity and psychological well-being. They also show that a one-sided focus on tasks and competences (Task House) is counter-productive... Read More...

This article is based on my research in adult cognitive development, published in Laske 2008 and 2015. It reminds the reader that his/her thinking undergoes life-long changes that have a dramatic impact on work effectiveness and quality of life, especially the latter. The notion that there are no changes in thinking after early adulthood is thoroughly debunked. It is shown that the structure of “thinking” is built of “thought forms”, and that how these forms are linked and coordinated internally determines not only the flexibility of thinking but also how far human thinking is enabled to grasp the real world in all of its complexity. "Thinking" is also shown to shape emotional life since every emotion is saturated with thinking, in contrast to mere feeling. The article places thinking into a developmental progression from Common Sense to Understanding to Reason and Practical Wisdom, inspired by Bhaskar’s notion of the UDR movement (Bhaskar 1993). It showcases an independent line of adult development of great influence on Kegan's "social-emotional" sequence of stages. ILR August 24 2012 Read More...

From AQAL to AQAT: Dialog in an Integral Perspective In this paper, presented at the 2014 Integral European Conference, Budapest, Prof. Bruno Frischherz compares with great clarity the methodological tools offered by Wilber's Integral Theory to those offered by Laske's CDF.  The author shows that AQAL in its present form -- focusing only on I, We, and It(s) -- omits the category of You and, as a consequence, excludes the dialectic fundamental to engaging in dialog. The author also shows the lack of an ontological foundation of Integral Theory, accounting for its irrealism in the sense of Bhaskar, and thus shows it to be a continuation of the irrealism of western philosophy since Parmenides. He proposes a dialectical extension of AQAL called AQAT -- "all quadrants, all (CDF) thought forms" -- able to render the moves-in-thought naturally occurring in integral thinking but suppressed by Wilber. The paper stands as the clearest outline of AQAL as a purely formal logical theory with false pretensions to totalizing human experience. dialog_in_an_integral_perspective   Read More...