Category: Team Development

The IDM program that leads to fluency in the use of CDF tools, now 20 years old, has unusual features that set them apart from other professional offerings. Among these features are: (1) professional learning closely linked to personal self-development, (2) comprehensive introduction into developmental and dialectical thinking, (3) exercises set in social contexts that make it easy to transfer them to professional practice, (4) teaching CDF tools in a social-ontology framework that opens participants' eyes to the social and cultural constraints they encounter in launching life and work projects, (5) unremitting modeling of developmental and dialectical practice in all workshop sessions in which participants enable and coach each other at a high level of awareness of their own internal conversations. For more details, see the description below: Description of IDM's CDF Program Read More...

Professional work is typically viewed as based on 'expert', that is, logical knowledge and systems thinking. I show in this blog that such a view is mistaken since it encourages doing professional work within the confines of closed systems geared to efficiency and control. In the blog, I see such systems as self-serving and ideological in that they stand against an 'open systems', social-ontology view of human agency as a causal power bringing about societal change. Architectural practice is used as an example. Following Prof. Freek Persyn's inaugural lecture at the ETH, Zurich, I demonstrate what it looks like to view architectural work as an expression of human agency in the sense of Bhaskar's and Archer's  social ontology, thereby consciously placing it within the Social Cube. What in this blog is said about architectural practice can easily be extended to any professional practice one is involved or interested in. Architectural Work as Environment Making Read More...

In this chapter for volume 2 of Meta-Theory dedicated to the memory of Bhaskar, delayed in its publication since 2014 and forthcoming at Routledge at the end of 2020,  I outline a dialectical epistemology and CDF teaching method for absorbing Bhaskar's legacy into integral thinking. I do so since both are presently absent from the integral community's work that has shown itself immune not only to dialectical thinking based on Baskar's MELD itself, but also to new developments in adult-developmental theory set forth at on this site. In nuce, in this text I outline the IDM 'Case Study Cohort Method' taught since 2005 and geared to educating professionals for the sake of becoming a 'master developmental coach or consultant'. In this chapter, I suggest that adopting this method or a suited variant of it would facilitate integral training and practical interventions in society and organizational work. See for yourself. Laske Chapter on Application of Bhaskar's Meld 2020   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 VI gathers articles as well as teaching slides, copyrighted and to be used accordingly. Articles 2008 Anleitung zur kognitiven Prozessberatung 2010 Wirtschaftpsychologie 2012 Habecker MHD Bd. 1 Rezension 2012 Habecker, Jenseits aktiven Zuhoerens 2015 Der Mensch im Anthropozaen Workshop Slides (Folien) 2004 [Folien] Unsichtbare Dimension 2006 [Folien] Humanpotenziale 2007a [Folien] Einleitung in das Entw. Coaching 2007b [Folien] Konstanz-Berlin Einleitung in das Entwicklungscoaching 2007c [Folien[ Luzern Persoenlichkeitspotenziale 2008 [Folien] Einleitung in das Entwicklungscoaching 2013 {Folien] Einfuehrung in Tiefes Denken Eine Einleitung in dialektische Denkformen 2019 [Folien] Komplexes Denken Wien Read More...

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...