Category: Team Development

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...

Teams are increasingly in focus as carriers of corporate culture. Collaboration and self-organization have become key- and buzzwords. New notions of what makes an organization 'humane' relative to A.I. and other kinds of 'business software' are emerging, but, alas, without an understanding of levels of adult development, thus without the possibility to differentiate in pragmatic ways how different team members at different levels of adult development relate to, think about, and use new technologies and thereby contribute to team work. Under these circumstances, enabling managers and HR departments to think more complexly and realistically about the integration of technology into human work is of high importance. The 2019 revision of chapter 11 of Measuring Hidden Dimensions, volume 1, of 2005, posted below, will contribute to a better understanding of how different levels of meaning- and sense making influence, if not determine, team members' capability to collaborate and integrate new technologies into their work. The team typology presented here, while 'only' social-emotional, not also cognitive, is a first step toward clarifying issues organizations increasingly grapple with: how role identities and work agreements, meeting practices and corporate culture are shaped by different systems of interpretation grounded in levels of adult development, and... Read More...

More and more, teams carry the organizational workload. The extent and quality of their collaboration is becoming a focus of practical and theoretical attention. However, a developmental theory of teams, whether social-emotional or cognitive, does not exist. What is clear is that the hidden (= developmental) dimensions of team performance are now defining companies' competitive edge and chances of survival. The slide set on developmental process consultation, below, written almost 15 years ago, gave the first hint that team maturity is a fruitful subject of research. Developmental research, over-focused on the individual, was making it clear that 'maturity' was not a psychological, but foremost a social-emotional and cognitive-developmental issue. From this insight emerged Laske's social-emotional team typology outlined in chapter 11 of volume 1 of Measuring Hidden Dimensions in 2005 (see ). Aside from the lack of social-emotional data on teams, an even greater gap in public knowledge is the lack about teams' cognitive status, regarding their fluidity of thinking and complexity handling capability. This issue is even more arcane to most since contemporary developmental theory continues to reduce cognitive performance either to logical task performances (as in M. Commons' work) or to social-emotional stage positions (as in work by... 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...

My colleague and friend Jan De Visch has recently made enormous strides toward a 'dialogically savvy app', -- an app that triggers deep and critical thinking in order to foster dynamic collaboration. The app is accompanied by the Re-Thinking Game, an implementation of DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework. DTF is an ideal framework for preparing yourself to become a Critical Facilitator because it enables a learner to acquire the skill of 'building complexity' with clients, a process by which clients become aware of the 'terrible simplification' they perform on the real world by way of logical thinking. Jan is an graduate of the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) where he learned to think in terms of the moments of dialectic and their thought forms (see the many blogs on this computer to learn more). Below, have a look at what Jan has to say about the difference between conventional and critical facilitation (facilitation based on critical thinking). In Jan's and my definition, the difference between a conventional facilitator and a 'critical facilitator' is the following: A facilitator functions from a 'participant perspective.' He looks at an organizational system as an outsider and intervenes in it to achieve certain objectives. S(he) is... Read More...