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Over the next month, due to increasing demand, Otto Laske will make available a large number of his unpublished social-science papers on this site. The majority of papers is unpublished, but some important papers published more than 10 years ago will also be made available. Only very few papers are incomplete. The Archive is divided into two parts: Decade 1 (1999-2009) and Decade 2 (2010 to 2019) of IDM. Each part of the Archive will be in the form of a single blog and will comprise both papers and sets of slides, the latter used for teaching CDF in both English and German. The articles will be posted in chronological order and will be annotated to various degrees in order to make them accessible. Writings of the first decade of IDM begin with a critique of behavioral mindset generally, whether in management, coaching, or consulting. They extend the critical approach to organizations initiated by Chris Argyris and Elliott Jaques. These writings reconceptualize the tayloristic shibboleth of "Human Resources" on grounds of developmental thinking, a critique that finds its clearest expression in the forthcoming book by Jan De Visch and Otto Laske on collaborative intelligence (see ). To me, these writings... Read More...

This year, the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) turns 20. Conceived of as a virtual teaching, consulting, and coaching institute, it has outlasted 2 decades of neglect of the cognitive dimension of life as well as work, today the focus of 'cognitive coaching' and/or 'critical facilitation'. Over 20 years, the institute has educated close to 100 individuals in developmental thinking, both in its 'social-emotional' (Kegan) and 'cognitive' form (Basseches, Jaques, Bhaskar, Laske). The 3 documents here posted, written between 1999-2001, together form the historical foundation of work with CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework. The first is entitled "An Integrated Model of Developmental Coaching", the second  "Foundations of Scholarly Consulting: The Developmental Structure/Process Tool (DSPT)"-- DSPT, the 'developmental structure/process tool' being the original name for CDF. (In the original name, 'structure' stands for the social-emotional, and 'process' for the cognitive, profile of an adult.). The third paper highlights the -- still unusual -- merger of two lines of adult development which is the highlight of CDF. While the first paper is an extensive introduction to the Three Houses as the mental space of developmental coaching and consulting, the second paper details adults' CDF profile in both of its dimensions. The 2nd paper reviews... 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...