To appear in July 2015 at Integral Publishers
Integral Publishers (integralpublishers.com) and Otto Laske, Director of the Interdevelopmental Institute (www.interdevelopmentals.org), have joined forces in order to publish a book demonstrating by examples how leaders of large forums, organizations, institutions and board of directors can quickly acquire patterns of thinking that hinder them from getting stuck in seeing the world in purely static, “logical”, terms.
Leaders have long yearned for ways of excelling in focusing their thinking on processes, relationships, and patterns of transformation that reflect the complexity and incessant change that is their daily bread. Especially when working with teams, leaders have worked hard to create collaborative intelligence, by exercising ways of thinking that, while logical, transcend formal logical identity thinking by integrating “what does not fit”. Rather than wanting to fall back into orthodox systems thinking, they have craved thinking tools that are as transformational as the world in which they have to act.
Leaders need to search no further. Author Otto Laske has first-hand experience with schooling thought leaders in a new way of breaking down barriers of complexity and thereby making complexity manageable. In his book Dialectical thinking for integral leaders: A primer (2015, 130 pp.) he introduces leaders to the deep structures of their thinking, simultaneously opening up ways to make such structures increasingly transparent to themselves and others. Laske does so by focusing on the underlying thinking structures that determine what people think “about”. He thereby shifts the focus from “what” one thinks to “how” one thinks, opening up a plethora of choices.
Since the author focuses on the “four moments of dialectic” and their associated “thought forms” one by one, he makes it easy for the reader to exercise new thinking patterns from the get-go, and elaborate them further step by step. After an introduction showing how the four moments relate, each chapter develops the implications of each moment based on examples taken from the human resources field of organizations.
As the book proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that the classes of thought patterns associated with the moments not only represent new thinking tools but bring into being a new stance toward the world for creating unheard-of thinking experiences. In the last chapter, all moments and their thought form equivalents join forces in a crescendo of truly transformational thinking that is the root of both innovative thinking in individuals and of collaborative intelligence in teams.
Paramount in benefitting from the book is openness to one’s own untrammeled thinking as one moves from chapter to chapter. Starting out from the static world of “Context”, the reader is shown ways of including opposites, antitheses, and absences leading to “Process” thinking. From here, it is only a small step to understanding intrinsic relationships between things sharing a common ground (“Relationship”). This step opens the gate to transformational thinking in which all facets of an organization, like that of a beehive, can be integrated by the mind.
Having followed the book by closely thinking with the author, the reader ends up finding him- or herself put into a world not grasped before that has emerged through joining the four dialectical perspectives on things, whatever one may want to think “about”. The vocabulary of “moments” and “thought forms” has firmly entered the reader’s mind who can now carry the book’s wisdom into daily pursuits and issues.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Jan De Visch
Introduction
Chapter 1 A Logical Beginning: The Four Moments of Dialectic as Four Classes of Thought Forms
Chapter 2 A First Step Beyond Formal Logic: Context
Chapter 3 A Second Step Beyond Formal Logic: Process
Chapter 4 A Third Step Beyond Formal Logic: Relationship
Chapter 5 The End of Downloading and the Beginning of Deep Thinking:
Transformation
Epilog A Call to Action
Appendixes
Appendix A The Four Moments of Dialectic Summarized
Appendix B Practical Examples of Handling Complexity Using the Four Thought Form Classes (courtesy of Jan De Visch)
Appendix C Compact Table of DTF Thought Forms; Concept Behavior Graph, Evaluated to Obtain an Individual’s Cognitive Profile
Appendix D Historical Origins of the Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF)
Bibliography
Index (Terms)
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