Tag: Cognitive Dimension

Since 2015, webinars and courses at IDM have addressed the developmental structure of teams and central issues of team coaching. Specifically, they have clarified notions such as 'self organization' in teams and their ability to develop 'collaborative intelligence'. The perspective taken has been adult-developmental, to the effect that self organization of teams is anchored in the self organization -- thus the maturity -- of individual team members, rather than being a mysterious quality of whatever team. The perspective greatly differentiates interventions that make sense with teams from a merely behavioral vantage point. Team coaches need to address two dimensions of self organization: the social-emotional and cognitive one which broadly overlap and influence each other. The teaching of team coaching has been based on Laske's social-emotional team typology that distinguishes three levels of team maturity. On each of these levels, a team is either downwardly or upwardly divided as a function of the relative maturity of team minority or majority. Clearly, each such team necessitates taking a different approach to intervention. The attached set of slides details the CDF team typology. The typology distinguishes 6 types of teams, or 'We-Spaces', 3 of them up-, and 3 of them down-wardly divided. The... Read More...

This blog gives readers access to the Introduction to Jan DeVisch's and my book entitled Dynamic Collaboration: How to strengthen self organization and collaborative intelligence in teams, to be launched in May 2018 at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. In this book of five chapters, we deviate from the extant team literature by adopting an adult-developmental perspective and instead of "skills", "competences", and "agile" mantras and tool kits focus on the structure and quality of team dialog as the source of self-organization both in individuals and teams. We equate self-organization with being mature enough to be aware of the structure of one's emotions and thoughts as an expression of the level of one's adult development. To provide senior managers with new ways of thinking about teams and new kinds of interventions derived therefrom, we show that teams are always developmentally mixed -- composed of different developmental levels -- and dependent upon how team majority relates to team minority, are prone to being either up- or downwardly divided, rather than unified. We put at the disposition of senior managers a large set of tools unknown to them that derive from adult-developmental research at Harvard's Kohlberg School since 1975, showing them how... Read More...

The topic of this abstract for a lengthy article is presently absent from the literature of 'humanistic management' (M. Minghetti 2014), namely, the  limitations of human collaborative intelligence that naturally arise from the vicissitudes of adult development over the lifespan. (For example, at level 2 of meaning making (Kegan 1982), especially when accompanied by undeveloped resources for complex thinking (Laske 2008, 2017), levels of collaborative intelligence that can actually be reached are very low indeed.) Limitations of collaborative intelligence pervade every culture, not only of organizations. They define to what degree an organization has the potential to become effectively developmental, thus able of self-transformation. Such limitations, uncovered by empirical research since 1975, naturally arise from differences in emotional and cognitive maturity that distinguish individual collaborators one from the other. Although they are no longer a mystery for researchers, these limitations continue to be disregarded by those who formulate visions of humanistic management, a fact that diminishes the realism of such visions. Transforming the Human Resources Function Read More...

Teams and teamwork are the heart and soul of every organizational and institutional project. This is especially true for agile teams. It is not the individual performance or accomplishment that counts, but that of the team. Just like in team sports, the team succeeds and fails together. Up to now, little research on team collaboration that is grounded in empirical studies in adult development has been conducted and published. The topic is still a carefully avoided no-man's land. As a result, strategical advice given and practiced regarding team self organization has pervasively fallen far short of being effective. This is about to change due to the appearance of a forthcoming short book by Jan DeVisch, a professor at Flanders Business School, Antwerp, Belgium, and Otto Laske, Director of the Interdevelopmental Institute, Gloucester, MA, USA. Central to the book are the processes required not only for overcoming stuckness in teams but for developing collaborative intelligence in organizations now experimenting with self-organization in teams. The book is geared to CEOs and Board Members. Senior managers, rather than professional coaches, are considered the main actors. The book promotes the creation of enabling environments for self organizing teams. It serves as a guide to... Read More...

As shown at and, on this website, at , a workshop on new dialog methods specifically for creating collaborative intelligence in teams will take place in Milano, Italy, on January 30-31,2018.  The workshop is offered by Consulenza Evolutiva, Milano and its Altroove School, and staffed by Lorenzo Campese, Alessandro Rossi, and Otto Laske. The workshop is a pioneering first in that it introduces Broad-Spectrum Systems Constellations which broaden the focus of attention of conventional constellations as detailed in the attached pdf. The workshop is held both in Italian and English. Those interested in signing up for the workshop with Consulenza Evolutiva will find further details on the workshop process below. Broad-Spectrum Systems Constellations Read More...

In this article, the author proposes structural, rather than behavioral or emotional, measures of team connectivity and introduces the notion of "cognitive" or "structural" systems constellations. These measures are derived from DTF, his Dialectical Thought Framework, a methodology rooted in cognitive developmental research since 1975. In contrast to the contemporary team literature, and in a follow up of an article co-authored with Graham Boyd on Distributed Leadership found in a book forthcoming at Palmgrave Publishers, UK, (#aboutBook), the author focuses on measuring team connectivity based on a team's cognitive behavior graph in real time. The author teaches DTF to both individuals, especially as coaches, and teams, in hands-on workshops in English and German, and with the help of a translator also in Spanish and Italian. TF Constellations 2 Read More...