Tag: Dialectical Thinking

Over the next month, due to increasing demand, Otto Laske will make available a large number of his unpublished social-science papers on this site. The majority of papers is unpublished, but some important papers published more than 10 years ago will also be made available.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...

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...

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...

The blog reviews the personal, experiential and historical, roots of the Constructive Developmental Framework as a tool for systematically exploring movements-in-thought through empirical data capture in real time. Its main purpose is to highlight the need for establishing a systematic training sequence geared to educating critical facilitators working in organizations and institutions, for the sake of promoting self-organization and transparency at work. Exploring Movements 8-2019 Read More...

This blog contains a downloadable copy of Laske's Psy.D. dissertation of 1999 (2 volumes). The thesis was submitted to William James College, Newton, MA. Readers were Robert Kegan, Ph.D., of Harvard Graduate School of Education; Samual Moncata, Ph.D., of William James College, Newton, MA. (then called 'MA School of Professional Psychology'); and Tim Hall, Ph.D, of Boston University's Business School. The dissertation is a comprehensive social-emotional and cognitive study of 6 executives from the Boston, MA, area, the first of its kind. The dissertation comprises 2 parts: 1. volume 1 (5 chapters): methodology and findings 2. volume 2 (Appendices A to D, focused on the relationship of executive and adult development, and including interview data as well as  coaching recommendations based on interview scoring outcomes). On this blog, a third part comprises the volumes' figures. In nuce, the dissertation undertakes to show the limitations of theories of executive development given their neglect of the 'vertical development' axis, both in its social-emotional and cognitive dimensions. It introduces the distinction between 'ontic' and 'agentic' development barely acted upon in organizations even today, as well as the issue of the linkage between the social-emotional and cognitive dimensions still unacknowledged in today's developmental research.... Read More...