Tag: Otto Laske

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...

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...

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...

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...

In this blog, I draw conclusions from two previous blogs, found at and , both focused on teaching and learning dialectical thinking. I show that teaching dialectical thinking needs to address, and draw practical conclusions from, the distinction between 'thinking' and 'cognition', seen as counter-movements between the four moments of dialectic, CPRT, in the sense of Bhaskar's MELD. I trace DTF dialectical thinking back to Plato's Socrates, respectfully acknowledging Hannah Ahrendt's tremendous insight into 'the thinking ego' as remaining 'absent', which she owes to her  deep knowledge of Greek philosophy transferred to reading I. Kant's work. I tend to think that Roy Bhaskar would have been pleased to have his MELD epistemologically elucidated as happens in this blog. On Letting Thinking Appear   Read More...