Tag: Team Coaching

This manifesto decries the 'terrible' simplifications that tayloristic managment theories colonizing HR inflict upon the capabilities of human beings working in organizations. See for yourself how little of being human remains when you reduce human capabilities to mere competences and then ask contributors to add value for others than themselves. This manifesto consists of the co-authors' introduction to 'Practices of Dynamic Collaboration', Springer 2020, in June of 2020. Manifesto Against the New Taylorism 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 this wide-ranging interview, Robin W. helpfully challenges me to answer questions that arise regarding DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework, and developmental consulting to indiviuals and teams based on a dialogical and constructivist viewpoint generally.  In rereading the interview, I have here and there slightly edited my answers to Robin's question. In addition, I have supplied an answer regarding his question about "power", which I see rooted in monological rather than dialogical thinking. My thanks once more to Robin Wood for his excellent questions. Interview with Otto Laske in ILR May 2018 AS Read More...

For the longest time, teams have been managed, as well as researched, based exclusively on behaviorist tenets: the notion that by focusing on how team members "behave", their collaboration can be made more effective, even 'self authoring', or whatever the latest fad dictated. For the same long time, managers have spoken rather than listened, and if they listened, they only listened to the content of what team members were saying, -- rather than to the structure of team members' thinking, as well as their own, on which speaking is based. What is more, teams have been addressed only by way of purely logical thinking that turns whatever it encounters into an inert object (rather than acknowledging it as a living entity). As a result, the meaning of team work has been driven out of it, and only what team work descriptively "is" has remained standing, yielding predictably shallow team interventions. To change this counter-productive state of affairs is the purpose of Jan and Otto's book, entitled Dynamic Collaboration: Strengthening Self-Organization and Collaborative Intelligence in Teams (ConnectTransform & IDM Press 2018). They succeed at this by demonstrating in detail that behavior is only one dimension out of three that are relevant... Read More...

Starting in 2014, coach education at IDM shifted to team coaching. In this blog, the reader finds materials that form the basis of my collaboration with Jan De Visch on the book "Dynamic Collaboration: Strengthening Self-Organization and Collaborative Intelligence in Teams" of 2018. One of the basic tenets of this book -- that organizations comprise different team levels or 'We-Spaces' -- derives from my social-emotional Team Typology found in volume 1 of "Measuring Hidden Dimensions: The Art and Science of Fully Engaging Adults" (2005, chapter 10). Below, the reader encounters some of the seminal ideas presented in the form of sets of slides and texts, each of them briefly commented upon as to its main topic. *** Introduction to Team Coaching based on CDF (2014) In this short text, I outline the IDM team coaching program. Based on an introductory 'Gateway' course, the program focuses on two main types of coaching: social-emotional and cognitive. Certification is based on undertaking a case study. Team Coaching for Maturity: IDM Gateway (2014) In this set of slides, I introduce coaches to the CDF perspective on organizational teams. The slides emphasize that teams are developmentally mixed (comprise divergent levels of adult development) and, in terms... Read More...

Developmental  coaching, announced as a breakthrough in the form of an evidence-based discipline in 2003, has had a sorry history ever since. Since this discipline never acknowledged the -- empirically validated --  distinction between the social-emotional (Kegan 1982) and cognitive development of individuals  (Basseches 1984), its impact was reduced to half by its practitioners' fixation on "stages" (whether Loevinger's or Kegan's) and the rampant speculative ideologies derived therefrom. Coaching organizations defensively pushed empirical research evidence into the background while in the meantime co-opting the term 'developmental'. Only a tiny number of coaches learned developmental interviewing and listening, and then only in the social-emotional, not the cognitive, domain. Consequently, developmental coaching was unable to withstand the onslaught of purely behavioristic coaching lore that increasingly gained the field in the form of ICF. the international coach federation. As a result, developmental coaching -- dignified by Wilber's writings in which he only paid lip-service to cognition -- became a misnomer. Having failed to integrate existing research into the unfolding of complex thinking in adults, today (2018) this discipline is only a shadow of its original potential. Relegated to a perspective of 'continuous improvement' -- the lowest level of cognitive functioning in organizations and... Read More...