Tag: Team Coaching

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...

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...

Shared or distributed leadership in holacratic environments is often more of a hope or an advertisement than a reality. This is so because leadership is an adult-developmental issue that behavioral training methods are not equipped to handle. However, tools originating in adult-developmental research (since 1975) are still unknown or else eschewed in behaviorally thinking companies, to their own detriment. This article describes the purpose, structure, goal, and outcomes of a workshop based on the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF). It is an initial offering for preparing a company for undertaking a series of advanced team work sessions. Parties interested in evidence-based deliberately developmental approaches to leadership are invited to contact [email protected]. Proposal for systemic constellation work   Read More...

I propose to strengthen the cognitive processes involved in design thinking, especially for cross-functional teams, both through artificial intelligence techniques and focused cognitive coaching. I take as an example of design thinking the canvas metaphor used by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2014, 2010), selecting its CS (customer segment) component for further scrutiny. Specifically, I introduce an amplified form of design thinking called "transformational" thinking that is grounded in research in adult cognitive development over the lifespan (Laske 2008 [2017b/c]). My approach is rooted in DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework developed at the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) since the year 2000. In focus in the blog is the notion of “hidden dimensions” of the canvas that iterative cognitive sprints of a cross-functional team reveal. I see such sprints as based on a combination of “breadth-first” and “depth-first” search, where the former is focused on creating the biggest possible picture, while the second deepens and refines the picture in its details, both in terms of thinking and resulting outcome. I show that the two kinds of searches are mutually reinforcing and that purely logical thinking (and thus algorithmic thinking also) fail in depth-first search, At the end of the text, I demonstrate by... Read More...

This blog introduces the new IDM Program for learning complexity thinking based on critical problems brought forward by the client. Client-proposed problems serve as a procedural and behavioral guideline for a 5-step acquisition of cutting-edge solution approaches that have been tested in previous IDM teaching and are grounded in Roy Bhaskar’s work on dialectic (1993). In contrast to earlier IDM offerings, the present one progresses in clear steps from module to module to facilitate learner progress. Emphasis in the course is put on “doing” over passive listening. Lecturing is kept to a minimum. A progressive sequence of mandatory "meta-thinking" exercises is in place. The program comprises 5 steps taking 9 months to 1 year to complete, depending on the learner’s present level of cognitive development and mental habits. It concludes with three successively higher-level certifications in complexity thinking for use in life and work. Course materials are module-specific and are enriched by IDM publications on sale at www.interdevelopmentals.org under Publications, or taken from recent blogs by Otto Laske. A discount applies to registering for 4 of the 5 modules upfront, after writing to [email protected] to discuss the learner's agenda. In coming months, the program will move from its present test-phase... Read More...

Can you imagine being part of a dialog in which you not only listen to what your interlocutor is saying but also to the underlying structure of his or her thinking?  If you had knowledge of the thought form structure of human sense making, this way of listening, called “dialectical”, would enable you to point to what is missing (absent) both in your own and others’ verbal communication. It would thereby help you deepen your and others' thinking in real-time dialog. Your critical listening would then not be restricted to content but would equally focus on underlying thought structures used by your interlocutors. In a team and group context, you would be able to point to interlocutors’ thought gaps in a compassionate, inter-developmental, way. Such gaps are not “academic”. They are more serious than that since they translate into gaps between how people think and how reality works. It is this kind of dialog that the present article introduces. The article paves the way for an intelligent reading and teaching of the Manual of Dialectical Thought Forms (DTFM), which in the near future will become available in pdf form on this website under Publications. The article introduces cutting-edge thinking tools... Read More...