About Otto Laske

Otto Laske is the Founder of the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM), its Director of Education, and its main instructor. He has a broad, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary background linking philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and the arts. Being a scientist as well as an artist, Otto draws together in his work many cultural influences and creative projects.

At the present time, Otto’s main interest as a scientist is in the applied developmental sciences. He wants coaches and other consultants to take better advantage of the research that has been done on adult development since about 1975. For this reason, he developed the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF), a methodology taught in various forms in all IDM courses. The student body benefitting from Otto’s teaching is international, and comprises “the best and the brightest” coaches and consultants from Australasia, Europe, and North- and South America.

Otto was raised in Europe (Poland, Germany), and studied philosophy and social research at the “Frankfurt School,” Frankfurt am Main, Germany (Dr. phil., 1966); music at the Darmstadt Conservatory, Darmstadt, Germany; New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, MA, USA, and the Instituut voor Sonologie, Utrecht, The Netherlands. He also studied information processing psychology with H. A. Simon at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and computer science at Boston University. Between 1992-95, Otto, a perpetual learner, attended Harvard Graduate School of Education (“Kohlberg School”) to absorb developmental psychology, and in 1999 submitted his second doctoral thesis to Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, Boston, MA (Psy. D.).

As is true for his early mentor, Th. W. Adorno, Otto’s central interests have always been the theory of knowledge and the arts (which he has practiced as a composer, lyric poet, and visual artist). These two disciplines have schooled him in a deep kind of listening, whether to speech or instrumental-vocal and electronic sound.

After professorships in music in the 1970s, Laske became a software and knowledge engineer, simultaneously directing the New England Computer Arts Association (NEWCOMP) and its international annual competition. When engaged in organizational consulting on expert systems during the 1980s, Laske realized his lack of psychological knowledge of how people behave and function at work. He therefore decided in the early 1990s to become a clinical-organizational psychologist. His clinical training in major Boston teaching hospitals made evident the need for merging developmental and clinical know-how in work with individuals and teams.

Based on his two-volume study of the adult-developmental effects of coaching on executives (1999), in 2000 Laske established the Interdevelopmental Institute, where he has been teaching ever since. In the first decade of this century, he published two textbooks on applied adult development under the title of “Measuring Hidden Dimensions” (2005; 2009), emphasizing the need for assessments. In the U.S. as well as in Europe, he is considered a major author writing about developmental approaches to human resources, specifically coaching psychology, as well as a major teacher of developmental process consultation who is expanding Edgar Schein’s work.

As an artist, Otto has practiced as a composer, lyric poet, and visual artist at different times in his life (www.ottolaske.com). His work at IDM since 2000 is documented at www.interdevelopmentals.org