in this issue...

IDM Spring/Summer Courses European Spring and Summer Courses Featured Article: Requisite Coaching and Mentoring By Ken Shepard, Ph.D. On Practical Wisdom by Otto Laske Introducing the IDM Integrative Thinking in Management Certificate

IDM 2008 Spring/Summer Courses

Courses Taught by Otto Laske

All classes are recorded for subsequent listening.

IDM Summer Courses in Europe 2008

This summer, the emphasis of teaching in Europe will lie on dialectical thinking as a way of taking a dynamic and holistic view of organizations and work in organizations. This teaching is geared to managers, consultants, and coaches alike all of whom work with cognitive tools whether they know it or not.

The seminars below are addressed to different audiences: coaches and consultants in Brussels, managers and consultants in Berlin, and business school faculty in Lucerne. All are two-day seminars.

*The Economic University, Lucerne, is the competency center of central Switzerland for educating upper-level managers. Its purpose is to contribute to modern knowledge-based society by way of teaching, research, and consulting. The university educates experts and leaders and supports organizations and institutions based on the social sciences. It is part of a network linking Swiss and international universities and partners in administration and the economy at large. See http://www.hslu.ch/

FEATURED ARTICLE: “Requisite Coaching and Mentoring”

By Ken Shepard, Ph.D.

Ken Shepard, President, the Global Organization Design Society, Toronto, had the kindness of reading parts of volume 2 of Measuring Hidden Dimensions. He decided to comment on coaching from a point of view informed by Elliott Jaques’s work. His comments are meant to help developmental coaches position themselves in the market place.

It's clear that organizations have a range of coaching and mentoring practices using external professionals to support these practices in various ways. I'm familiar both with organizations who allow senior managers to use consultants or coaches to work on whatever is needed to support them and I’m also know organizations who have carefully structured coaching programs using an array of internal and external coaches to meet program goals and guidelines.

While my consulting focus is in strategy, structure, and talent pool management, a significant number of general manager clients have engaged me in discussions about their careers and used me to support their long term growth. And In this context, I thought you might like comments related to your developmental coaching framework from a requisite organization point of view.

In requisite organization, coaching is an accountability of a subordinate's manager and relates to improving the subordinate's performance in his/her current role. Then what might be the features of requisite coaching?

• The manager retains the coaching accountability but contracts some of the work in helping the subordinate to improve to an external contractor... perhaps called a personal trainer.
• The manager is the client. S(he) specifies performance improvement goals, (always with input and best advice from the subordinate) and evaluates whether improvement has been achieved over time.
• The personal trainer works with the subordinate on skills and knowledge useful in improving toward the goals set by the manager.  These may include technical work skills as well as managerial leadership skills required in the role.
• All work-related information behavioral information is shared with the manager.
• Medical and psychological information, information on values, and personal confidences about attitudes, etc. are considered confidential and are not shared with the manager.

In requisite organization, a distinction is made between coaching and mentoring. The latter is grouped with talent pool management, identification of high potentials, and mentoring. The role in charge of these interventions is not the subordinate’s manager but his manager’s manager or skip-manager, the Manager-once-Removed (MoR):

• MoR's may contract with external providers to make assessments of managers as part of their efforts to support individuals to be proactive in their own development for future roles. The assessments could be done as part of management development workshops like the Centre for Creative Leadership's Leadership Development Program (where as a participant, I was assessed in several different ways supplemented by up to 18 instruments and then got three hours of feedback from a registered psychologist.) The service could also be provided one-on-one. In these cases the assessment information is confidential to the mentee and not shared with the MoR.
• Alternatively, MoR's could contract with external assessors to make cognitive (and socio-emotional) assessments as part of the organization's identification of high potentials program.Many organizations retain bioss (http://www.bioss.ac.uk/) to do the Career Path Appreciation. I'm told that a summary of the assessment showing current and future potential capability and its relationship to current role and to the maturation curves is shared with management. Personal information in the feedback session stays with the person assessed.
• It feels difficult for the MoR to contract an external professional to mentor someone in the sense of following their career over the years, identifying and recommending developmental assignments, etc. However, a contracted personal trainer could be used to support learning skilled knowledge and managerial leadership practices required in future roles.

From what I know about the coaching and consulting practice at IDMA, it seems like the best markets for your approach might be:

• High-end out-placement services to support in depth reflection, planning, and finding better job fit.
• Senior coach consultants who may want developmental coaching primarily to develop themselves.
• Senior facilitators and OD consultants, again for their own high-end personal growth.
• High potentials wishing to contract for your developmental coaching privately to get leverage within their own organization's talent pool mangement system.

Ken Shepard is the co-editor of the new GO book entitled, Organization Design, Levels of Work and Human Capability: Executive Guide. A digital copy of the book may be downloaded for free by clicking here. Print copies are available at Amazon.com, and at the GO Society. Video and printed materials can be viewed at http://www.GlobalRO.org. He can be reached at .

Practical Wisdom

By Otto Laske

Wisdom is a time-honored term used to describe philosophical perspectives of a selected group of people in different cultures, especially on the “meaning of life”. Only recently has the topic of wisdom been submitted to scientific scrutiny, foremost by the Berlin Baltes School (http://www.baltes-paul.de/Wisdom.html). Paul Baltes and his students have called, and laid the groundwork, for a psychology of wisdom. Since 1990, they have broadened our insight into this topic, largely focusing the topic on successful aging. In this perspective, wisdom describes human excellence and appears as the peak of adult development.

The term used in this article, Practical Wisdom, points to the notion that wisdom is not some kind of academic knowledge but reflects active and practical engagement in the world. From the perspective of the Constructive-Developmental Framework taught at IDM, this notion entails two issues:

1. In what way does wisdom signify equilibrium between social-emotional and cognitive development, integrating as well psychological balance (‘character’)?
2. Is wisdom teachable, or can its emergence be facilitated by mentoring, coaching, or training? In this short article I focus more on the first than the second question.

When engaging in developmental interviews and interpreting behavioral findings about psychological balance in an IDM case study, students get a first inkling of the structural reasons for lack of wisdom in a particular person. This lack has to do with the absence of equilibrium between the person’s social-emotional meaning making, cognitive sense making, and self conduct, approach to tasks, and emotional intelligence when engaged in the world. The case study is meant to stimulate potential reflection in the person given feedback to, on where further developmental work is needed or at least would be beneficial in reducing stress or suffering.

When one removes the term ‘wisdom’ from its philosophical pedestal, one comes upon the notion that wisdom and equilibrium are inseparable. This is a reminder that the notion of equilibrium plays a central role in developmental psychology ever since Piaget. One is led to ask: “what kind of equilibrium?” Equilibrium seems to imply the notion that there exist different, often diverging, lines of development, and that “bringing them into equilibrium” is the crucial task at hand, either for the person herself or her helper. Emphasizing the practical aspect of wisdom, Baltes (http://www.baltes-paul.de/Baltes&Kunzmann.pdf says:

On the most general level we have defined wisdom as expert knowledge and judgment about important, difficult and uncertain questions associated with the meaning and conduct of life. Wisdom-related knowledge deals with matters of utmost personal and social significance. To test for wisdom we present people with difficult hypothetical situations.

Hypothetical situations, also used in research on moral development (e.g., Kohlberg’s Essays on Moral Development, 1981), indeed provide a good window on wisdom, but only if we focus it on thinking. They engage a kind of thinking taught at IDM as dialectical thinking (Module B). Equilibrium as which one might describe wisdom is not one of content but of structure, particularly the structure of thinking itself. One cannot reflect upon “difficult and uncertain questions associated with the meaning and conduct of life” without moving from formal logical thinking to a dialectical inquiry system, thereby embracing the paradoxes, conflicts, ambiguities and sad predictabilities of human life. From this vantage point, then, practical wisdom seems to rest on a cognitive foundation that provides for the ability to think of life as a transformational system rather than a static, closed one. And this is exactly what dialectical thinking accomplishes.

In my view, wisdom, especially practical wisdom, indeed represents the peak of adult development. It requires a merger of originally separate lines of adult development. The way one emotionally engages with others and the world, the way one reasons, and the way one conducts oneself have to reach harmonic equilibrium, and conflicts between them have to be contained in a ‘broader view’.

As I show in volume 2 of Measuring Hidden Dimensions (Summer 2008), this merger is largely cognitively enabled and entails fluidity of thinking that is achieved only in later years. It has nothing to do with intelligence and even less with being ‘smart’. In fact, not being smart is one of the hallmarks of wisdom.

As Baltes says:

Trained raters evaluate responses such as these by using five criteria that we specify as defining wisdom-related knowledge: (a) factual knowledge about life and lifespan development, (b) procedural knowledge about strategies of life development, (c) knowledge about the context of lives and their dynamics, (d) knowledge about value relativism and tolerance, and (e) knowledge indicative of the awareness and management of uncertainty.

The emphasis in the quote from Baltes is on knowledge. Epistemic, logical, and dialectical knowledge are not distinguished in the quote. (Epistemic knowledge is knowledge about the limits of one’s own thinking.) However one wants to define aspects (a) and (b) above, certainly the remaining characteristics of wisdom-related knowledge all fall into the domain of dialectical thinking.

And such thinking can certainly be schooled!

Introducing the IDM Certificate of Integrative Thinking in Management: Requirements and Benefits

By Otto Laske
IDM Director of Education

In a recent book by the Dean of the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto, the author, Roger Martin, proposes that leaders are foremost good thinkers and excel in what he calls having an “opposable mind” (2007). Such a mind can hold two or more ideas together, even contradictory ones, and therefore can be said to practice “generative reasoning”.

Behind the notion of the opposable mind stands C. S. Peirce’s writings on abductive thinking, a kind of formal logical thinking that transcends inductive and deductive thinking and deals with what “might be”. Part of such generative thinking are thought experiments by which to do reverse engineering on a sequence such as:

Abductive thinking is certainly an advance over thinking typical in the business world. What really matters in business, though, is not thinking about what might be, but WHAT IS. In terms of the sequence above this means to go beyond abductive reasoning which keeps the thinker ego-centrically anchored in himself, and thereby include the world about which a person ‘thinks’:

The Embedding of TAO in the World

To address the world in its full reality, what is needed are dialectical tools by which one can illuminate aspects of the world in terms of four interrelated perspectives, on:

• Processes [P]
• Contexts [C]
• Relationships [R]
• Transformational systems [T],

where the last one implies as well as presupposes the previous three.

These four perspectives are ways of human thinking. Their use is based on a particular Stance or attitude by which alone dialectical tools can be used. To express that the reality of the world itself is structured dialectically, one can speak of it originating in the four quadrants of dialectic shown below:

The Four Quadrants of Dialectic

As shown, the four cognitive perspectives mentioned above are linked, reflecting the composition of the quadrants of dialectics as a transformational system. Thought forms representing the upper quadrants (P, R) enable critical thinking, while those representing the lower quadrants energize constructive thinking. What matters in educating leaders and managers is to bring critical and constructive thinking (declarative or abductive) into balance with each other. That’s exactly what the new IDM Certificate of Integrative Thinking in Management sets out to do.

IDM is exceptionally well positioned to bestow this certificate on students of management, whether private and public. On account of its research and teaching of integrative thinking since 2000, the Institute has accumulated experience in the matter of how integrative, dialectical thinking is taught, absorbed and used by practitioners. We know about the hindrances to, and the resistance to, learning to think systemically.

Purpose

The purpose of new Certificate is to document theoretical knowledge of, and practical experience in, complex systemic thinking in the context of private or public management. The ‘thinking’ certified by this document transcends dealing with well-structured or logically constrained problems. It ventures out to dealing with ill-structured problems regarding which mere classification, simplification, and specialization fall short of making headway. The Certificate is also of the highest benefit for experts in Action Learning whose task it is to help teams think creativitely.

Course Requirements

The ITM Certificate requires participation in the following IDM modules:

• Gateway
• Module A
• Module B1 (elementary)
• Module B2 (advanced)
• Module F1 (case study)
• Module F2 (case report)

An Exit Interview terminates the course of study which, in academic terms, comprises 3 14 week-long semesters.

Module F is a regular discussion group in which candidates for the ITM Certificate meet with three purposes in mind:

• To put in place a case study of three individual clients based on social-emotional and cognitive interview.
• To write a report about each client as the basis of feedback to the client.
• To link the knowledge acquired through the three case studies to a management problem of the candidates own choosing in order to demonstrate the level of integrative thinking the candidate is presently capable of. This Case Report can be of variable length depending on the topic, but should not be shorter than 25 pages.

Logistics

Gateway is a 16-hr course as is Module A. Modules B and F comprise 24 hrs. of instruction each. Case Study Mentoring is available after Module A depending on student needs. The eighty hour total is offered in 40 weekly 2-hr sessions (approximately 10 months).

Pro Action Europe

Pro Action Europe, Brussels, is the most advanced affiliate of IDM in Europe. This Winter and Spring, Rainer v. Leoprechting continues to teach IDM Gateway and Module A courses. A short description of Rainer’s endeavors is found below, together with information about his classes.

Pro Action Europe Offerings, Winter/Spring 2008

A new series of interdevelopmental learning workshops has begun in February of 2008, see http://www.pro-action.eu/7.html

Integrative Thinking

Discover how adult thinking develops and how you can help your own cognitive development at this unique workshop in Brussels with Otto Laske on June 10-11 of 2008. See http://www.pro-action.eu/11.html

Gateway is the introductory class that introduces students to three models of human capability, namely the cognitive, social-emotional and behavioral one. The class puts in perspective the special contribution adults’ cognitive development makes to their potential of delivering high-caliber work as a medium of optimal self development.

Module A, on social-emotional meaning-making, is somewhat curtailed in favor of the emphasis on Module B which is centered on cognitive development. Module B introduces to hands-on knowledge of the epistemic stance and the cognitive tools needed to think dialectically. By ‘stance’ is meant the mental attitude and level of insight into the limits of one’s own knowledge and judgment required for systemic thinking. ‘Tools’ refer to empirically validated thought forms by which one can open one’s own and other people’s mind in order to gain access to a broader mental space in which to live and work. For the purposes of the ITM Certificate, Module B is divided into two parts, elementary and advanced. (Module C, on individual’s psychological balance at work, is not included in the training.)

Module F is the focal module of the new certificate. It is divided into two parts, F1 and F2. In F1, students write three case studies, each on a single client, as in Program II. This schools their facility of thinking based on dialectical thought forms which, in turn, prepares them for addressing a management problem from the comprehensive perspective of transformational systems. By nature, such systems pose ill-structured problems, problems that cannot be solved by formal logical thinking alone but require a habitually “opposable mind” able to hold multiple perspectives, even contradictory ones, at the same time. The capability to do so is demonstrated in F2 by a lengthy Case Report on some pragmatic issue of public or private management chosen by the student according to his or her own interests.

Discount Gateway Tuition for UK Students

For readers of Dr. Turner’s “Mike the Mentor” Newsletter:

Certification Program in Developmental Coaching/Consulting - Special Offer

Dr. Turner writes:

Regular readers of the newsletter will know that of my interest in developmental views of leadership, and how leaders at different levels of development inhabit very different worlds. One person doing very interesting work in this field is Otto Laske of the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM). His methodology enables you to assess the social-emotional and cognitive level of development of yourself, and of your clients. At the core of the methodology is the constructivist assumption that adults construct their own reality depending on the degree of ego-centrism their thinking and social-emotional relating is presently limited by. This raises important implications for coaches - for example is it ethical for us to coach clients who are at more complex developmental levels than we are: is our effectiveness as coaches limited if we don't recognise our own degree of ego-centrism?

I have negotiated a discount of £35 for UK readers of this newsletter who want to attend his introductory Gateway program. Just mention Mike the Mentor. To obtain the discount go to http://www.interdevelopmentals.org/certification-gateway.php. On the checkout screen when ordering please type coupon code 'mike' to obtain the discount.

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