Opening up your deep thinking capabilities to make a real difference in strategy design and execution
A New Leadership Program by Otto Laske and Jan De Visch
Starts Monday, June 4, 2012, 6-8 pm CET/12-2 pm EST
8 two-hour sessions by conference call held on Mondays, June 4, 11, 18, 25; July 2 and 9, 2012.
Participants will receive a GoToMeeting dial in number and web link.
Nature of the Course
This leadership course is designed to create a practical, inspiring self-reflection process for senior managers who are ready to abandon “business as usual” and embrace new ways of gaining access to their own thought process. We are addressing managers who are eager to shift and develop their thinking about transforming the competitive landscape.
Group reflection on focal concepts in strategy design will be combined with modeling how to mine the gold of one’s own cognitive resources once they are freed from undetected presuppositions. We will observe the flow of thinking we are engaged in during strategy design.
Emphasis on Practice
The Dialectical Thinking Leadership Program is an intensive 8 x 2 hour program designed to make BETTER decisions MORE of the time. Through a series of thought provoking sessions, participants will be introduced to dialectical thinking structures (thought forms) and develop frameworks, gain tools, and practice techniques needed to become better thinkers. By working to apply the thought forms of dialectic using specific business examples, own cases and scenarios, participants have the opportunity to develop an increased understanding and self-awareness of their own mental models; they will be trained in better equipping themselves in their thinking as key in designing an personal leadership strategy.
Change the way you think about your challenges
The program will teach participants powerful and practical forms of thinking used by high value decision makers, as shown by new research. They will learn how to find ways to change their habitual thought patterns in order to create novel solutions to problems. The course invites participants to think about thinking while thinking, and develops terminology for thinking about their own thinking.
The course is not about rules of thinking, but is procedural, providing participants with patterns of heuristic thinking t rich in alternatives. The course increases participant’s ability to distance themselves from the contents of their own thinking, their own emotions, and ingrained patterns of behavior, and increase their analytical focus, enabling them to become self-authoring in their behavior and decision-making.
Co-creation with participants
The program practices what it preaches. Participants, being aware of the knowledge landscape of the 21st century, know that what one needs to know how to do today has become a lot denser. They know that fluidity of thinking and holistic approaches are at a premium in their industry. This course assumes that one’s personal mental models and the self awareness that goes along with them can make a crucial difference when it comes to learning faster, thinking holistically, and making better decisions.
Participants bring in their wealth of knowledge and experience facing a difficult challenge. We will teach them that solving seemingly intractable problems has much to do with seeing them in a new light. The course facilitators empower the participants to use their present thinking capability to maximum effect, thereby broadening their own mental models and transforming themselves, and ultimately their organizations.
What is dialectical thinking?
As long as we take the world lying before us for granted, rather than realizing that it is constructed by us, we remain chained to what we seem to “see”. But once we become more highly aware that “the world” is our construction, we can begin to identify, name, and assess thinking patterns, and can also use them as mind openers in our communications. These patterns enable us to see the bigger picture, see emerging changes, the common ground in diversity, and the transformational potential of people and situations.
Dialectical thinking is about the use of patterns of thinking evolving gradually over adults’ life span. Such patterns are tools each of us uses to construct his or her very personal “world”. They define the uniqueness of a leader. According to research as well as the instructors’ personal experience, dialectical thought forms enable leaders to tackle highly complicated issues once they acquire the capacity, to coordinate contrasting and contradictory thought forms that contain elements of several different models of things. Embracing such thought forms makes for better problem posing as well as decision making.
Questions we will address in the program
- How to resolve the kind of problems that seem to change as you attempt to solve them – the kind of questions that seem to have no good answers?
- How to recognize automatisms in thinking that are counter-productive, and re-engineer them in order to change your own thought patterns?
- How to better distinguish between ‘knowing-how’ and ‘knowing-what’, and produce better communications and interactions among colleagues?
- How to create common ground when you are faced with choices that seemingly force you to choose between mutually exclusive, yet suboptimal, options?
Who should attend?
This program is designed for senior leaders in their respective organizations who are:
- driving innovation to create new customer/human centric value for their organization
- looking for new ways of thinking to stimulate breakthrough ideas, growth strategies, and organizational transformations.
Program content and exercises are relevant to organizations of all sizes and industries. The overall objective of the program is to produce thinkers who, when faced with a tough problem with no immediate or appealing solutions, see it as their job to generate an unconventional solution.
Facilitators
Otto Laske, Founder of the Interdevelopmental Institute (www.interdevelopmentals.org)
Jan De Visch, Managing Director of Connect & Transform (www.connecttransform.be) Both have extended knowledge in dialectical thinking applied to organizational issues.
If you have further questions about this offering, please contact us.
Course Certificate
Participants earn 16 CEUs in the form of the IDM Certificate in Dialectical Leadership.
Register for "Leadership Based on Dialectical Thinking"
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