Integral Review (Sep 2015)
Laske’s Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF) as a Tool for Creating Integral Collaborations: Applying Bhaskar’s Four Moments of Dialectic to Reshaping Cognitive Development as a Social Practice
Abstract
I am introducing into Dialectical Critical Realism (DCR) a developmental, dialogical, and dialectical epistemology for enhancing adults’ cognitive development toward dialectic. I do so for the sake of solving real-world problems in a holistic and transformational manner with a high likelihood of success. Emphasis is put on dialectical thinking as a social practice learned by way of a dialogue method called the Case Study Cohort (CSC) method, taught at the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) since 2000. CSC combines dialectical with adult-developmental thinking and listening in real world situations. Through this pedagogical framework, students engage organizational clients as midwives of their own learning and development through teaching, coaching, consulting, and/or talent management activities, even psychotherapy. In 6 sections, the paper deals with the question of how best to educate CDF-users working as inter-developmental interlocutors who have overcome the epistemic fallacy by guided self- assessment through DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework. This framework operationalizes Bhaskar’s MELD based on Basseches’ pioneering studies in the development of dialectical thinking over the adult lifespan. DTF forms part of CDF, Laske’s Constructive Developmental Framework, whose social-emotional and psychological components derive from R. Kegan’s and H. Murray’s work, respectively. DTF takes up the challenge of teaching and exercising dialectical thinking in an administered world shaped entirely by analytical reasoning. Inter-developmental interlocutors are CDF/DTF-users who withstand the onslaught of downloading and de-totalization, and by so doing become teachers, even models of global self- awareness. They develop this capacity by acting as a member of an IDM study cohort, as well as consultants to client organizations whose thinking they scrutinize in expertly guided case studies. As a result, their focus of attention becomes the structure of their own and others’ thinking as the hidden root of how the social and physical worlds shows up for them and their clients.
