References to Measuring Hidden Dimensions Volume 2, Figures and Tables (Laske, 2009; MHD V2)
Welcome And Agenda
Welcome to this seminar on Chapter 12 of Volume Two of Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems (Laske, 2009; MHD V2).
In this session I will talk about what’s in focus in our Dialectical Thinking Program. CDF has introduced a different concept of coaching and by implication consulting too. And we follow this path in our Dialectics in Practice Program in which you first, through self-study, learn the basics of developmental research and then go into live classes where you practice what you learned. This new coaching program relates to Volume 2 and the relationship between semi-structured interviewing and coaching.
Today I will talk about how we can scrutinize speech to understand clients better, the benefits of semi-structured interviewing and then the issue of good thinking versus finding a solution now and then something about dialectical listening.
The Structure Of People’s Thinking Generates The Content
If you listen to most coaching sessions, you do not ever hear something that, in CDF terms, gives you any information about the cognitive profile of a client. Now this is pretty sad because, what we do in coaching is thinking, but you never hear any focus on conceptual matters. And this is the difference. What Laske is saying is, let’s think about how we could help a client on cognitive grounds. What would it mean if we would listen to people’s conversations and listen for concepts they use, not for content.
Why should we do this? We should do this because all the contents that a person brings up in a conversation are determined by the concepts they know how to use, and those concepts that they don’t know how to use will never contribute to what they present to you in terms of content. Which means that a vast aspect of the universe they talk about may lie in the shadows because they cannot think about it.
So the claim in Volume 2 is that the structure of people’s thinking generates the content.
Let’s take a simple example. Somebody talks about the weather. Well, you don’t have to be a meteorologist to talk about the weather of course, but if you want to talk about the weather in depth, you need certain concepts that a person typically doesn’t have. So you cannot speak about the weather in terms of contents that actually go to the root of why we have a storm system and so forth, because you don’t have the concepts. The same is true in coaching. If you talk about your task, your goals, your boss, whatever you talk about, if you don’t have certain concepts, certain contents will never come up for you. One way to bring these concepts forward that lie in the dark is by having a coach who can think in concepts, and not only in concepts, but who can think abstractly, pull them out. And dialectical thinking is the best way to learn how to pull out concepts and focus on concepts so that clarity is provided to the client.
Dialectical Thinking Focuses On The Relationship Between Concepts
And that’s the challenge. If you want to be more effective in the sense that you provide more clarity for the client, that you are able to listen for the conceptual structure of the client, and not just the content that he or she is bringing forward, then the best way is to learn the elements of dialectical thinking, because dialectics is a way of thinking focused on the relationship between concepts. And what we call a thought form has to do with the form that thoughts take on if we follow the process of going from one concept to another, and spelling out the details.
Now, most people never think about the structure of their thinking. They just think. And they think, they think well, because they have this information, that information, and that’s all fine, but that’s not good enough. You ought to be standing back from the structure of your thinking, which is not easy to do alone, and that’s why we teach that in a group; and you ought to become aware that the way you construct the world precludes you from even seeing certain contents.
Now, people may ask, why these four classes of thought forms that refer to the four quadrants. It’s because you can look at anything in the world, including yourself, in terms of process, in terms of what’s going on, how something has developed out of the past into the present and will develop into the future; in terms of context, which gives you kind of a static snapshot of a picture that can be bigger and bigger and bigger if you look at yourself, and then you look at your community, and then you look at your country, and then you look at the world. And you can look at things in terms of relationships, and finally, in terms of transformation, which presupposes the other three concepts.
So, it’s simply, using dialectic as a discovery procedure, and that’s what it is. It’s a discovery procedure people use in dialogue and have used for thousands of years, but it’s kind of a lost art, at least in the education system we are in.
So, try it out, focus on concepts, and use those of dialectic as far as you have learned them in this lecture or otherwise, and see what happens.
A Thought Is A Living Form
Let me say a little more on thought forms, which has more to do with how, if you are up to it, given your cognitive development level, you can use thought forms in your coaching or any other conversation. What thoughts can we develop about that?
You might say, what does form have to do with thoughts? In what sense have thoughts a form? Well, I would say a thought is a living form. And it arrives from the categories that are in your mind. And these categories are things like cause, being, existence, and so forth. Which you find in a logic like Hegel’s logic or in Kant’s logic. These are deep categories that are ingrained in your brain, depending on the culture you are part of. But everybody unconsciously uses these categories. Now, in the thought forms, we are not spelling these out. That would be an even deeper job than we do in our teaching. We are taking these categories for granted. Only Hegel tried to spell them out. Few people after him have even tried.
Dynamics Of The Concepts
Dialectics is asking, how aware is the thinker of the dynamics of the concepts she is using? What do I mean by dynamics of concepts? I mean there is a link between one concept and the other. And a single concept doesn’t mean much. You can’t really think a single concept. For instance, if you think of a tree, you can’t really think of a tree if you don’t think of soil or of weather.
These concepts are all related; they live in a network, they live together. And that’s the dynamic of concepts. That if you make no presuppositions and just think of a tree, your thinking will automatically lead you to think about things the tree is related to.
Here I’m speaking about thought forms. This entrance into the web of thinking appears in terms of concepts in speech. The phase of dialectical thinking you are in depends on how aware you are of the dynamics of the concepts you are using. For instance, in this and other sessions, we have used concepts like cognitive profile, social-emotional profile, and Stratum, to name a few. These are concepts that have a relationship with each other.
We could also look at the interview or coaching session itself and pick out the concepts the client has been using and ask, well, what are the major concepts the client has used?
Listen For Concepts And Put The Contents In Brackets
Here comes the problem that we have pointed to many times before. In a coaching session, typically, the thinking and the speaking of both parties is all over the place, with no fixed or central concept in view. And as long as that is the case, we are not in the domain of cognitive coaching because we are just following content cues.
The only way to change that is to put your foot down and say, from tomorrow on, I am going to listen for concepts, and I will put the contents I am hearing in brackets. And in my coaching session, I will focus on the first concept that comes along and stick to it and lead the client back to it and make him or her aware of the concept she is using initially and then go to another concept.
And what is that concept like? Is there any relationship between the first and the second? Well, if there isn’t, then again, we are all over the place.
If we hinder that from happening, we need some cognitive power ourselves, as coaches, to say we can’t do this. Or at least we choose not to do this because it gets us nowhere. It lets us be stuck in content, and we don’t want to be.
And if you want to focus on concepts, then dialectics will help you. You can use the concepts that refer to the classes of thought forms, process, context, relationship, and transformation, and find that the client can shift. Now, shifting is one thing, sticking with a concept is another, and going into the depth of the meaning of a concept is another. But that’s what this is about.
So, doing less in terms of content is actually doing more. The less you do with content, the greater the depth into which you can go. To get at the concepts that the client is using over and over again, without knowing it, reproduces the world for him, and he never gets to the root of his own thinking or her own thinking when staying with content.
So, starting with dialectics, you can do this exercise of focusing on concepts, whatever they are. They can be the names of classes of thought forms, or they can be concepts your client is bringing up. And then stick with them, and check out how deep is the knowledge or understanding of your client of this particular concept they are using. By simple questions like, what do you mean by that? Can you be more specific? How is this related to that? What would you say is the bigger picture of this concept if we ask what lies beyond this concept? So, it’s mental hygiene that you would be introducing to clear away the scraps that fly through the coaching session. And just be clear. And that’s dialectics used as a discovery procedure, not only about things the client is talking about, but the client’s thinking itself.
Making The Client’s Problem Formulation Part Of The Problem
So this is much broader than solving a problem. Because the problem here is the client’s thinking and the way he presents the problem, not what he thinks is the problem. So you have to begin to make the client’s problem formulation part of the problem. Before you do that you are not going very far, and you can do that very well with dialectical thinking.
Dialectics Is A Discovery Procedure, And It’s About The Dynamics Of Concepts In Their Relationship To Each Other
The takeaway message is that dialectics is a discovery procedure, and it’s about the dynamics of concepts in their relationship to each other. And it is much more than that, but that’s for practical purposes, probably sufficient to say here.
You could say as long as you are not thinking dialectically beyond logical thinking, you are living in that flatland. It’s one or two-dimensional, or it’s a one-way street, but I think the dimensional metaphor is much better. The world you could live in cognitively could be three or four-dimensional if you got hold of being subject to your own thinking.
Negative Dialectics And Non-Identity
So, here comes Adorno. What does Adorno have to do with that? Adorno is the founder of the Frankfurt School, and he is known for his work on negative dialectics, which puts the emphasis on there never being a real identity between the concepts people use and the thing they refer to through the concept. So, there is something non-identical. If I say, Dahlia, that’s a concept, but it never exhausts the richness of the meaning of Dahlia. I can say Dahlia all day, and I don’t come any closer to the richness of the Dahlia. So, there is something non-identical. And dialectics, for Adorno, was a way of focusing on that which does not fit the concept, which is outside the concept, which maybe can be captured by a relationship of one concept to another, but never through a single concept. And he made his students aware that thinking is identifying. So, if you are not careful, you are in the illusion that you understand the world just because you use concepts, forgetting that the world is much, much more complex than any of your concepts.
Constellations Of Concepts
And now, what is Adorno proposing to do about that? He introduced the notion of constellations. He said dialectic is a discovery procedure by which we use not a single concept but constellations of concepts. That’s exactly how language is functioning, that we never explain things in language. We just are guided from one concept to another. And if we are listening to that attentively, we can spot this dynamic process we are going through. And so, Adorno thought that we need to pay attention to the constellation of the concepts the speaker is using and that we can introduce this for the speaker, to explore a subject matter with the speaker. So, he thought that language lends objectivity to concepts by putting them into a specific constellation of other concepts, and these are hinted at by dialectical thought forms.
Typically, a single thought form, like limits of separation between two things, can be expressed in a multitude of ways, not only in terms of content but concepts. You can say, well, you can’t really talk about a tree if you don’t talk about the soil it is in. So, there is a limit of separation between these two concepts. But other concepts enter into the constellation, like weather and whatever you may want to link to the tree in the conversation you are having, and this is an expansion of thinking, that a single thought form in itself already harbors a constellation of concepts that all hang together. We can’t just look at a thought form like limits of separation and say, OK, that’s a concept, and that’s it. No, it’s not it. The thought forms are so general that they imply and comprise and comprehend and include all these other concepts not immediately mentioned but that will come up in a conversation if you talk about limits of separation with a client. So, that’s what’s meant by constellation here.
Aspects Of Speech
There are many aspects that speech has. And there are probably more than what I will mention here. There’s a social-emotional aspect to speech that we use in social-emotional interviews where somebody positions themselves by talking about what they think is success, taking risks, and other such prompts. There’s a psychological aspect that is more hidden, but any psychotherapist can tell you about it, what shows in speech about what the client or the patient is struggling with. And there’s certainly a sociological aspect, not only in terms of class but other issues like what group you are part of, what do you think is appropriate speech, and so forth.
And then there’s a cognitive aspect which we are focusing on here. The cognitive aspect you get to know when you do, or learn to do, a cognitive interview where we focus on thought forms or forms of thought. For the cognitive aspect, since we are going beyond formal logical thinking in our teaching, we are linking ourselves to a tradition related to dialecticism.
Semi-Structured Interviews And Coaching Conversations
The overall question today is, what does qualitative research in terms of semi-structured interviews have to do with coaching conversations? And coaching is essentially conversations. So interviewing, what is interviewing? It’s a way of scrutinizing speech as the carrier of thought and feeling, not to speak of culture and all the other aspects I’ve mentioned. At first sight, there is quite a gulf or gap between conversation and interview. Although they both take place in speech, a conversation is seen as being free-flowing, uncontrolled in contrast to interviews which are seen as stifling, artificial, imposed, and all those things. I want to take that apart today and show in what way it is mistaken. Because developmental interviewing is not focused on content but on structure, either stage or thought forms used, the purpose is to make the client shine, to show the client at their best in articulating their meaning-making and thinking.
Introducing Structure Into Coaching Conversations
So we have certain prejudices to deal with when we introduce methods of qualitative research into coaching. The claim here is that any coach can benefit from introducing structure into their coaching conversations, which essentially means they are not going to be all over the place, which does not mean necessarily that the client is, that there is some imposition on what the client wants to say, can say, is focused on, and all that.
So what is meant by semi-structured? We can say at least that a conversation is structured in terms of the place where it takes place, the culture in which it takes place, the environment and it’s structured by what the people bring to the conversation. They bring their stage, they bring their cognitive profile, they bring their psychological profile. So the idea that conversations are free-flowing is a fiction. Conversations are heavily constrained by who the people are who talk to each other and they are all the more constrained, the less the people who do the conversation know about themselves.
So what’s meant by semi-structured? Let’s say conversations are considered totally unstructured and free-flowing, if that is what’s meant. We are saying they are heavily constrained and structured without people’s knowing. Now semi-structured has a special meaning. It means there are some pieces of structure that return in every interview I would do with one or the other client, and there is thus enough margin of freedom to shape the conversation according to the client’s train of thought. There is some structure there, for instance, in a social-emotional interview, the prompts like, “What does success mean to you?” and so forth, and “How do you think about it?” And in a cognitive interview it’s the Three Houses and the thought form classes. Semi-structured means there are certain pieces of structure that every interview entails, like the Three Houses or the notion of thought forms but outside of that, the interviewer coach will handle this structure freely.
If you do 50 cognitive interviews, you follow the same structure, and that makes the interviews you do comparable to each other. You can compare output, you can compare scores, you can say, well among 50 scores we had so and so many of this kind and that kind, so it’s useful for research. And it’s also useful in a way that I want to make more clear today for the coaching conversation or the consulting conversation. Semi-structured means there is some recurring structure, but within this structure, there is enough freedom to follow the client’s train of thought, and indeed more than that, the framework or the structure used is meant to enhance the client’s train of thought. So it’s not in contradiction to it but supporting it.
For example, if somebody in a cognitive interview speaks about the competition they are in with another colleague for getting promoted, let’s say, I’m just making this up, then I would think, from my cognitive way of dialectical listening, that the person could be using thought form 2 in which there is a conflict articulated, but also thought form 23 and 24, and maybe some other thought forms, all of which have to do with opposition and conflict. And in order to clarify for the client what he or she is talking or thinking about, I could use those thought forms as mind openers to go deeper on the issue.
The Problem Formulation People Bring Into Coaching Is Part Of The Problem They Are Trying To Solve
And if we think more generally that the problem formulation people bring into coaching is part of the problem they are trying to solve, then there is a need to go into this problem formulation in detail and ask yourself, well why is my client posing his or her problem in the way they are posing it; because the way they are posing it is maybe exactly the obstacle to solving the problem. In any case, it is part of the problem formulation and has to be understood, and that is the big difference between developmental coaching as understood here and conventional coaching.
There seems to be a difference initially between coaching conversations and interviews and if you consider that different coaching schools also have certain styles, which means they impose different constraints on good coaching, although mainly in terms of focus but also of structure, then the two are not so far apart. Perhaps you can give an example about how, let’s say, a coaching conversation in business coaching or in some others in a particular school of coaching, let’s say NLP or ontological coaching, is actually heavily constrained simply because of the style.
Good Coaching Conversations Are Focused
So the issue is that in my experience, and I wonder what your experience is, good coaching conversations are never all over the place; they are focused. What does that mean they are focused? Essentially it means the client’s attention is focused by the coach on something, and the focus could be what the client brings up; it could be, what is behind or underneath what the client brings up, if it’s thought about by the coach in a broader perspective. So the question is, what should the focus be? It should be as close to the client’s train of thought as possible; surely, it should be relevant to the client, it should be opening a new vista for the client, and it should overall make the client shine.
Most coaching conversations you might listen to are heavily social-emotionally flavored, and that means there is no clear distinction between the Task House, the Organizational House, and the Self House; there is no clear distinction; it’s very hard to find thought forms in these conversations. That means most coaching conversations without their knowledge are constrained by a social-emotional outlook that is not really social-emotional but is a kind of a mishmash of psychology 101, and some understanding of meaning-making, which doesn’t go to the level of actual developmental listening.
So these conversations are heavy on content and thin on concepts, and there is no attention to concepts used on either side. That’s not a good situation. And if you take it to the end, it gets you to a different type of coaching which I’m speaking in favor of here. If you want to stay in your old way, nobody can hinder you. But if you are eager to be more firm and structurally focused and, in my view, more helpful, that path is open to you.
Valid Developmental Data
One can summarize that by saying most coaching conversations do not lead to valid data in the sense of qualitative research. Well, one would say, why should they? Well, I’m saying they can. If you are interested in developmental coaching, then you have to take the path that researchers have taken and learn from them to come up with data that are valid developmental data in the qualitative research sense.
I want to remind you that the term development has two meanings in English. One is simply that we say something like, “we want to develop this team.” So here, development has to do with what we do, with our agency. But that is only the second meaning we are talking about here. The first meaning is that something develops out of its own accord, by being a human being by nature you develop. And these two meanings of development are always mixed up in coaching literature.
Benefits Of Introducing Structure
There are some benefits of introducing structure. There is some structure already in what the client is bringing as a problem formulation, and this structure is defined by the client’s social-emotional level of development and by his or her cognitive profile. The coaching conversation cannot be unstructured because the client is structured, and so is the coach. The way to have structure is to think about the structure that is there and to eliminate the structure that doesn’t belong there. And the structure that doesn’t belong there is our ignorance about who is speaking from what social-emotional level and what cognitive profile. So I have said “benefits of introducing structure,” because we are not imposing structure as much as we are introducing it, and that’s an art, in order to create mental spaces into which the conversation can go, to create new freedoms, new liberties, all the good things we want to achieve in coaching.
The notion is that the problem formulation brought to you is part of the problem. What we are critiquing is listening to a client, accepting his or her problem formulation as content, and then simply going with the content. Anybody can do that. That’s not coaching. You have to at least begin to question, why is the client posing the problem they are having or the goal they are proposing in the way they do.
If somebody says, I don’t know how to handle this issue without offending my boss. For instance, I would consider that the client is speaking from a level of meaning-making of Kegan 3/4 or at most 4/3 where they struggle with being self-authoring but feel themselves to be in a conflict which they cannot really handle. I think a person at Stage 4 would not say this, or if the same formulation would be used, it would have a different meaning. I can’t be absolutely sure that it’s under 4, but I’m pretty sure. And that can be probed. So that’s an example.
If somebody would say, I and my team have a different notion of what the real problem is, well, that’s an invitation to you to inquire into how these people actually conceptualize things that, as a team, they are dealing with. So that’s an open invitation which, if you take it in the sense of dialectical interviewing or cognitive interviewing, you would have a heyday with, because you have a whole repertory of concepts at your disposal that you could use to probe into the conceptualization of the notion that the team has.
When going back to some of the misconceptions about semi-structured interviewing seen from coaching, assumedly free-flowing coaching conversations, you hear that such interviews restrict the client’s expressive options, they impose constraints on clients, and they hinder clients from being authentic or anything like that. So you can go to any lengths to be defensive about structure in your coaching.
Metaphor Of The Three Houses
Now the Three Houses Laske introduces in Volume 2 are not the only metaphor we can use. Some people use the Wilber Quadrants, although that, most of the time, leads into a social-emotional direction. But you can try it out. Laske has introduced the Three Houses to keep three aspects of the internal workplace apart. Namely Task House, Organizational House, and Self House. This metaphor is meant to allow you to ask some leading questions, one in each house. Namely,
In the Task House: what is your responsibility?
In the Organizational House: How do you see the relationship of what you do with your environment?
And in the Self House: why do you do this work, or what motivates you to do this work?
These are the three guide questions. All the other questions are made up freely by you in listening to your client’s conversation. You will probably agree, that’s not much of an imposition of structure.
Good Thinking Versus Finding A Solution
But then you will say, oh, that’s all very good, but I would immediately come up with a problem, that my client wants to find a solution to what they are dealing with right now. So then we get into a conflict between good thinking and finding a solution right now.
And being under pressure to find a solution in itself would be worthy of investigating in that you ask yourself, well, what’s the client’s social-emotional position there that they feel so pressured to come up with a solution? For whom are they looking for a solution? Is it for themselves, for others? There’s a whole social-emotional issue right there. And there’s the cognitive issue that finding a solution here and now really means you are looking at a tiny aspect of a complex problem. You want to pin it down and attach some kind of solution to it, which tomorrow will appear to be not a solution at all.
So all of this then hinders you from realizing that your client’s problem formulation may be in error, incomplete, skewed, hiding essential relationships to other problems, being out of context with the environment and the environment’s universe of discourse, or being just a mere replication of what other people think about it, so it has nothing original about it.
So good thinking is not part of that. Good thinking is outside of finding a solution right now.
In action learning, you would say, well, let’s first spend the first hour of our team looking at the problem presentation we have been given for this team to work on and ask ourselves, is that the real problem, or is it just one of the problem presentations that one can adopt? And then, after having found some consensus about what the real problem is, we can begin to look for steps to a solution, but it will not be right now. There’s no solution forthcoming anywhere right now.
That approach is good thinking.
Focus On Base Concepts
Then there is a liberation that concepts provide, especially if they are reflected upon because that’s the door through which you enter the dynamics of your own and your interlocutor’s mind. Even in a speech that is full of social-emotional, and psychological content or structure, there are concepts, and the clients are looking at these concepts. If you do it felicitously, you can find new perspectives on the issues posed. So concepts in themselves can lead somebody out of the dark to see more about himself and the problem they are addressing. So here we are saying that it makes sense to focus on certain base concepts.
Concept Behavior Graph
I’ll just refer to that concept behavior graph, which shows for a cognitive interview in what house what thought forms were used. You can draw multiple fruitful conclusions from the concept behavior graph. Even if you were to engage with a client just in terms of cognitive interviewing, you would say, let’s make a cognitive interview and look at the thought forms that emerge from our discussion, and then I will give you feedback on it. You can get huge insights alone from the fact of what thought forms never occur, which occur weakly, which occur in the Task House but never in the Self House, and so forth.
Cognitive Interviewing And Listening For Dialectical Thought Forms
However, to do that, you need to learn the discipline of cognitive interviewing, and you want to substantiate this ability, or you can best do so by doing a case study and showing how much of that you can do. When you read Chapter 12 of Volume 2, you can get some examples of how you can use cognitive cues for doing cognitive interviews and more generally. To do that, you need to have studied the dialectical thought forms. That’s referred to as dialectical listening, meaning listening for dialectical thought forms.
Quadrants Of Dialectic And The Four Classes Of Thought Forms
Since they are a limited set, about 28, you can gradually learn them, so you can know them in your sleep, so when somebody speaks, these thought forms pop up in your mind and you say, oh, let’s follow that thought aspect in that direction.
This is one of the focal points in the Dialectics in Practice Program. You have to study the quadrants of dialectic, explained in Chapter 6 of Volume 2, and what follows from then, namely the four classes of thought forms and then the individual thought forms. By doing so and using that in your practice, you develop the ability to estimate, even intuitively see or understand, how much coordination of thought forms is going on in that client’s speech.
Then, you can go and use thought forms to test how far a person can think certain things and how far they can’t. There’s always a big area of the world that is in the shadow for people when they talk about their issues. And perhaps by using thought forms, we can find what zone of shadow is lying over somebody’s speech.
Epistemic Position And Stance
What does it mean to learn or to become familiar with the quadrants of dialectic? It’s more than an analytical task. It is a matter of your stance, namely, how open are you to the world? How are you engaged with new discoveries? How much? It has a psychological and social-emotional background. Of course, everything is related. So it does have to do with your epistemic position. If you are at epistemic position 4, where everything is relative to a person’s particular mindset, then there are no generalities you can talk about. Thought forms don’t have the slightest importance for you. But if you go to epistemic position 5, where you begin to use abstractions to make comparisons between different domains, that changes. Then the door is open for engaging more clearly in dialectical thinking.
Shedding Light On Structure
Basically, that’s an invitation to consider that instead of talking about coaching conversations as being free-flowing and unstructured, you begin to consider them as heavily constrained by the people having the conversations and ask yourself whether this structure could not be shed light on, and thus in a sense broken up in favor of a larger mental space that you can enter by absorbing different ways of speaking and talking about the world in terms of the quadrants of dialectic.
And here is the real difference between developmental coaching and conventional coaching, whether it’s ontological, NLP, integral, whatever the name is; business coaching, life coaching, all that are put together under conventional in contrast to developmental coaching in the strict sense that has been developed at IDM by Otto Laske by saying that the structure that people bring to these conversations with their coach is open to much more scrutiny from a dialectical thinking point of view than is made use of today.
And that’s why we are issuing this invitation to you to dig into Volume 2 and see what’s there.
The Potential Of Metaphor For Revealing Things
The paradox is that to reveal structure, you need to, in some sense, impose it. In other words, if you don’t use a metaphor like the Three Houses or some other metaphor, then certain things will not be revealed. So each metaphor has a certain potential for revealing one thing or a class of things and not others.
It would be just to say that what we teach based on CDF is a structuralist perspective on the client in the sense of the earlier linguists, de Saussure, and others, and of course, Piaget. This is a structuralist approach to the world. The notion is that if we use structure, we will find structure. And that’s the art of finding structure or revealing it without imposing some other kind of structure or using it skillfully enough to reveal something.
The Term Developmental
Let me say a few words on the term developmental. Developmental coaching is a term we try to avoid. We call it the Dialectics in Practice program, because everybody claims to be developmental, and the term doesn’t mean much anymore. But if we take it as its strict meaning coming out of adult developmental research, then I would say developmental coaching does not by any means necessarily imply that you coach a person for their further development. Because whether you make that distinction or that decision or not isn’t really relevant because the person will develop anyway. All coaching is developmental, so to declare it as being developmental misses the point that coaching is, by definition, developmental. So something specific is meant.
But beyond that, it is in some cases either not necessary or even counterproductive to think of one’s developmental coaching as being meant to promote the development of a client. Because where are you going to draw the line between doing one thing or the other? I mean between working on the development of the client, if that can be done at all, or not doing so. I find there is a lack of distinction we can make between working intentionally with a developmental focus and not doing so. I don’t understand developmental coaching as being about the development of the other person necessarily because that’s implied, and I couldn’t do much about it anyway because I’m only a facilitator. The person who really has to develop is the other one, the other party. And I can only extend some assistance to them.
How do other people see that? How far do you go into a coaching session or even explicitly define the purpose of the sessions to be developmental in contrast to focusing on a particular problem or issue?
What Development Entails
The very debate about whether you should make development the focus or not comes out of not understanding what development really entails and mixing up the two meanings of development in English that I was pointing out, that one is something we do as agents and the other one is something that happens anyway, whatever we do.
And I would like to draw attention to that meaning and to speak of developmental coaching in the second sense of something that we honor, the development that has or is taking place in a person, that’s very different from the notion of, oh yes, we are going to develop this person or this team. And it requires an understanding of the developmental literature and the research findings, and the techniques that have been developed for gathering valid developmental data in the emphatic sense.
So I would distinguish between using the term development or developmental emphatically in terms of research and not doing so.
