References to Measuring Hidden Dimensions Volume 2, Figures and Tables (Laske, 2009; MHD V2)
- Fig. 11.1 The Three Houses of Employees and Managers (MHD V2; p. 333)
Three Different Ways To Learn Dialectical Thinking
Let’s just remind ourselves what we are trying to do here, before we go to some more practical work. We have begun to build a social practice of applying the four moments of dialectic to the working of the human mind. As you know, we use CDF and DTF in applying the four moments of dialectic to understanding how the human mind develops in adulthood. The best tool to do that is to use the Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF) and its thought forms, and to do cognitive interviews. The way to look at it is that there are at least three different ways to learn dialectical thinking, or deep thinking.
Using DTF in Cognitive Interviews
One is to speak to people and listen to them, and then to go back and look at what they have said beyond what you could immediately catch in the interview. Because once you transcribe an interview, you will find that there is much, much more that they actually said than you understood. But of course, the more you observe and use this framework of DTF, the more you will initially, up front, understand in your listening. It makes sense to speak of something like dialectical listening, or listening for dialectical thinking and structure of thinking. That’s one way in which one can school one’s dialectical thinking.
Using DTF in Discourse
The second way is to look at a situation that is part of a dialogue with another person or group, in terms of the four quadrants of dialectic. What is the problem formulation that your client is bringing to you? How are you viewing the client’s situation, or the client in it, seeing the client as the origin of the presentation problem, you could say. By which I mean, there is the problem, and there is the way people present the problem, and the two are different. And when you go into psychotherapy, the clinician will ask you, why are you here? And then you tell him, and that’s the presentation problem. But you will soon find out that the presentation problem is not the real problem. It’s just the way the problem is presented in the session, either a coaching session or a consulting session.
This is an example of discourse in which we can use the lens of the four moments of dialectic. We can ask, well, how does the client present this problem, which will depend on the client’s level of cognitive development. And here we are not dealing specifically and in any depth with the theory that is elaborated in Volume 2 about this development from age 25 to 100. We are just looking at the tools which are used and which you can use, and have already begun to use. So that would be the second use.
Using DTF in Text Analysis
The third use would be to analyze the text from an interview or from a communication, let’s say an annual report, or a report by the UN, compared to another report about the same issue, let’s say global warming by another institution. And what you can do there is analyze the text in terms of how fluid it is in terms of thought forms, how apt it is in capturing the complexity of the issue it is dealing with. And you can also use the four dimensions of dialectic in writing a text and ask yourself, well, have I really covered all the aspects of process, context, relationship, and transformation that are linked to this issue?
Practicing Interviewing
So there are three different ways of using the four moments of dialectic. We can lead a discussion, we can analyze a discussion as text or even during the listening, or we can do an interview that elicits a particular and peculiar thinking of a client or whoever we want to interview.
Cognitive interviewing is one of the best ways to learn the thought forms, and certainly the four quadrants of dialectic. You could practice by actually interviewing someone about a current problem they are knowledgeable about. This would be a way to use not so much the thought forms, but what is more fundamental to begin with, to use the four quadrants of dialectic. And of course, you can go between the two. In our interviewing, we always use the four quadrants of dialectic. And by learning the thought forms pretty well, you can go back and forth between just very general issues or questions about process and relationship and the individual thought forms that are associated with these moments of dialectic.
And you just do what you can at this level of knowledge, of this framework, so you don’t have to worry about it, whether it’s the moments of dialectic or the thought forms. But as we know, in this class, we want to have a little more of an understanding of the individual thought forms.
The Cognitive Interview Protocol
When we have an interviewee, he or she is knowledgeable about a particular problem that you as an interviewer are not necessarily conversant with; but you have a set of tools called the cognitive interview strategy based on the four moments of dialectic and the associated thought forms that you can use, simply to understand better what the interviewee is talking about.
We begin by saying to the interviewee, thank you for your willingness to do this interview.
There is a protocol for the cognitive interview that you can find when you go to Fig. 11.1 The Three Houses of Employees and Managers (MHD V2; p. 333), and that is called the Three Houses. And by house we mean a mental domain, one of three.
The way we look at an interview is that you are exploring, using language, the internal workspace of a client. There is an external workplace, and then there is an internal workspace. And this internal workspace is one that is created internally and is a representation of this external workspace.
We can say generally, if we have an interviewee, he has both an internal and an external workplace, or workspace also, and when he goes away from the job, he takes his internal workspace with him, leaving his external workspace behind. We are not really interested in the external workspace particularly. We are interested in how anybody who is being interviewed represents internally the situation he is seeing. And that’s pretty broad.
And to make interviewing more effective, one might say, in several meanings of the word, more effective for assessing the person, more effective for understanding the situation presented, more effective for consulting effectively to the situation, this internal workspace is divided, which is also a workplace, into three houses.
So we have the consciousness of the interviewee divided into these three domains called houses, and the houses are called Self House, Task House, and Organizational House. We are assuming that we are dealing with some kind of an organization, it could be a family, it could be a family enterprise, but we are dealing with an organization, and the notion is that we can probably best start in the Task House, because anybody reasonably educated can speak without becoming too emotional about what his present accountability in that organization is, what is the function and the accountability of the person I’m speaking to.
That’s the question we could ask him, which is indicated here on Fig. 11.1 The Three Houses of Employees and Managers (MHD V2; p. 333) as formal authority. If the person has a formal authority, he or she is also in a particular role, or even different roles, and the roles can be interpersonal, can have to do with interpersonal communication, or they can have to do with receiving and distributing information, or with making decisions of some kind, and there are probably other roles, but that’s what we could ask an interviewee about.
Then there is the Organizational House, in which we can look at the organization that is in focus in four different ways, which I will briefly explain.
Self House
In the Self House, we ask the interviewee, why are you doing this work? What’s interesting about this work? What is motivating you to do this work? We call that the Self House, so we can talk to him about his professional agenda, and of course this is particularly important, or interesting for coaches and consultants. We can ask them, well, how do you see the next three years of you being in this organization, and what are the goals you are pursuing, and what are your career goals, and so forth. We can ask about his or her personal values that may deviate from the organizational values. We can ask about the work context, whom are you working with, and how does that impact self-development. So the Self House is about self-development in the job.
Organizational House
So the Organizational House we can divide into what we call floors, four floors for all the houses, and we can look at this organization from a structural point of view, in terms of division of labor, who does what work, for whom. We can look at the organization from a political perspective and ask, well, are there political cliques and groups that vie for power and therefore compete with each other for the resources that are scarce in the organization. We can ask about human systems, where the relationship between the managers and the employees comes into play, how are the employees treated in terms of how they are educated, how are they treated as people. And the symbolic floor, so to speak, the symbolic perspective has to do with looking at the organization like a South Sea island and looking at the aborigines and asking, well, what kind of people are they? How are they speaking? What are they speaking about? What is important to them? So we are looking at the organization as a kind of play on stage and we are looking at this play that is repeated day by day, from coffee break to outings to meetings, and we are trying to, playing the anthropologist so to speak, trying to understand what kind of a tribe do we have before us here. And I will make a link in this interview between the Task House and the Organizational House.
Task House
I may begin and ask, what is your present function in this organization that is on your mind? In the Task House I ask, what do you think is your main role? Is your role mainly interpersonal or is it informational or do you make decisions and since you seem to be doing all of these how do they relate to each other? Do you see some relationship or distinction between them that you can speak about?
You will notice that in the Task House we are essentially in contextual thought forms, in the sense that this is typically how interviews start out, because there has to be something to talk about and something to investigate more closely. So in a cognitive interview I would now try to lead the person into the process and the relationship domain of the Dialectical Thought Form Framework. Now here it is not a matter of assessing the interviewee about his level of cognitive development, which is a separate issue. We could also do that and say we are rather using thought forms not as assessment tools but as mind openers for the interviewee and for individuals that he is going to talk to and is interacting with.
Transitioning Between Houses
After 15 minutes in the Task House, one question that I would say to the interviewee would be, is there anything you would want to add to what you have said about your responsibility and how you see the roles you are playing in this sort of task here?
And then transition to the Organizational House; and we keep the houses in the cognitive interview very clear. For one thing, we have only an hour, so we cannot spend more than 20 minutes, but also, we want the interviewee to be aware of what house he or she is, because we think that that will help the person clarify their communication with us. And in the Organizational House, we are looking at different perspectives of how the organization could be viewed.
A Situation Is Viewed Differently on the Four Floors of the Organizational House
For example, the interviewee might describe a complex situation and the organization as very averse to dealing with conflict and then I would inquire on which of these floors they would want to handle that. Is this a structural issue of a conflict between departments or divisions of the organization? Is it a political conflict? Is it a conflict in how human resources are dealt with in the organization? Or is it a symbolic conflict in that the kind of culture that the organization is based on is full of seemingly unsolvable conflicts, that there is not enough information perhaps about the mandate of the organization, there are conflicting ideas of what the organization should achieve and so forth.
So I am pointing out these four different aspects or the four different kinds of conflict that one might be speaking about.
And remember, the situation we are all in as consultants and coaches, it is not our task to solve issues because we are doing process consultation in the sense of Edgar Schein, which means we are trying to understand the mental process of the people we are consulting to, and we don’t need to know the solutions to help them, because they can only help themselves. You don’t really need to know what the solution is, what you are doing is not solving problems as much as helping people see the problem in a broader way.
The Art Of Fully Engaging Adults
The subtitle to Volume 1 is called The Art of Fully Engaging Adults, and that can be seen as a subtitle for the second book also, so that the two books, Volume 1 and 2, are really about a new kind of epistemology or theory of knowledge which is interactive, interdevelopmental and dialectical, and has ultimately no other purpose than to engage adults deeply, not necessarily in a clinical psychotherapeutic sense, but in the sense that if you think deeply using these thought forms, for instance, then you will in most cases, let’s say, encourage others to do likewise. Then you get beyond debate and discussion into dialogue, which is ultimately the highest form of thinking and is very closely linked to dialectical thinking. So dialogue and dialectic can’t really be separated.
A Cognitive Interview Is About Engaging Adults
So a cognitive interview is really about engaging adults, engaging another person deeply in their own thinking, and finding your way to their thinking, which means you have to stay on the train of thought that your interlocutor has chosen to be on, and you don’t want to introduce anything that would sidetrack that conversation that has been started.
