Practice in Dialectical Thinking: Text Analysis

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)
• Table 11.5 Thought Form Selection Sheet for Donald’s Cognitive Interview (MHD V2; p. 338-348) 
• Fig. 11.3 Donald’s Cognitive Behavior Graph (CBG) (MHD V2; p. 349)

I would like to use this today to ask, what are dialectical thought forms and how do we use them from the point of text analysis, which implies that we are now listening to somebody. Dialectical thinking and dialectical listening are inseparable, and here we are focusing on what can we hear. Ultimately, to think dialectically you need to be able to hear other people’s dialectical process. That takes time and effort.

You have three columns here in Table 11.5 [Thought Form Selection Sheet for Donald’s Cognitive Interview (MHD V2; p. 338-348)]. In the first column you just have the page number, or in terms of time stamp it could be the time point in the interview. The second column is the bit, which means the fragment (quoted in column 3) taken from the interview, which is the choice of the person transcribing, who has decided that this is a section or bit that he or she wants to evaluate in terms of thought forms.

So this is what the client says in bit number 1 from the example Thought Form Selection Sheet:
“I was a senior collector, and so I had a good amount of authority when it came to evaluating a certain claim I was handling in terms of what we should do given the situation.”
I will explain the context out of which this comes.

You know, this could be an annual report of a bank, or it could be an annual report of some other company, and you are consulting to the executive team of that company and you are taking note of their annual reports and you are intending, at least as a CDF user, to tell them what is the kind of light that their annual report sheds on their thinking and what is missing in their thinking.

In any case, what do you get from this content? What is the structure of this content for you in terms of thought forms now?

We will gradually come to understand the thought forms and what they focus on.

So we can now say, okay, you are pointing to an element of process, can we find it? Can we find it together? What is it?

If the process was thought form 1, then I would consider that as saying, well the speaker is thinking of, or pointing to, the speaker’s situation that in the world that he’s working in, there’s always change or motion in the debtor and the creditor.

If the process was thought form 2, then I would consider that as saying, well the speaker is thinking of potential things that he has to make decisions about and could do or recommend, and these are potentialities that stand against what is the case.

I am sure, you would agree that it is a very weak reference to process, but you could, for instance, say, well, I would score it at a weight level of 0.5. Actually, this is a method we use in case study cohort class, that we initially evaluate thought form use at level 1, but then we become more refined as we learn more and we make distinctions and we code 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, up to 3. So we have six levels of weight in a way.

Now this must seem to you to be incredibly pedantic. And it is. But it is one of the best ways to learn the thought forms, to learn to use them, to learn to hear them. Keeping in mind that the speaker could have chosen many, many different ways of speaking about his situation.

The question might arise, is this also possibly guided by the interviewer? If I were a novice interviewer, could I also constrain the person who is speaking? 

The interviewer could indeed constrain the speaker, simply on account of the limits of his dialectical thinking.

As an interviewer, you are actually challenged to think at your best level, what you can do at this level of cognitive development you are at, and you have the mandate to make the client shine and think at his or her best level. That’s actually the function of the cognitive interviewer, to let the client shine. And to let the client shine as an interviewer, I have to do my very best in how I think about what I’m hearing from the client.

So here, if we look at this first bit where someone might say that there is a very fuzzy but still noticeable relationship to thought form 1, we could now formulate an interview question that would have the purpose of making the interviewee speak more in terms of process than he has done so far. What would be the question we could ask him?

I want to also mention that what’s happening here is that we are not just thinking up a question that we are interested in, but we are using the content that the speaker has given us, and we are basing our question on that content, or our understanding of it. We are staying very close to the train of thought, or we ought to in any case, of the interviewee. We are not jumping off the train of thought.

I would say, going back to what I said previously, on the difference between the actual world and the real world, we are trying to get to what is the real world for the interviewee. We are trying to help ourselves and him or her to see the real world and not get swarmed by what seems to be the actual world. And it’s an empirical inquiry.

Someone might comment that when reading this, they read relationship, because there is a relationship between what he calls the debtor and his company, and the creditor, and himself. Between them there is this, and this arises out of this medium which is the owing of something and the non-payment. So there is a dynamic relationship going on there.

I don’t know whether at this point you find interviewing the most effective way to learn dialectical thinking or text analysis or discussion. In my view, it is the coupling in CDF case studies and the way to them between the interviewing and the text analysis that accounts for the potency of what I think can be learned here. And we always do both.

Going to the texts here, we had spent quite a bit of time on just two or three of these bits in a cognitive coding sheet, and if you go back to that, maybe we can look at one or two more bits. For example, bit number 16, Systemic Thought Form 27, Open Self Transforming Systems. Now the thought forms you find here in this coding sheet are those of a student, and it doesn’t mean that it probably is the correct thought form, but there might be others that he didn’t catch, or she. So here in bit 16 we have a transformational thought form, which means logistically that you have to coordinate thought forms. You have to be able to coordinate thought forms like a process thought form with a context thought form, or a context thought form with a relationship thought form, or a process thought form with a relationship thought form. To think transformationally, you need to coordinate at least two if not three thought forms from different classes. Let’s see what’s happening here in bit 16.

The person speaks about himself, the Self House, the interview goes into why are you doing the work you’re doing, what motivates you to do this work, and what is your goal in the next two or three or even five years regarding your career. And so the person speaks about their professional self, which is quite different from speaking about one’s tasks and also from speaking about the organizational environment. Here the art of the interviewer lies in not letting the interview collapse into a psychological interview, and also not into a social-emotional interview. Because we are not interested in psychology here in this house, nor in some task or role. We’re asking the person about their professional self. 

And he says, 

I guess it might sound a little esoteric, but I think the best way to integrate those perspectives into yourself is to let go of yourself. An insight that I’ve had just recently is that who you are has a lot to do with your perspective, so the more attached you are to a perspective, it leaves less room for other people and for other perspectives. The ability to integrate has a lot to do with letting go, I think. Let’s say you were holding your perspective in your hands, you could only hold two if you have two hands. If you let go, you have freedom to move around and to bring together or to manipulate them, so in a sense to make them objects of your subjectivity. In terms of letting go, another way to say it would be to open up, to create space. If you are inside something, then there is so much outside of you. So if you kind of break that and keep opening the space, that has a lot to do with it. I think another way you can say that is that it’s fluid, it’s malleable. 

So the evaluator has suggested that this is thought form 27, which deals with open self-transforming systems, we can say every living system is such a system, in that it takes in stuff from the real world and it transforms it and puts it out in a different form, either within or outside of itself. Whether it’s your body or the beehive or even an organization, we can look at it as a transformational system. Here the speaker dwells on his own perspective on himself, as he calls it, and speaks of letting go and creating space and becoming fluid. The question then would be, can we corroborate that or can we add to what this evaluator has done? Is there another thought form that strikes us, or that we hear, I would say? 

Now, in a way, if we have a transformational thought form, we already have all four moments of dialectic assembled. It’s very rare that when we have a transformational thought form we feel compelled to score another thought form, like process for instance, or relationship or whatever it may be, because when we say that something is a transformational thought, we are already asserting that there is a process element, there is a relationship element, and there is of course also a context element that could be made more clear when we go into the depth of what is said here. 

So, would anybody think that we need another thought form? And if not, maybe we need a different weight than was assigned here? Because, we would ordinarily in a coding sheet weight a thought form use between 1 and 3 in terms of degree of articulateness, or even 0.5 to 3. 

So, let me make a comment then. When I look at the first part of this list, labeled as parenthesis 1, I would say here is a pattern of interaction, a kind of process where the person sees that the perspective of the person determines or influences who the person is, and the more the person insists on the perspective, he leaves out the possibilities of other perspectives, so then his perspective influences his own self, and the self influences his insistence on the perspective. So, it’s a kind of pattern of interaction. 

Then the question that comes up would be whether we speak of that thought form in terms of process, being a process or a relationship thought form, and in this comment, I am thinking of process. 

To me, it’s more a process and there is also some implication of what is left out. So, there is some partial thought form 2 involved. 

And that points to this element of negativity, that there are, you could of course say, well, this is about the relationship between the person’s mind and his or her own perspective, but my analysis would be to say, it is really about a pattern of interaction that actually produces something like an absence, or like something that gets lost and cannot be done. So there is thought form 2 in it as well. So, to the extent that you feel very strongly about this element of negativity being part of the bit, you would of course in the interview try to reinforce and strengthen that element. And whether you would here evaluate or include the thought form 4 at a weight maybe of 0.5 or so, would be up to you and could be discussed. 

And in the second part of the bit there is another emphasis that I have not spoken about. 

I would say the second part then elaborates and opens up what is already in the core of the first part. So, the speaker is following his own train of thought. 

So, would I score 4 as well as 27? 

Well, I wouldn’t see 27. I mean, for example, it’s not about transformation, it’s about something maybe in the process of unfolding or a kind of unfolding, I guess, or development. And also, there is, although mentioned letting go, there is some kind of trying to hold on to something. 

So it’s both, holding on to and letting go. 

And there is, we try to ground somewhere, so there is not real openness in the system yet.  It’s an unfolding of a process in which things get lost, but also at the same time get grounded, and there is not as much of a transformation than is indicated or suggested here. And, you know, it is this kind of conversation that I was referring to when I said that only in a cohort can you get to that kind of level of thinking. 

Welcome to this session on Chapter 11 of Volume Two of Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems (Laske, 2009; MHD V2). Today the session is on Chapter 11 of Volume Two, looking into the thinking of a particular individual, where Laske introduces the cognitive behavior graph that he discusses in regard to a cognitive interview. 

We will look at a client’s cognitive profile, taken from an interview. It could be a coaching session. A coaching session is not an interview, but it’s a linguistic process of a give and take between two people who have a dialogue; so it’s pretty close. 

Then we will look at this cognitive behavior graph that shows a person’s cognitive behavior in terms of the concepts they have used, and more specifically, the thought forms they have used and not used. 

And so we will arrive at some cognitive profile of the person called Donald, and we’ll ask certain questions about Donald. Is he in the right place? Can he really do what he has been hired to do? How can we coach him? And so forth. 

Cognitive Behavior Graph 

Let’s go to the cognitive behavior graph. It’s a graph that makes you see the thought forms a client has used from the beginning to the end of the session, and they are listed by number, one after the other. The client started in the task house when talking about his tasks and used thought form 8, which is a description of the environment the person is in from their own point of view, with a focus on what they do, not the environment. And then went on to a relationship thought form, 16. So, the graph simply lists the thought forms used, and if there is a square bracket with a two in it, as you find under 10, under context, that means that thought form was used very emphatically. 

Let’s say you record a coaching session of yours and learn the tools to analyze it in terms of dialectical thought forms. What we’re saying is, if you can do that, you can give cognitive feedback to your client, which would be going beyond informal use of the classes of thought forms. But the two are related because once you have learned to do a cognitive interview evaluation and administer a cognitive interview, this will then have an impact on the way you converse with others. You will benefit from your knowledge of thought forms. 

It’s clear that you don’t do a case study each time you have a coaching session. But when you have done it once, it will infiltrate what you are doing, and you find informal shortcuts to do the same thing in a more informal way. 

Let’s say you had dug into one coaching session, and you got a CBG like this. There is a lot of information about your client that has nothing to do with the content they are telling you that you could give them feedback on. Not only could you give them feedback on this particular session, but in the future, you would know the structure of your client’s thinking much more clearly, and you would develop techniques to steer the client in directions in which he or she by themselves will never go. 

So you will have developed a discovery procedure that you can use all the time. But you have to once go into depth and get that under your belt, so to speak, to then even acquire a sense for what is needed, what before you did not hear, and so forth. 

Fluidity Index, Cognitive Development, And Phase Of Dialectical Development 

In this graph, if you count the entries in each column, for instance, in process, there are 3 entries, and in context, there are 9; in relationship, there are 8, and in transformation, there are 5. If you add up these numbers, you have the fluidity index of your client. 3 and 9 and 8 and 5 is 25. 

Now this positions the client at a particular level of cognitive development. And that is very helpful because if you link that to the strata, you can say, well, if this person really works on Stratum 4, that would be a tough thing for them to do because they are barely managing at Stratum 3. Because we know that the cognitive requirements at each Stratum are different, and they become higher and higher and higher. So we have a fluidity index of 25. That puts the person in phase 2 of dialectical development, where logical and dialectical thought forms are still very much mixed, and the thought forms used are kind of weakly expressed, not very strongly. 

And if we look at the cognitive score, which is derived from that simply by transforming these numbers we had before into percentages, then you see that the strength of the client is to be able to think in terms of context, 43%, and also relationship, 38%. But the client cannot really think well in terms of process, which is only 14%. And the systems thinking index refers to the transformational thought forms. 

And here you see the lack of balance between the four classes of thought forms, 14, 43, 38, 24. The ideal score would be 24, 24, 24, 24 because that would mean that the person can think transformationally, not too high, but at 24%, which is not too bad. And that he or she is equally able to instantiate or concretize what they see in their holistic thinking in terms of the processes that are going on, the contexts that are in focus, and the relationships that are implied. 

Now this client cannot do that. His systems thinking index is lower than the context and the relationship index, so to speak. So there is a predominance of static context thinking and equal relationship thinking. And this person can never pull these categories that he uses together to think about something truly systemically. That’s simply what the score says. And this is what we would give feedback on to the client, related to contents that are important to him or her. 

We took a one-hour session and recorded it, and we take it to be representative of the client’s thinking yesterday and tomorrow. We could do another session. It would come out pretty much close to what we found. Now, that’s an empirical study in itself. 

Would it be better, without substantive coaching, if we explained what the four different types of thinking are and said, talk about something else and try to touch on each of these four classes of thought forms, so it’s not completely spontaneous? 

Now, this is exactly what we do in the interview in contrast to the coaching session. We say this interview is going to be about the concepts you use, and we see them as falling into four different classes. And I will be listening to what you bring forward in terms of concepts, and I will ask you about concepts. And in order to do that, we are going to use the three houses. 

So that’s what we actually do in the interview. Now, if you did that in the coaching session, you would bring the coaching session closer to the interview, and I would encourage you to try that. So Laske calls this cognitive coaching, where you either make the client directly or indirectly aware, by the way you ask questions, that this is about concepts. 

Donald’s Developmental Profile 

Let’s look at Stratum 4. If you are at Stratum 4, you are expected to be social-emotionally between 4/3 and 4(3), which is true for Donald, and you are also supposed to have a fluidity index between 20 and 30, which is also true for Donald. So you could say superficially, oh yes, Donald will do fine on Stratum 4. 

Well, ultimately, he will not do fine. And the reason is that if you look into the details of his cognitive and social-emotional score, he will be better positioned at Stratum 3, and I will briefly indicate why. 

One thing we have already considered is that his cognitive score is very imbalanced, so he wouldn’t do that well at Stratum 4 cognitively, as outwardly seems to be the case. But social-emotionally, if you go to page 352, Table 11.7 Donald’s Developmental Profile, you can see that while he is anchored in the center of gravity of 4(3), that means just under self-authoring with a value of 7, he has a high risk of 5 to make meaning from lower stages. And this risk is higher than his potential to go beyond where he is, which is only 3. 

So his social-emotional score, as well as his cognitive score, do not bode well for his doing excellent work at Stratum 4. Although he falls into the range of that Stratum, if you look at the details, it’s not really cogent to say that he would do well at Stratum 4. 

Distribution Of Thought Forms 

Now, let’s just go back to the CBG. If you look at that graph, what strikes you? On the left, you have the distinction between the different houses, which I’ve talked about in previous lectures. Now, if you look at this graph, simply in terms of the number and the distribution of thought forms, what is striking for you? 

Well, simply that they are unevenly distributed over the houses. For instance, you have already seen that in the score, the highest number of thought forms is used in context, summing to 9. Close to that in relationship, summing to 8. However, the relationship thought forms are all used in the self house, most of them. They are not used in the task house, they are not used in the organizational house, and vice versa; in the self house, there are no context thought forms. So, the client can think in terms of relationships, but only in a particular area, when he talks about himself and his personal relationships. Whereas otherwise, while there is this or that thought form in the task house and organizational house, it’s very weak. So that shows that the cognitive profile is not in balance. The same for the transformational thought forms. They all turn up in the organizational house, or most of them. And there are just two, 28 and 27. 

So, this is what is meant by imbalance. 

You could say, well, what’s the benefit of thinking systemically and holistically in all domains of your work regarding your task or your relationship to the organization, not just yourself? Well, it would make for a more effective way of doing one’s work. As it is, the thought form uses are segregated. So then, what is Donald’s added value, given his profile? If Donald is positioned at Stratum 4, the value he adds to his organization is not commensurate with his responsibilities. 

And other issues also come into focus, like, is there a discrepancy between his formal authority and his decision authority. If he has to go to his boss to ask for permission to do what he wants to do, then there is another gap that would diminish his effectiveness. 

Case Conceptualization In Terms Of Cognitive And Social-Emotional Scores 

We can speak of a case conceptualization, as they do in more clinical coaching, and can say, this is the case of Donald, and we can frame that case conceptualization in terms of his cognitive score and his social-emotional score. Now the big problem is, once we have such a case conceptualization of Donald, as I’ve given you, the question comes up of whether the coach is sufficiently thinking dialectically to work effectively with Donald. 

So there is the pragmatic question, what should the coach do, which everybody asks. But the other question which nobody asks is, is the coach really able to help the client cognitively? At what level of cognitive development is the coach? And here, the same pertains in the social-emotional domain, simply that if you are below your client’s level of development, you are not going to be able to help him, or you are going to do harm even. The same here in the cognitive domain. 

Now this has nothing to do with being a brilliant thinker or thinking quickly, or all these conventional notions. It has to do with the structure of your thinking. And you can look into that structure of your thinking by learning to practice dialectical thought forms. There is really no better way. 

So, in summary, we started out with the coaching client’s behavior graph, which was itself derived from a conversation. We used it to point to a structural imbalance in the client’s way of thinking. We drew all kinds of conclusions from this profile. And we also said that it can be used informally, that once you have gone through this rigor and discipline of a case study, then you really make that your own, and you develop your own, so to speak, best practices to do that informally. And we haven’t really talked in depth about how these two profiles we looked at give us a hook on which we can fasten our coaching plan. If we were to develop a coaching plan for coaching our client cognitively, what would that look like? 

To give an example, in the interview transcript, Donald often talks about the underlying problem with a debtor. For him, the underlying problem with a debtor was, “Why should the debtor pay?” My job is to make the debtor pay. I’m using, hopefully not threats, but I’m pointing to the law and saying you owe this; why haven’t you paid this? But Donald was pretty sophisticated, and he said, well, the real question with all we are doing about clients not having paid is, we are not addressing the question of “Why should the debtor pay?” Now, most people would say, well, sure, he should pay because he bought this or he owes this, but that doesn’t mean that the debtor will feel that way. The debtor might have said, well, you know, I ordered this, but it came to me damaged, or it didn’t really serve my purpose, or that’s really not the kind I ordered. So the debtor may feel, no, he doesn’t have to pay. And this whole enforcement of payment doesn’t address this question. And Donald was trying to get to this question. So maybe you can say, it’s an ethical issue that lies at the bottom of this whole work of being concerned with having debts paid. The whole company, he said, that I’m with, never addresses this problem. They just take for granted that he should pay. 

This is an example of coaching by going into the dark and not in the light to find the keys. Because this is the dark spot with a client. If we could convince the client that he should pay and learn about why he thinks he shouldn’t, then we would be a great step further in this work that Donald is doing, or he would be. So there are systemic circumstances that cause the non-payment, or whatever it is we are dealing with in coaching, there is this dark spot and dialectics is a flashlight to go into that darkness with. 

So Donald finally decided to leave the company because it was never addressing this problem, which he thought was the main problem, and so he left. Now, we can take this to any other problem. You have to develop the ambition to go into the dark where the client’s thinking is not, rather than where the client already is. Because why should you repeat what the client already can do?