Dr. Iva Vurdelja & Dr. Jonathan Reams - If People Could Only Think Better

Iva Vurdelja, Ph.D., is the Founding Principal of Requisite Development LLC. Iva has a multifaceted career as an educator, consultant, and executive coach. She enables senior leaders in organizations to navigate and sustain large-scale, complex change by helping them to build deep thinking, leadership, and decision-making capabilities. Iva is also a Visiting Clinical Professor at Loyola and Marquette Universities Schools of Business, where she teaches graduate courses in organizational ethics, strategic change, leadership, and human resources development. 

A Quote From Iva's Chapter

"Adult cognitive development, a separate line of inquiry within a broader frame of adult development, evolved as a process for developing increasingly sophisticated conceptual structures...However, the approach has not yet been widely applied to measuring leadership capacities for leading complex organizational change."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Book - Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders: A Primer by Laske
• Book - Measuring Hidden Dimensions: The Art and Science of Fully Engaging Adults by Laske

More About Series Co-Host, Dr. Jonathan Reams

• Jonathan's Website
• Book: Maturing Leadership: How Adult Development Impacts Leadership
• Article: A Brief Overview of Developmental Theory

About  Scott J. Allen

• Website

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are important views to be aware of. Nothing can replace your own research and exploration.

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in the study, practice, and teaching of leadership. 

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Transcript

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00  
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you for checking in. And this is another one of those episodes where my co-host today is Jonathan Reams and Jonathan Good to have you with me, sir!

Jonathan Reams  0:12  
It's good to be here with you, Scott.

Scott Allen  0:15  
Oh, this is gonna be a fun conversation. Today, we have Iva Vurdelja. Iva is a Ph.D. She is the Founding Principal of Requisite Development LLC. She has a multifaceted career as an educator, consultant, and executive coach. She enables senior leaders in organizations to navigate and sustain large-scale, complex change by helping them to build deep thinking, leadership, and decision-making capabilities. She is also a Visiting Clinical Professor at Loyola and Marquette Universities Schools of Business, where she teaches graduate courses in organizational ethics, strategic change, leadership, and human resources development. But you know, it's so fun to have you here. I know you're in Croatia today. It's a fascinating topic, not one that I have explored deeply. But I know it's important, again, for listeners, something I love about this whole experience. And I said this to Tony Middlebrooks recently, as we reflected on 150 episodes, this project has taken my conversations to so many areas where I don't have any level of knowledge yet, whether it's Maori ways of knowing, and that that whole world of indigenous perspectives on leadership. I mean, that's, that's a whole world of knowledge. And it could be transfer of training principles. You know, I've spoken with folks who they've been studying that for 30 years. This is another topic that I intuitively know is very, very important, but I don't know a lot about it. So I'm very, very excited to explore Iva's chapter today, Jonathan.

Jonathan Reams  1:54  
Yeah, I am, too. So the background for me was that I read Iva's Ph.D. dissertation. And when the opportunity to put this anthology together came up, Iva was high on my list of people to get to contribute something. Now I had to do some arm twisting. Because, like any of us, it's working to condense a Ph.D. down to a book chapter. But I was super motivated because, you know, I'd encountered Otto Laske's work and Michael Basseches' work, so I knew a little bit of the context you are working in Iva, but maybe as a starting place, could you say a very brief, I know you have this fantastic, amazing background, could you give us a little bit of personal context? And then, what were the reasons that you wanted to take on doing a Ph.D.? 

Iva Vurdelja  2:47  
Well, you know, it goes back to my childhood when I was four or five years old, I wanted to be a teacher, and why I wanted to be a teacher because I was fascinated by people who could think - who was very smart. At that time, I was living in a totalitarian society. And I was frustrated. Even as a child, I was very frustrated with that single-mindedness and that ideological environment that was forcing people into a specific way of thinking and believing in certain things that I didn't feel like I was agreeing with. And that led me to escape in reading. So I was reading a lot, everything I could. And this was where I developed - I felt the tension between the outer world and the inner world. And that tension just grew louder and louder and stronger and stronger as I was growing up. So that notion of being able to think permeated my childhood. And I felt like this should probably be engraved on my gravestone "if people could only think better." That was a thought that led me to that to that road of discovery and education. And I had a grandmother who was phenomenal. She was instrumental in helping me and providing that safety net for me to educate myself and move beyond my current environment, my current reality, and dream about greener pastures. That led me to an international career later, and that's how I ended up in the United States. So I'm going to skip all that journey to adulthood and arrival in Chicago, where I decided to pursue education and forget all about my European background and European baggage. I studied at DePaul University for my undergrad, and this program was designed for adult learners. It was a premiere program for adult learners. That's how I discovered adult learning theory. And that was the beginning of my journey, and throughout this whole process of educating myself through the undergrad program, and then I went to Loyola to study masters programming and organization development. That ability to think and explore different ideas - explore concepts, and digging deeper, was my way of being. That's how I showed up in the world.

Scott Allen  5:23  
So that's the throughline is the ability to think I love it. It's so beautiful. That's the throughline, the ability to think.

Jonathan Reams  5:31  
Yeah, I think that's a great transition. Before I move us forward, I want to let listeners know that there is such a rich, interesting story you could fill in those years of leaving Croatia and doing all this stuff. It's quite rich...that was an ILA dinner conversation in Florida. But when you talk about the ability to think then, what moved you into encountering dialectical thinking, and can you say a little bit about what dialectical thinking is?

Iva Vurdelja   6:08  
Well, I have to tell you how I ended up in the electrical thing dialectical thinking because I discovered Robert Kegan and his work on adult development theory. And that theory was fascinating for me as a way to understand my evolution. So I used Kegan's work to develop myself as I worked full-time in a corporate environment. And I was studying; I was looking for ways to use Kegan's work, they'll develop I felt that this was the key to my question, "how can we help people think better?" I was working as a change management consultant. And I've noticed how the way people interpret their position interpret their jobs was instrumental in the success of change efforts or not. So I wanted to use it as I was working through my Ph.D., I wanted to use adult development theory to create a study of leaders of change. I reviewed all the literature and all the research that was done by using Kegan's framework, and then it wasn't really what I was looking for; it wasn't 100% there,  I couldn't go out and interview people and ask them to measure their development. They were leaders of change in the organization, so in the corporate world, you don't talk about personal development. So there was this discrepancy between what Kenan was teaching and where I was working. And one day, a friend of mine from Paris called me up. She was familiar with my work. And she said, "Iva, I just come back from Brussels; I met a man there. I spent two days in a workshop with him." I didn't understand a word of what he was saying. Brilliant. I think you need to talk to him. And then I said, give me his number. So she gave me the context of Otto Laske. And I got in touch with him; I read some of his writing the same as my friends. I didn't understand what he was writing at the time. But I felt that this was the key. This answered my question because he was teaching and explaining the structure of people's thinking. So this was the defining moment where he explained how the content of thinking could derive from structure. And then I thought, "okay if I could study and access the structure of one's thinking, I could influence content."

Jonathan Reams  8:42  
I think this is something that I recognized for myself through going through kind of Kurt Fischer and Theo Dawson, and Mike Mascolo's work is the way that the underlying structure of our thinking will naturally lead us to notice and pay attention to and activate certain content of thinking. So I had a conversation with a consultant at IKEA, who was working a lot on value; these values are so important. You know, values are derived from the structure because what you care about has to do with what you can see.

Scott Allen
When you use the word structure, are you talking about the neural network in the brain?

Jonathan Reams
So my response would be this, I think that these models of thinking are better and better approximations of what's going on in neural networks. We're trying to model them essentially. So we can't get out the really rich, vast complexity. But certain models are getting better at this, and I think what I hear you saying, Iva and I've had some encounters with Otto Laske. His work is that there's a nuance and real rich substance to that, that seems to model that process in a really good way.

Iva Vurdelja 10:04  
Yes, that's one side, but then we need to dig deeper into dialectical thinking and how it differs from formal logic. Everything that I have encountered in the process of studying cognitive development was grounded in formal logic. That's how we are educated, that's how we think, and this is our habitual way of being in the world, right? That's what the western education system is based on - formal logic. Now, in dialectical thinking, things are a little bit different, right? So, first of all, let me say a few words about dialectical thinking. Dialectical thinking is a philosophical discipline, not a theory. It's a specific form of cognitive organization, defined by a theory known as a three-step movement - thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. However, what is not so well known is that dialectical thinking differs from formal logic in how it treats contradictions. In formal logic, we have that notion of falsehood; if something is either correct or incorrect, A is always A, and if you encounter B, B is wrong or false - so it's trying to correct and then find the right path. So viewing deviation from a predictable path is considered wrong. And we are insisting on correcting them and returning to its original path. That's formal logic. In dialectics, we say that what appears wrong is part of the overall totality. And it has to be incorporated. So we have to enlarge the conceptual space so that other parts, what is not A, is also part of the bigger totality, where everything is grounded in.

Jonathan Reams  12:04  
So when I listen to you say this, I'm going to try to unpack it for listeners a little bit in my own words. First, I think of Hegel; I think of the dialectic that Hegel brought into the philosophical world. I also think of Michael Basseches'  and Mike Mascolo's work on that TACS model – thesis, antithesis, conflict, and synthesis. And there's a developmental process that happens within that. So I recognize those kinds of strands. And what I hear you saying is that formal logic has always been treating the thesis and antithesis as negating each other, so to speak, and dialectical thinking says, "no, they're connected in some way. And we just have to see that connection."

Iva Vurdelja  12:58  
I cannot even do justice to explaining what dialectical thinking is in scholarly terms. I know that when I discovered dialectics the way our task is teaching it, that was it, I could not find a better way of pursuing my work. Then, digging deeper into dialectical thinking and making it practical.

Jonathan Reams  13:23  
Iva, you told us a little bit about the core of dialectical thinking; I know that there's a part of this called "thought forms." Can you say a little bit more about what the thought forms, how many words are in Otto Laske's world, and what function they play?

Iva Vurdelja 13:42  
Okay, there's, again, there's an intro to this, and the introduction is understanding the difference between Kegan's work and Otto Laske's work. Kegen's theory of development is stage-based. And it's quite holistic, in a sense. He explains how people relate themselves to their environment. That's the essence of his theory. Otto Laske comes along, and Otto Laske says, "well, we can't look at adult development holistically; we have to separate different lines of development." So we have to look at cognitive development as a separate line from the social-emotional line of development; how we relate to our environment is the social-emotional line. So he used dialectics to separate those two and then integrate them into those assessments. And as I was thinking about researching successful leaders of change, people who successfully transform their organizations. I was interested in applying adult development theory to observe what is it that they have that other people don't have that may make them makes them very successful in implementing change. And as I was thinking about methodology, I thought, okay, I could use Kegan's methodology. And then I thought there were some limitations. How can I bring Kegan to the corporate world and study CEOs of large companies? I can't say, "Hey, can I measure your development?"  It just didn't feel right. When I discovered Otto's dialectical thinking, then I thought, okay, I can go, and I can identify their patterns of thinking that perhaps lead them to be successful in implementing change. I was hypothesizing...maybe it has something to do with how they apply the dialectical thought forms. And I will talk about thought forms in a moment. And that's what led me to do this research, and it proved to be the right decision because I could identify it.

Scott Allen
So when you say "patterns of thinking," is that what you mean by thought forms?

Iva Vurdelja 
Well, thought forms are; there is a little more to that than just patterns of thinking.

Jonathan Reams  16:10  
My first encounter, Iva, with dialectical thinking, was through getting exposed to Michael Basseches, in the first issue of Integral Review, Sarah Ross pinged him and got him to contribute a piece and I read through and said, "Wow, that's really interesting." So that was my first encounter with that before Otto Laske. Can you say a bit about what's the relationship between them?

Iva Vurdelja  16:34  
Michael Basseches just did brilliant work within that dialectical thinking around as a philosophical discipline; he went back and studied the evolution of dialectical thinking since Plato. And he singled out 24 thought forms and thought forms a constellation of concepts. He called them schemata. And he used those schemata to study to empirically assess adolescents and adults -  that is his contribution. He designed an interview. So this was a very unique and novel way of conducting an empirical study. So he conducted an interview in which he focused on asking interviewees specific questions on specific topics. He introduced the concept of education, and then he talked to the freshman seniors in college and then faculty, and he identified that more junior students had fewer thought forms in their thinking, and there's more sporadic and they're, they're not consistently used and, and they're not used in a coordinated way. And then he said the faculty, and he noticed that faculty members use the forms in a more coordinated way. And he was able to show empirically how adults can differ in terms of how they express themselves in thinking dialectally. He identified those 24 thought forms and numbered them. Then he was able to quantify his research, observe the structure of thinking, and explain the difference in complexity of people's thinking.

Jonathan Reams  18:24  
Iva, so, I've met Michael Basseches, and I think his work is fascinating with what he did. Can you distinguish what additional things Otto Laske did with Basseches' work?

Iva Vurdelja   18:40  
Otto Laske integrated a number of different theories, and he took Otto Michael Basseches' work to a whole new level. So don't forget it Otto Laske was a Frankfurt scholar. So he studied with Adorno for ten years, so he was a scholar of dialectical thinking. So he recognized the contribution that Michael Basseche made, but he also elevated it to a whole new level. He identified four what we call four quadrants, or four classes of thought forms, "context, process, relationship, and transformation." And then he organized 24 thought forms by adding four more and distributed them across four quadrants. So there were 28 thought forms, and those 28 thought forms represented 28 different ways of looking at reality, organized around those four quadrants. And each quadrant represents a specific position of how we see the world, and how we view life. So we have context, and in context, we're looking at the structure at the big picture, how things are organized, how the typical structure of a system, we are observing the system. And then we have underlying processes. We look at different processes of things emerging or disappearing. So how is change happening? Otto's work is grounded in Roy Bhaskar's work.

Jonathan Reams  20:20  
Critical realism.

Iva Vurdelja  20:22  
Critical realism. Yes. So, Roy Bhaskar's notion was that reality is punctuated by absences. Change happens because something is missing; something is not there. So we need to identify what is in the system that is absent that we need to bring into existence; that's the essence of the process, quadrant, or class of thought forms. And then we have relationships. And in the relationship quadrant, we are looking at how different ideas or different entities or different views that are unrelated come together and how we can bring them together. What's the common ground? How are things intrinsically related within a system? Especially in the value system. How do we bring together opposing value systems? So when we understand, and we have access to those three quadrants, through the use of thought forms, when we understand the deep level, those three domains or three quadrants or three classes, then we can truly transform the system in our thoughts first and then outwardly. So that's the essence of Otto Laske's work.

Jonathan Reams  21:38  
What I know, Iva is that that seems overwhelming in terms of how a leader in an organization would make use of that. So I know in your Ph.D., part of your challenge was to condense that down to something more usable. Can you talk about that? And how did you end up with 12 thought forms? 

Iva Vurdelja  22:01  
Yes, true. So, I was so excited after completing my dissertation, and I wanted to go out in the world - because there was studying the presence of thought forms in my leaders' thinking. And then, I identified that those who are really who were successful in transforming their organizations used thought forms abundantly and in a very coordinated way. So they could simultaneously see the big picture, see those interconnections, identify absences, and see how transformation needs to happen, diving deep into those four quadrants simultaneously. So that was my finding. And I saw that each leader had a unique pattern of thinking in using those thought forms; they all have the commonality of using a large number of platforms at the same time. But the constellation of those thoughts differed. So I had 10 participants in a study and ten very different profiles. So each person I was giving the feedback identified immediately how they could develop further because we identified a class of thought forms that was not maybe as developed as other classes of thought forms.

Jonathan Reams  23:21  
Okay, so I get the picture. Now, if I go back and summarize a little bit, we can talk about Kegan's stage model, and you go from a socialized mind to self-authoring. That's the typical move. That's a big, undifferentiated process that takes many years. Now, what you described is a much more granular set of processes that you can distinguish from each other and that people can recognize more easily. And notice what is different about them. Is that a fair assessment?

Iva Vurdelja  23:56  
Yes, absolutely. This is very accurate.

Jonathan Reams  23:59  
So Iva, if you give us one thing that distinguishes this dialectical thought form model from others. What would you summarize that as?

Iva Vurdelja  24:12  
Well, this is the model that enables us to observe inner conversations and inner dialogue with yourself in real-time.

Jonathan Reams  24:24  
Great, then the question becomes, "How did you make this more practical and useful?" And how did you end up with only 12 thought forms? I could still do that job?

Iva Vurdelja  24:34  
After completing my dissertation, I was very excited about having that community where I could help people develop their thinking, that desire that lasted like a lifetime. And I designed my first workshop and I use those 28 thought forms organized around four quadrants I had a group of executives who were so also excited about this material in this work, but they could grasp the essence of each thought, not the essence, but maybe the meaning of each thought form. But they recognized it was overwhelming, I could not get them to use those thoughts sustainably. After a while, they went back to their habitual way of thinking. And then my other mentor at that time, Daryl Conner, asked me if it would be possible to maybe simplify and condense those thought forms into fewer numbers so that they can, they're more manageable. And I thought, "my gosh, I'm like committing heresy here. If I do this, and I touched Otto Laske's work is not good." But I tried to look at the essence of each thought form and combine them. So what they came up with was a table of 12 thought forms where I, instead of seven, in one, class of thought forms, I had three, but those three contain all seven in a sense, but not immediately.

Jonathan Reams  26:03  
I think of how I understand some development of the term chunking. Were you able to take concepts and constructs at a certain level and kind of synthesize them at a slightly higher order of abstraction that chunk them together?

Iva Vurdelja  26:18  
Yes, exactly. That's correct. So I came up with those 12 thought forms. And I was running another workshop with another group of executives who were all leading...they were in the midst of a major transformation of their organization. And we did this workshop as a working session, where I used thought forms, to help them stimulate their thinking, and to identify what they were not seeing. And this was a winning combination. They were so excited about this because their view of reality became so rich in real-time. In that two-day workshop, they were able to completely reimagine what was possible, they immediately saw what was missing, and they came up with an action plan on how to lead change differently. This was very encouraging for me to continue working with thought forms. And then I shared the table with Otto Laske, and he looked at this table, and I was very apprehensive. This was another defining moment, right? I was very apprehensive, and I told him what he did. And I said, "I would like you to give me your feedback and tell me if this is something I could continue doing. Are you okay with this?" He looked at this table, and he said, "Hmm, I think it's brilliant." And I said..."okay!"

Scott Allen  27:47  
Did you think I'm kind of a big deal?

Iva Vurdelja  27:50  
No, I never thought I was a big deal I was.

Jonathan Reams  27:54  
But I think that's a good description of these pivotal moments where you know, you do stuff you investigate, you try it out, you play with it, but you're so immersed in it, you don't have a perspective on it, and to get your teacher's blessing that you've done good work, that's a big chopping stone.

Iva Vurdelja  28:12  
So at that time, I didn't have time to write anything about thought forms or delicate thoughts from framework or anything, I was doing workshops, I was teaching and I was working in a corporate environment. We agreed that author would write a book, and he authored the Dialectical Primer. And I was delivering another workshop in Germany with another group of executives, and they validated that the framework was very powerful for their work, they could go back then Monday morning and apply those doctrines right away to their work. So that was the beginning of a new phase of my professional engagement.

Jonathan Reams  28:51  
And I think this is where we're going to get to leave readers curious about the unfolding story. As we kind of wind down now, there are two things I want to mention. One is that I'm very much looking forward to -  Iva and I are going to work together on a project where we will get to bring these dialectical thought forms into a group and practice with some of the stuff I've been doing. So this is going to be very exciting for me. But I also know that you have a very dear to your heart project. So one of the other things that I know, Iva is that Otto is a very complex thinker, and not always easy to understand - you've mentioned that before - and that part of one of your projects now is to give people access to his thinking and work. Could you say more about that project?

Iva Vurdelja  29:41  
Yes, anything I would write about the work of Otto Laske would be a very impoverished version of the power of his work. And this work has changed not only my life in a profound way but the lives of anyone who studied with him, and I felt that Otto's book is completely inaccessible for most people because it's a 611-page monster; it's very difficult to process. And I did, because I was working, I was using it for my Ph.D., I feel that Otto Laske's work needs to be better known and that the world needs to know the power of His teaching. Now, he is a dialectical thinker - he's a social scientist, but he's also a musicologist, and he's also a visual artist, and he's a poet. People don't know about him. So that richness of his life needed to be recorded somewhere. And I decided to do a movie about his life. So now I'm working with my cousin, a well-known filmmaker in Croatia. And we asked Otto Laske to create a movie. And now we are at the final stage of creating a documentary about Otto Laske's life. And I think this will portray Otto Laske's working life and legacy in a much better way than I would ever be able to express in my way of speaking.

Jonathan Reams  31:12  
So now, even what I also know is that now that you've got these 12 thought forms, and you've been able to create structures for people to engage with them, you're going out and doing work with this, what's going on with that work? Where's it headed? What have you seen when you're doing it?

Iva Vurdelja  31:31  
I'm coaching managers, directors, and executives in large corporations. And I also noticed that each time when we discuss any topic, or any issue they have, first, they always come to start with some kind of tension that's happening within themselves or in their environment. And I immediately use my skills from interviewing and using thought forms to identify what they cannot see. And then I used thought forms and introduced a table of thought forms and walked them through the table and gave them a tool to think about themselves, to think about the role they're playing in the organization, and think about the larger environment they're embedded in. And they consistently report that this experience was life-changing. And that gives me hope that we can develop leaders in a new way, by giving them this tool and helping them develop their thinking.

Scott Allen  32:33  
You know, it makes me think, Jonathan, of some of the work you've been doing, and some of the programs that you've been developing, we have a whole entire episode on that. It sounds like this could be another powerful tool in your bag of tricks there, sir.

Jonathan Reams  32:46  
Well, that's why I'm so excited that even are going to do this project in Sweden together over the next couple of years. I just want to thank you, Iva, I know this is always a challenge to condense the richness of what you've done into a short conversation like this, but you've done brilliantly with it. And I think it will pique the curiosity of leaders and listeners and academics in the field to pay attention and say, "Hey, there's something here that could be useful for us to learn more about."

Iva Vurdelja  33:20  
Thank you. Yeah, I was hoping that someone would take notice of not my work but Otto's legacy,

Jonathan Reams  33:27  
What you've been able to do with it is make it more pragmatic for people.

Scott Allen  33:35  
Well, Iva, we often will ask people what they've been streaming, or watching or something that's caught their eye at the end of episodes, but we're gonna leave listeners in a little bit of a place of curiosity. And maybe you can come back and talk about the documentary after it's finished. We would love to learn more about that as a resource that people can access and engage in. You know, as I said at the beginning of the conversation today, I think this is something that is a fascinating topic. There's a lot here. I am looking forward to learning more because, as I said in the beginning, I have not jumped into this pool at all. Jonathan, I know you have. And Iva, you've been in the deep end. And so we are so thankful for your work.

Iva Vurdelja  34:25  
Thank you for having me, and I will let you know when it's out and ready to be shared with the world.

Scott Allen  34:31  
Okay. Okay, Jonathan. Another adventure completed on our trek. Be well, everyone and take care. Thank you so much, Iva.

Iva Vurdelja  34:43  
Thank you. Thank you.

Scott Allen  34:45  


Transcribed by https://otter.ai