Understanding Developmentally Sourced Diversity as a Key to High-Quality Dialogue and Collaborative Intelligence

This chapter introduces the structure and content of the book, as well as the central experiences, ideas, and assumptions from which the book evolved. In critically reviewing contemporary management thinking, we show the stark limitations of Tayloristic ideologies, including those in now fashionable, digitally streamlined, forms. To substantiate the calamity of these limitations, we introduce findings from empirical research in adult development which substantiate that the developmental homogeneity of teams is a fiction and that this fiction hides limits of using digital tools. We demonstrate, in contrast, that and how team members’ adult-developmentally differentiated profiles determine the quality of team collaboration. In order to provide alternatives to Tayloristic shortcuts for organizational work arrangements, we introduce a framework for actively boosting dynamic collaboration in teams. At the end of the chapter, we help readers prepare themselves for taking note of, and reviewing, behavioristic misconceptions in five practices: holding quality meetings, developing commitment and ownership, creating coherent collaborative action and common ground, and promoting an organization-wide dialogue about individual development of contributors that amplifies administering “human resources.”