Connecting Cognitive Capacity with Social Emotions

Speaker A My name is Otoranski, and I had the pleasure this afternoon to talk to King Shepherd and we talked about my experience of reading Jacques, meeting Jacques, and how it relates to my present work. And what I would say in a nutshell is that Elliot was a great inventor in terms of making use of research on cognitive development in organizations, and I've greatly learned from him in that regard. But in the last year of his life, when I met him in person, we talked about how the cognitive line of development might relate to what I call the social emotional line that essentially has been researched mainly by the Colbert School at Harvard after 1970. So people like Colberg, Robert Keegan, Robert Feldman and others. Kurt Fisher as well. And I happened to be studying there in the early 90s. So I came to see what Elliot called capability in a broader perspective, namely something that links cognitive and what I call socially emotional. And that's much more than just emotional. It means how do I position myself to the world, to the cosmos as a social being? And I just was explaining to Ken that if I were to give you a sound bite about the two lines of development that I'm trying to combine in my assessment, I would say that the social emotional issue that we are dealing with in assessment is about what should I do and for whom? Whereas the cognitive issue is what can I do and what are my options? And the two lines of development really closely intersect. And that's what I use in my work. I'm a developmental organizational psychologist, I'm a coach, and I'm a social scientist. And I am strongly in favor of what I call evidence based management, where we rely on research. And what would be wonderful would be to do more research about how these two lines of development link in executives, say, or managers in organizations and what that means for the organization as a whole. And there's a lot of research that has to be done. Up to now, for instance, I have only hypotheses about how do drug strata link to developmental levels like Keegan. I would like to have some empirical data, and I would look forward to the work with you, with others who have other expertises than I do.