LILA ~ Learning Innovations Laboratory at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Trust - Harnessing the Power of Agency and Belonging

Trust - Harnessing the Power of Agency and BelongingPeople have an inherent need for belonging and agency, which can be fulfilled by trust in different ways. But just what is trust? It is the willingness to be vulnerable—to take a risk—in a relationship based on positive expectations of the trustee. And in the workplace belonging and agency matter because of their impact on job performance, commitment to the organization, and well-being. Mike’s research suggests that feeling trusted and having an opportunity to trust others can increase employees’ sense of belonging and agency. By a wide margin, the three biggest predictors of trust are ability, benevolence and integrity. (There is also trust propensity – a personality trait where someone is more willing to believe that others are reliable – but this can go away.) A few examples of trusting behavior include the supervisor’s willingness to rely on the employee’s skills and abilities, to disclose sensitive information or feelings to the employee, and to reduce monitoring of the employee. What are your thoughts? When have you experienced trust that led to your feeling a sense of agency, belonging and More »

Uniting Through Difference with Rachel Arnett

Uniting Through Difference with Rachel ArnettIn the first presentation Rachel spoke about the benefits and risks of navigating a minority identity in the workplace.  In this  presentation she spoke about one way to bring attention to a cultural identity in a way that doesn’t necessarily activate bias and exclusion, and can actually activate and increase More »

Agency in the Context of Diversity with Rachel Arnett

Agency in the Context of Diversity with Rachel ArnettIn her first presentation, Rachel shared some of her work about agency in the context of diversity.  Diversity is increasingly a reality of the workplace, and it brings lots of benefits – we gain new perspectives, we gain access to broader and better talent pools, for example, which helps us to innovate and improve how we do things in organizations. And there are also many challenges for example,  how do we navigate sources of differences.  Rachel’s research explores how the perceived risks and benefits of sharing features and aspects of identity can influence and enhance both individual and collective agency at More »

Agency for Unimagined Events

Agency for Unimagined EventsAgency and structure matter for how you act but also for what future events you imagine or can’t imagine.  Lets look at reflective agency - when you consider scenarios that could happen, you do so based on your current position and the information available to you at the time which lead you to consider different alternatives and contingency plans.  Pre-reflective agency driven by past experiences, will lead you to take for granted that some aspects of reality will be as they have been in the past – leaving you in the dark about the future. More »

The Structures Within and the Structures Out There by Ivano Cardinale

The Structures Within and the Structures Out There by Ivano CardinaleIvano conceptualized agency as "what you exercise when you consciously choose among alternatives, and especially when you choose the objectives that you pursue, and the best means to pursue More »

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Our Current Focus

  1. LILA Theme 2020-2021: System Leadership

    Each year, LILA focuses collective discussion and exploration around a contemporary theme that optimally encompasses members’ practical interests and illuminates challenges in the larger field of human learning and innovation. A fruitful theme is typically identified by criteria such as its resonance with members’ concerns, its readiness to be explored through multiple, interdisciplinary lenses, and its ability to frame and advance the experimental practices of LILA members. Based on member interviews, the discussions during past gatherings, availability of academic research on the topic, and the current social context, the theme for 2020-2021 is System Leadership – Navigating Complexity at Scale.

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  2. LILA Theme for 2020-2021: System Leadership – Navigating Complexity at Scale

    Each year, LILA focuses collective discussion and exploration around a contemporary theme that optimally encompasses members’ practical interests and illuminates challenges in the larger field of human learning and innovation. A fruitful theme is typically identified by criteria such as its resonance with members’ concerns, its readiness to be explored through multiple, interdisciplinary lenses, and its ability to frame and advance the experimental practices of LILA members. Based on member interviews, the discussions during past gatherings, availability of academic research on the topic, and the current social context, the theme for 2020-2021 is System Leadership – Navigating Complexity at Scale....

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  3. 2018-2019 LILA Theme: Collective Mindfulness – Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations

    Drawing on the fields of cognitive psychology, neurocognitive science, collective mind theory and organizational science we will explore questions such as what are the mechanisms that support collective mindfulness? How might we shape the social systems to create thriving ecologies? How might the macro and micro narratives come into conversation to further strategic paths? How can collective mindful organizing amplify the desired states? We will engage the theme through these three topics.

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  4. LILA Theme for 2016-2017

    Every year, the LILA community focuses on a particular theme of interest to members that will help them advance their thinking regarding the initiatives they are leading in their organizations. The 2016-2017 theme is Adaptive Cultures: How Institutions Set the Conditions for Success.

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  5. Managing Complexity – How Organizations Navigate Strategic paradoxes

    Managing Complexity – How organizations navigate strategic paradoxes Dynamic work environments are complex and the changing conditions of ambiguity, uncertainty, conflicting goals, contradictory messages, and competing perspectives create barriers to effective performance. We are asked to take a long-term view and to make short-term decisions that increase profits. We are asked to learn new things and to perform at highest levels. We need to innovate and to operate in predictable ways. We oscillate between centralized and decentralized operational structures. We organize work closely for control and want people to show initiative and self-organize. We encourage collective identity and reward individual...

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  6. Last Year’s Focus

    The starting point for our exploration of flexpertise was recognition of the incredible power of expertise. Our world runs on expertise – technical, political, economic, management, etc. Any one of us can live a good life knowing only a little about microcircuits or international finance or water shortages because other people know a lot, and we benefit from their knowledge. Departments in organizations can get away with knowing only a bit about X or Y because some other department or an outsourcer does it expertly. It’s a wonderful and amazing system. However, as individuals and organizations, we often don’t make...

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What’s New

  2. Join us for the 13th Annual LILA Summit with Rob Cross and Ryan Quinn

    This has been another intriguing year at LILA as we have taken on the theme of Collective Mindfulness: Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations. I hope that you will join us at this year’s LILA Summit on June 12th in Cambridge where the two keynote speakers are Rob Cross and Ryan Quinn. They will be joined by six past LILA faculty who will share their latest research with participants during small group conversations. In these sessions, you will have an opportunity to exchange ideas on how the research can inform your individual and organizational practices. The Summit is also a great occasion to meet and interact with the broader LILA community, including faculty, researchers, and current and past members, and to get a better sense as to who we are as a learning community and what you might experience as a member.

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  3. What do the members in your organization actively do to pick up weak cues signaling threat and/or opportunity?

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    During the December 2018 LILA member call, Professor Claus Rerup provided some insights into these questions. His research focuses on what he identifies as attentional triangulation – how a group of people (e.g., teams and organizations) avoid missing cues about threat or opportunity. Paying attention to the right kinds of cues is likely a mechanism toward achieving this year’s theme of collective mindfulness. When teams and organizations do not act in collectively mindful ways and are on autopilot, it is likely at least in part through lack of attentional triangulation.

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  4. The social structure of cultural change: Damon Centola

    A dominant theory cultural norms are functional, but Damon provoked us to consider that there are cases in which norms are not functional at all, and can even be dysfunctional. Conformity norms stifle speaking up, for example which is seen in the Emperor’s New Clothes story and Stalin’s Russia. Such norms often comes from some sense of exogenous authority that dictate a behavior (political science), or sense of what is better (behavioral economics), or snow-ball effects of what’s popular (sociology). But all of these explanations assume there is awareness of all these things and they are valuable in some way....

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  5. Where the tipping point missed the point

    Damon Centola’s work unpacked assumptions in networks that related to how ideas/behavior spread through networks via “strong vs. weak” ties.  For many years, and argued well in Gladwell’s Tipping Point, the belief was that all ideas spread like viruses through networks. Daemon’s work points out that what is important is the distinction between simple contagions (ideas/actions that requires a single contact) vs complex contagions (ideas/actions that require multiple contacts and social reinforcement). Many cultural practices require social reinforcement, particularly when there is uncertainty & risk, run against norms, or interdependence with other technologies. What is important to know is how complex...

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  6. Why tightness is terrible and terrific

    Michele Gelfand’s work in social psychology explores how micro changes in behaviors connect to larger shifts in values in cultures.  Her work has looked the effect of social norms across cultures. Her concept is that there are qualitative differences in tight groups (with strong norms, litter tolerance for deviance, more orderly) vs. loose groups (weak norms, high tolerance for deviance, less orderly). Her research showed that tight groups coordinate well amidst threats of survival, both human made (e.g. tribal conflicts) and natural (e.g. natural disasters).  Tightness can be activated, too, by real of natural threats. And the situations, such as libraries...

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  7. What We Learned About Unlearning To Learn

    This brief represents the culmination of our year of exploring the theme of unlearning to learn together. Over the course of the year, we have explored how we can best define, understand, and foster unlearning. Unlearning is learning to think, behave, or perceive differently, when there are already beliefs, behaviors, or assumptions in place (that get in the way), at either the individual or the organizational level. It becomes important when individuals, groups, and whole organizations have to find ways to effectively support change, overwrite old habits, surface and supplant entrenched ways of thinking, and develop new ways of working...

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  8. Journal of Workplace Learning Publishes LILA Research on Informal Learning Conversations

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    Informal learning conversations with colleagues is a powerful yet understudied source of self-directed, professional development. This study investigated the types of learning 79 leaders from 22 organizations reported they learned from 44 peer-led conversations over a two-year period. Survey data suggests empirical evidence of five learning outcomes – informational, conceptual, operational, reflective, and social learning. The study describes these categories, the overall distribution of these types of learning in the community, and how most conversations were “rich” in a particular outcome. It concludes with possible explanations for these patterns as well as potential lines for future research.

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  9. Leaders as Problem Finders

    The LILA Community explored the Problem Finding Organization. Michael Roberto shared his finding that leaders at all levels must hone their skills as problem-finders to identify and correct problems and prevent catastrophe.

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Upcoming LILA Events

  • September 23, 2021 - Member Call
  • October 20-21, 2021 - Activating Agency
  • November 18, 2021 - Member Call
  • December 9, 2021 - Member Call
  • January 13, 2022 Member Call
  • February 9-10, 2022 - Bolstering Belonging
  • March 10, 2022 - Member Call
  • April 13-14, 2022 - Cultivating Connection
  • May 12, 2022 - Member Call
  • June 7-8, 2022 - 16th Annual LILA Summit: Enabling agency, belonging and connection from the Inside Out and Outside In

Latest from Twitter

@AmyCEdmondson: Leaders who display compassion build psychological safety & commitment, and enable better work @HarvardBiz @WorkFearlessly https://t.co/He4huGcQTp

- 170 days ago

h J R
@gwucolumbian: Finally! Organizational Sciences Prof. David Costanza dispels millennial stereotypes. https://t.co/EmEsrZp9zT #GWU #GWCCAS https://t.co/A35vHQW2I2

- 206 days ago

h J R
Great article about LILA February Faculty Guest @DamonCentola about his latest book and some of the ideas he shared at the LILA Gathering about social networks and the science behind what drives change. https://t.co/mtXaaLKmAa

- 223 days ago

h J R
@contemplatethis: listening to @snowded talk for @LILAHarvard gathering on catalyzing system leadership. He's been sharing a handy heuristic 4 complexity lately, drawn from song in Frozen 2: Do the Next Right Thing. I love that he's not embarrassed to admit he watched it (or & Buffy the V slayer).

- 234 days ago

h J R
@SNFAgoraJHU: Catch SNF Agora director @hahriehan on @OpenMindTV! https://t.co/Ht28ZN86RT

- 248 days ago

h J R

Harvard Graduate School of Education