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

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Collective Mindfulness: Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations

Collective Mindfulness: Shaping the Human Systems in OrganizationsLILA Theme for 2018-2019:  Collective Mindfulness:  Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations In dynamic environments, how might we create the conditions that improve the quality of interactions in order to nurture collective sensemaking and collective action?   What are the states of dynamic organizations as they evolve and change?   Exploring collective mindfulness—defined “as the collective capability to discern discriminatory detail about emerging issues and to act swiftly in response to these details (Weick, Vogus & Sutcliffe) might provide some answers.  This year, LILA turns its attention to understanding how to nourish the organization and the systems whose future we hope to shape.  Systems which are first and foremost human ones.  With this perspective, we take into account that a key to organizational change involves not only rethinking the shape of the organizational chart, or reimaging the spaces where we work, but also in tending to what makes us human: the personal, the aesthetic, the narrative, the emotional, and most crucially, the relational. To read the full theme description, click LILA More »

LILA 2018 Summit Animation: Emergence in Organizations

LILA 2018 Summit Animation: Emergence in OrganizationsThis is the animation that reflects how the LILA community made sense of the theme of Emergence in Organizations: Shaping the Future as it Unfolds. To watch the animation click the play More »

LILA faculty for April 2018 gathering: Tensions of Leadership for Emergence

LILA faculty for April 2018 gathering: Tensions of Leadership for EmergenceGuest Faculty Mary Waller and Jim Hazy who will join the LILA community for the April 2018 gathering. Mary is currently Professor of Management at the Neely School of Business at Texas Christian University. Jim Hazy is a Professor at Adelphi University with thirteen years of academic experience is research and More »

"Experiencing emergence, emerging experience" - Donald MacLean

Every emergent system, whether it be musical improv or dance, has a discipline. The discipline is critically important, it defines the process of how we craft our plan for interaction, the reality of the activity, how we experiment, and then how we make sense of that experimentation. We felt this in our opening activity! Along the we each person receives feedback. Negative feedback is information that drives a system back to a predetermined state. Positive feedback drives a system forward, away from predetermined states. In many ways this is how we manage the More »

Leadership of emergence: How to generate new order?

Leadership of emergence: How to generate new order?Benyamin provoked us to consider four phases that occur when we create the conditions of emergence, each with leadership More »

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Our Current Focus

  1. LILA Theme for 2016-2017 Announced

    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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  2. 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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  3. 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

  1. LILA Thematic Arc for 2017-2018 Announced: Emergence in Organizations: Shaping the future as it unfolds

    Emergence in Organizations: Shaping the future as it unfolds We live in a transformative time – one where often, old paradigms no longer help us solve the challenges we face and where new ways have not fully evolved. There is much we do not know about how to perceive, understand, and approach the issues we face. In past years, LILA has embraced themes addressing this dilemma, themes such as Unlearning, Managing Complexity, and Adaptive Cultures. For the coming year we outline another such theme, one that directly engages organizational structure and structuring in the context of continuous change and distributed...

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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. Why tightness is terrible and terrific

    Michele Galfand’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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  5. 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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  6. Journal of Workplace Learning Publishes LILA Research on Informal Learning Conversations

    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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  7. 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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  9. Critical Knowledge Transfer by Dorothy Leonard

    As you may recall, Dorothy Leonard who is the William J.Abernathy Professor of Business Administration Emerita at Harvard
    Business School joined the LILA Community during the last several years as part of her research into the recently published book "Critical Knowledge Transfer." It is based on original research, numerous interviews with top managers,and a wide range of corporate examples, When highly skilled subject matter experts, engineers, and managers leave their organizations, they take with them years of hard-earned experience-based knowledge—much of it undocumented and irreplaceable. Organizations can thereby lose a good part of their competitive advantage.

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  10. The Emotional Decision Maker

    A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in the last few decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in thinking about decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute powerful, pervasive, and predictable drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices. The present paper organizes and analyzes what has been learned from the past 35 years of work on emotion and decision making. It also proposes an integrated model of decision making that accounts for both traditional (rational-choice theory) inputs and emotional inputs, synthesizing scientific findings to date.

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Upcoming LILA Events

  • September 27, 2018 Member Call on September 27, 2018 @12:00 pm
  • October 2018 Gathering on October 16, 2018
  • November 1, 2018 Member Call on November 1, 2018 @12:00 pm
  • December 13, 2018 Member Call on December 13, 2018 @12:00 pm
  • January 10, 2019 Member Call on January 10, 2019 @12:00 pm
  • February 2019 Gathering on February 5, 2019
  • March 14, 2019 Member Call on March 14, 2019 @12:00 pm
  • April 2019 Gathering on April 10, 2019
  • May 23, 2019 Member Call on May 23, 2019 @12:00 pm
  • 13th Annual LILA SummitJune 12th & 13th, 2019

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Harvard Graduate School of Education