This year’s LILA Summit will be the culmination of the exploration of the theme of Unlearning to Learn.  The LILA Community has spent the year thinking about how mindsets, habits and systems affect our ability to unlearn. For this last formal gathering on the theme, we will be joined by Dr. Bill Starbuck and Dr. Tim Wilson who will provoke our thinking by sharing their research on how individual and organizations can unlearn.  The Summit is open to all past members and faculty of LILA and by special invitation.  To register, please contact amanda_nourse@harvard.edu.

Bill Starbuck contributed to the concepts of self-designing organizations, organizational design, environmental niches, organizational equilibriums made of antithetical processes, relativity through time of levels of aspiration as well as to behavioral research methods and epistemological status. He contributed to the field of management through prescriptive organizational design studies, relativity of managers’ perception, interaction between rationality and ideologies, prescriptive yet experimental methods, crisis management through unlearning behavioral and cognitive patterns. He is the author of numerous articles on a wide-ranging set of issues relating to organizational behavior and strategy, he is also a former editor of Administrative Science Quarterly, co-editor of The Handbook of Organizational Design (with Paul Nystrom, and author of The Production of Knowledge: The Challenge of Social Science Research and Organizational Realities: Studies of Strategizing and Organizing. Bill is professor in residence at the Lundquist College of Business of the University of Oregon and Professor Emeritus at New York University. He receivedhis M.S. and Ph.D. in industrial administration at Carnegie Institute of Technology, after receiving an A.B. in physics at Harvard. He also received a Ph.D. honoris causa in social science from Stockholm University and the title Docteur honoris causa from both the Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II) and the Université Paul Cézanne (Aix-Marseille III).

Tim Wilson is the Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He is a social psychologist who has investigated unconscious processing, the limits of introspection, the consequences of introspection, affective forecasting, and happiness. Wilson is the author of several books including Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious and co-authored Social Psychology an introductory textbook on social psychology.   With Richard Nisbett, Wilson authored one of Psychology’s most cited papers “Telling more than we can know – verbal reports on mental processes” that demonstrated the difficulty humans have in introspecting on their own mental processes.   He is a longtime collaborator of Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University.  Tim received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.