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

Looking for content and documents from our Gatherings? Login

  1. Marga Biller

    Understanding Culture by David Perkins

    by
    November 3, 2016
    As Dave Perkins shared prior to his synthesis, this is not an attempt to summarize everything that the LILA community explored during the October 2016 gathering, rather it is a way a 64,000 view that might help advance our thinking on the topic.   Defining Adaptive Cultures Individual cultural knowledge is largely tacit – we don’t know what we know (we just behave) Iceberg: like the being roughly 90% under water, not knowing like this is not just limited to culture, but to all fluent knowledge (example of grammar, used implicitly) The 10% of explicit knowledge is very important to...
    Read more...
  2. Marga Biller

    The Science of Evolution: What Makes Humans So Different

    by
    September 19, 2016
    LILA October guest Michael Muthukrishna has written about how culture has evolved in the human species, and this perspective can help us begin our exploration of adaptive cultures in organizations. Muthukrishna and co-authors argue that humans are “an ‘evolved cultural species,’” which “has evolved to socially transmit complex behavior-shaping information between generations” (Chudek, Muthukrishna, & Henrich, 2015, p. 2). Our species has attained “cumulative cultural evolution,” which is where our culturally transmitted behaviors “are more complex, sophisticated and well-adapted than anything a single asocial or non-cultural individual could devise alone in their lifetime” (p. 2). No single person could ever re-create the world we live in.
    Read more...
  3. Sue Borchardt

    October 2016 Animation: Understanding Culture in Organizations

    by
    June 7, 2016
    The sheer scope of Culture’s sweep makes a pithy definition difficult, a challenge further amplified by the dynamic, overlapping, and nested cultural contexts we strive to make sense of. Culture is often named as contributing to the success or failure of organizational efforts such as globalization, mergers & acquisitions, and cultivating diversity. One place to start when exploring whether and how cultural forces might be leveraged to help organizations adapt to internal and external change, is by asking: how do cultures work? and how do they adapt?
    Read more...

Harvard Graduate School of Education