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

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  1. Towards Collective Mindfulness – Michael Pirson

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    Comment October 16, 2018
    The world is full on complex problems, ranging from global warming to economic disparities, to ongoing ethnic conflicts. Michael reminded us that mindfulness approaches involve contemplative action, restoring harmony, and questioning status quo. Mindlessness approaches are easier and involves apathy and actionism, questioning harmony and resorting status quo.
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  3. Insights from Interactions: How do teams manage complexity? with Mary Waller

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    May 30, 2018
    Mary has studied what makes teams effective in a variety of dynamic contexts, such as flight crews, nuclear power plant engineers, hospital trauma teams, fire-fighting teams and emergency crisis teams. In her studies of interaction patterns she has identified some key lessons for leaders to keep in mind:   Setting the tone: interaction patterns emerge quickly and solidify.  Initial patterns of interactions influence the subsequent effectiveness during dynamism.  Teams that had reciprocal, balanced and consistent interaction patterns performed better in highly adaptive situations. In the thick of it: when teams face ambiguity, uncertainty, and incomplete data effective teams accept ambiguity...
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  4. “Three keys to leading emergent organizing” by Jim Hazy

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    Comment April 19, 2018
    Too often we feel that we are in control at a fine grain and local level, but too often in emergent contexts emergence it unfolding at a coarse grain and macro level in which we cannot control.  Traditional leadership still may still apply but the context matters more. An important first move is fine-grained to empathize with followers: what are their needs? A theory is that, as humans develop we move from dependence, independence, to inter-dependence.  Different leadership frameworks speak to these developmental needs.  For example, charismatic leadership speaks to dependence needs.  Transformational leadership speaks to independence needs, to support...
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  5. Embracing the Simple & Strange with Jim Hazy

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    April 18, 2018
    Jim began by emphasizing that first we consider leadership we need to mediate on: what iscomplexity?  There are many sources from biology, sociology, economics, etc.  What links them together is unpredictability of time (you don’t know when something will happen), place (you do know where it happen), social complexity (you don’t know who is connecting, influencing, etc. whom).   What leaders need to do is find the simplicity on the other side of complexity, to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes. From Jim’s research there are some keys to get to simplicity: Realize that the map is not the territory. Models aren’t reality but...
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  6. Sue Borchardt

    February 2018 Animation: Engaging Emergence

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    2 March 3, 2018
    The seeds of innovation and "becoming" reside in these random, unpredictable fluctuations. When the things we want spontaneously sprout up, we might call it serendipity in hindsight, but we often suppress deviations from the norm before it's even possible to guess the nature of what is germinating. Engaging with emergence entails letting go of preconceived solutions, a daunting challenge when performance measures loom at every level.
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  7. Sue Borchardt

    October 2017 Animation: Unlearning for Emergence

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    1 November 21, 2017
    Sometimes it seems like it would be easier to start from scratch than to achieve wide-scale change in an organization. This might explain, in part, why restructuring is so common. The science of complexity offers insights into why this rarely results in lasting change. Emergence, the arising of ordered systems – both natural and human – can be viewed from many angles within complexity science.
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  8. “Experiencing emergence, emerging experience” – Donald MacLean

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    October 25, 2017
    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 emergence.
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Harvard Graduate School of Education