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

Looking for content and documents from our Gatherings? Login

  1. Embracing the Simple & Strange with Jim Hazy

    by
    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...
    Read more...
  2. Sue Borchardt

    February 2018 Animation: Engaging Emergence

    by
    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.
    Read more...
  3. Sue Borchardt

    October 2017 Animation: Unlearning for Emergence

    by
    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.
    Read more...

  4. “Experiencing emergence, emerging experience” – Donald MacLean

    by
    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.
    Read more...
  7. Marga Biller

    LILA Thematic Arc for 2017-2018: Emergence in Organizations: Shaping the Future as it Unfolds

    by
    June 19, 2017
    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...
    Read more...

  8. Frustrated or flourishing? Three ways we make sense of challenges at work

    by
    June 5, 2017
    Sally Maitlis shared her research which revealed that, in the face of challenges, there are three pathways that workers take:   Identity Path: in the face of threats, they rely on their sense of who they are Contribution Path: in the face of threat, they try and use their skills to help Practice Path: in the face of challenges, they learn skills as part of the work   What’s important is that these paths explain different outcomes of employees – the identity and contribution paths lead to frustration, burn-out and leaving the organization. Only the practice path, which is about...
    Read more...
‹123456789›

Harvard Graduate School of Education