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

Looking for content and documents from our Gatherings? Login

  1. 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...

  2. 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...

  5. When we are uncertain, we turn to our group

    by
    April 12, 2017
    Michael Hogg’s shared his research on the role social identity and uncertainty. Just giving a groups a categorical names can create in group and out group dynamics: individuals trust, favor and conform to their in group and distrust, discriminate, and compete with the out group.   This research forms the foundation of social identity theory – the relationship between self and group. And what motivates this is often feeling better about oneself.   Michael’s work looks more specifically at a specific kind of uncertainty, identity uncertainty.   Overall, individuals are motivated to reduce uncertainty. And there are many sources of identity uncertainty –...
    Read more...

  6. The social structure of cultural change: Damon Centola

    by
    February 9, 2017
    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....
    Read more...

  7. Where the tipping point missed the point

    by
    February 8, 2017
    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...
    Read more...

  8. Why tightness is terrible and terrific

    by
    February 8, 2017
    Michele Gelfand’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...
    Read more...
  9. 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...
  10. 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...
‹123456789›

Harvard Graduate School of Education