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
    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...
  2. Marga Biller

    March 2018 Member Call: Adopting a Paradoxical Mindset for Emergence

    by
    Comment
    Dr. Smith shared that adopting a paradoxical mindset has been shown to encourage creative outcomes, job satisfaction, and innovation, and has been linked to promotion within organizations. Organizations inherently have competing demands; they always exist but are not always observable o Become salient through a number of organizational conditions and/or individual characteristics o Example: Paul Polman (CEO of Unilever) invites people to discuss tensions Smith found there are two core dimensions to how people think about competing demands: 1. How do you experience tensions and make them salient? 2. How do you deal with the tensions? What mindset do you bring to the tensions?
  3. Sue Borchardt

    February 2018 Animation: Engaging Emergence

    by
    2
    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.
  4. Marga Biller

    January 2018 Member Call – Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing

    by
    Fascination with organizations that eschew the conventional managerial hierarchy and instead radically decentralize authority has been longstanding, albeit at the margins of scholarly and practitioner attention. Recently, however, organizational experiments in radical decentralization have gained mainstream consideration, giving rise to a need for new theory and new research.
  5. Marga Biller

    Authority or Community ? Two models of leadership emergence.

    by
    Comment
    Ned Wellman, Assistant Professor at Arizona State University will share his research on the role of cognitive relational models in leadership emergence. Although emergent leadership is an essential tool for organizations seeking to meet the demands of challenging, dynamic environments, facilitating such leadership poses real challenges. He will explain why and how organizations might leverage relational models to encourage desired patterns of leadership. I
  6. Sue Borchardt

    October 2017 Animation: Unlearning for Emergence

    by
    1
    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.
  7. “Experiencing emergence, emerging experience” – Donald MacLean

    by
    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.
  8. Marga Biller

    LILA Member Connections: September 2017 Member call

    by
    1
    During the first LILA community wide conversation of this year's cycle, LILA members identified connection between their organizational challenges, the initiatives they are leading and those of other LILA members. Additionally, ideas began to emerge regarding how the theme of Emergence in Organizations might inform the way forward on these challenges.

Harvard Graduate School of Education