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

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  1. Who are we? Organizational Identity content and its effect on members’ identification.

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    February 5, 2019
    Shelley Brickson – University of Illinois-Chicago   Shelley shared her work on organizational identity, which is a member shared understanding of what is central to an organizational character, distinct and relatively enduring about the organization. These can be “what we do” and/or “who we are.” The latter is more character-based and describes commitments, values, etc.   How does identity shape patterns of behavior? This is a driving question of her research.   First we should understand, “who is the organization?” This involves identity orientation. I key idea is that people have different senses of self: individualistic, relational, and collectivist.   Shelley’s work...
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  2. Marga Biller

    Can we measure collective intelligence in teams?

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    Comment January 28, 2019
    Until recently, organizations thought that if they wanted to create “smart” teams, they just had to hire smart individuals and put them together. But researchers have discovered that is not the case. Other explanatory factors account for the performance of teams more than simply the combined intelligence of individual team members. Anita Woolley has specifically focused on examining if there is an underlying collective intelligence (CI) that lets some teams perform better than others and, if so, can we measure it, use it to predict team future performance, and reliably create it?
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  3. 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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  5. Marga Biller

    September 2018 Member Call: Connecting to Challenges and Initiatives

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    Comment October 4, 2018
    This is the summary of the first LILA member call for 2018-2019 focused on Collective Mindfulness. Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations: How do a group of people act as a collective and in a mindful way? As the members shared about their companies and the challenges they face, several themes arose around this year’s theme of Collective Mindfulness: Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations. Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations: How do a group of people act as a collective and in a mindful way? As the members shared about their companies and the challenges they face, several themes arose around this year’s theme of collective mindfulness.
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  6. Marga Biller

    How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions by Damon Centola

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    September 27, 2018
    LILA guest speaker Damon Centola has published a new book about the ideas he shared at LILA. From the publisher: A new, counterintuitive theory for how social networks influence the spread of behavior New social movements, technologies, and public-health initiatives often struggle to take off, yet many diseases disperse rapidly without issue. Can the lessons learned from the viral diffusion of diseases be used to improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? In How Behavior Spreads, Damon Centola presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior–in voting, health, technology, and finance—occur and the ways...
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  7. Marga Biller

    Collective Mindfulness: Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations

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    July 6, 2018
    LILA Theme for 2018-2019:  Collective Mindfulness:  Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations In dynamic environments, how might we create the conditions that improve the quality of interactions in order to nurture collective sensemaking and collective action?   What are the states of dynamic organizations as they evolve and change?   Exploring collective mindfulness—defined “as the collective capability to discern discriminatory detail about emerging issues and to act swiftly in response to these details (Weick, Vogus & Sutcliffe) might provide some answers.  This year, LILA turns its attention to understanding how to nourish the organization and the systems whose future we hope to...
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  9. “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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  10. 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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Harvard Graduate School of Education