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

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  1. Marga Biller

    Unlearning to Learn – LILA Summit Summary and Animation

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    One of the ways in which LILA supports the learning of its members is to create an animated short presenting key ideas from the year long exploration.  The theme during the 2013-2014 season was Unlearning to Learn.  Below is the transcript from the animation which can facilitate your understanding of unlearning. Unlearning to Learn This year at LILA, we take a whirlwind tour of unlearning, approaching it from three angles: mindsets, habits, and systems. Here, we take stock of our two main quests around unlearning: understanding it and fostering it. Unlearning is what we do when prior learning creates...
  2. Sue Borchardt

    October 2016 Animation: Understanding Culture in Organizations

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    The sheer scope of Culture’s sweep makes a pithy definition difficult, a challenge further amplified by the dynamic, overlapping, and nested cultural contexts we strive to make sense of. Culture is often named as contributing to the success or failure of organizational efforts such as globalization, mergers & acquisitions, and cultivating diversity. One place to start when exploring whether and how cultural forces might be leveraged to help organizations adapt to internal and external change, is by asking: how do cultures work? and how do they adapt?
  3. Marga Biller

    10th Annual LILA Summit Documents

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    The 10th Annual LILA Summit will be held on June 7th and 8th at the Academy of Arts and Sciences. To access the documents for the gathering, click the link below. We look forward to seeing you all at the Welcome Reception on June 6th at NuBar at the Sheraton Commander in Cambridge.
  4. Marga Biller

    April 2016 Animation: Paradoxes of Learning and Performance

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    Comment
    This animation represents the sensemaking by the LILA community based on the ideas shared by guest speakers Jennifer Garvey-Berger and Chris Kayes. To continue the conversation, add a comment after viewing this animation. 1. What idea(s) sparked your interest? 2. How did it enhance your thinking? 3. What might you try based on the ideas?
  5. Marga Biller

    A Deeper Dive Into Deliberately Developmental Organizations

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    Comment
    Dr. Kegan’s study of organizations yielded four cases of companies that modeled the unique properties of a deliberately developmental organization. In the words of one of these organizations (Decurion Corporation), “Flourishing is the process of living into one’s unique contributions. It is the process of becoming oneself. We expect to do this through our work.” In the words of another, Next Jump: “Caring for your employees and helping them grow as human beings is possible while making money and helping the world become a better place.” Dr. Kegan underscored that each of the organizations featured as DDOs in his book were selected from a pool of hundreds of organizations that his team studied, and that each DDO was not only from a different industry or market, but was also financially high-performing. Thus, the common criticism that a developmentally-oriented organization may lead to “happiness as a process” but also lead to lower bottom-line performance is not supported by Dr. Kegan’s research. Instead, the DDO emerges at the intersection of developmental aspirations, developmental communities, developmental practices.
  6. Marga Biller

    10th Annual LILA Summit Speakers Announced

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    The Learning Innovations Laboratory will be celebrating its 10th Annual Summit on June 7th 2016 in Cambridge, MA. This is an opportunity for Chief Learning, Talent and Innovation Officers to come together to explore potential next practices for their organizations. The three keynote speakers at the LILA Summit will be Marianne Lewis (Dean of Cass School of Business), Tima Bansal (professor at the Ivey Business School) and Bob Kegan (Harvard) as well as small group discussions led by distinguished professors and practitioners Deborah Ancona (MIT), Maurizio Zollo (Buconni Univeristy) and Ethan Bernstein (Harvard) with John Bunch (Zappos).
  7. Working through the organizational “F” word: Failure.

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    Jennifer’s ideas made us wonder: Maybe “failure” is the obscenity in organizations that gets in the way of learning? Is curiosity the energy in the tension of learning & performance?   She reminds us that learning and adapting are more useful in complex systems than predicting and planning. So failure is a necessary part of growth, development, and learning.   What moves us through the necessity of failure? Perhaps courage is part of the answer. When we fail but don’t grow we experience shame, rejection, loss of identity, isolation, judgment, etc.   When we fail and we experience these things, too, but...
  8. Living in a “or AND and” world

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    Jennifer Garvey Berger reminds us of the Cynefin framework that describes two world states: the predictable world (obvious and complicated) and the unpredictable world (complex and chaotic). DW: I’m reminded that these four “worlds” are both objective and subjective. That is my 7 year old might experience something as chaotic or complex while I might experience it as obvious or complicated. Also, while I also appreciate this framework, where things often get tricky for me is when these worlds become nested – inside a “complex” experience or problem, there often are “complicated” and “obvious” sub-problems. So diagnosing the nature of a problem feels like the right move, toggling between the worlds in real-time is often the big challenge. How to create the spaces, tools, structures that support the skills but also the toggling feels tricky.

Harvard Graduate School of Education