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

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  1. Marga Biller

    Join us for the 13th Annual LILA Summit with Rob Cross and Ryan Quinn

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    April 18, 2019
    This has been another intriguing year at LILA as we have taken on the theme of Collective Mindfulness: Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations. I hope that you will join us at this year’s LILA Summit on June 12th in Cambridge where the two keynote speakers are Rob Cross and Ryan Quinn. They will be joined by six past LILA faculty who will share their latest research with participants during small group conversations. In these sessions, you will have an opportunity to exchange ideas on how the research can inform your individual and organizational practices. The Summit is also a great occasion to meet and interact with the broader LILA community, including faculty, researchers, and current and past members, and to get a better sense as to who we are as a learning community and what you might experience as a member.
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  2. Marga Biller

    How to spot collective mindfulness?

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    Comment April 16, 2019
    Mindfulness is a challenge of attention allocation. We tend to have both eyes on the current main thing, everything else is on autopilot. Mindful means were moving the main thing along and keeping one eye out for the yellow flags we might miss.
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  3. Marga Biller

    Becoming Collectively Mindful

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    Comment April 16, 2019
    When struggling to gain collective mindfulness in your organization, it could be useful to examine the role of collective identity in supporting or undermining collective mindfulness. You may find that, even though a clear purpose and goal have been set forth, there are still pockets of the organization that are not moving forward in a collective way. Is it due to a weak collective identity, or maybe to a strong collective identity that overrides collective mindfulness?
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  4. How can organizations prevent burnout?

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    Comment April 10, 2019
    In high reliability environments, employees are being pushed beyond their limits. People become emotionally exhausted when they are asked to pay more attention, look for new signals, and looking for discrepant and rare events. Tim Vogus noted that organizations that engage in high reliability have higher levels of emotional exhaustion. He found that organizations that establish compassion practices prevent burnout and increase high reliability.
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  6. Using the past to create the future with Davide Ravasi

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    February 6, 2019
    How do organizations use their history to understand and reform identity to support transformation?   Radical change can often be destructive so it is interesting to note how organizations look back to their history to create continuity in org identity while changing. Davide’s more recent research identifies the variety of historical mechanisms that organizations use to shape identity. One way is using collective memory – the shared memories of communities that get passed down, the rituals of remembrance, and symbolic objects and places to embody collective memory. For example, corporate museums are places that give quite a bit of evidence of...
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  7. Who are we as an organization and how did we get there?

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    Comment February 5, 2019
    f organizational identity is a self-reflective relatively mindful answer to the question of who we are as a organization, were does this come from? Davide Ravassi's work into organizational identity has examined various aspects of an org such as the emotional conceptualization, what is central and distinctive, deeply held beliefs, and claims and narratives that are reflective in the commitments. Interestingly, he has found that identity is revealed through conflict – when resources are scarce, when there is urgency, when there is some event that causes disruption. Also, foundational traits are acquired at the beginning of the organization: they are early imprints.
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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. Marga Biller

    What do the members in your organization actively do to pick up weak cues signaling threat and/or opportunity?

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    Comment January 28, 2019
    During the December 2018 LILA member call, Professor Claus Rerup provided some insights into these questions. His research focuses on what he identifies as attentional triangulation – how a group of people (e.g., teams and organizations) avoid missing cues about threat or opportunity. Paying attention to the right kinds of cues is likely a mechanism toward achieving this year’s theme of collective mindfulness. When teams and organizations do not act in collectively mindful ways and are on autopilot, it is likely at least in part through lack of attentional triangulation.
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Harvard Graduate School of Education