LILA 2018 Summit Animation: Emergence in Organizations

This is the animation that reflects how the LILA community made sense of the theme of Emergence in Organizations: Shaping the Future as it Unfolds. To watch the animation click the play More »

Insights from Interactions: How do teams manage complexity? with Mary Waller

Mary has studied what makes teams effective in a variety of dynamic contexts, such as flight crews, nuclear power plant engineers, hospital trauma teams, fire-fighting teams and emergency crisis teams. In her studies of interaction patterns she has identified some key lessons for leaders to keep in mind:   Setting the tone: interaction patterns emerge quickly and solidify.  Initial patterns of interactions influence the subsequent effectiveness during dynamism.  Teams that had reciprocal, balanced and consistent interaction patterns performed better in highly adaptive situations. In the thick of it: when teams face ambiguity, uncertainty, and incomplete data effective teams accept ambiguity better and avoid “solution tournaments.” Teams that have fewer entrenched interaction patterns  were able to drop routines and adjust more effectively than teams that had more. Switching gears: Planning happens during routine activities, or “slack time”.” However, too much planning time isn’t effective -- there is a sweet spot.   Her current research in military settings is now looking at how leaders switch gears from being directive to More »

"Three keys to leading emergent organizing" by Jim Hazy

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 autonomy. Shared leadership speaks to interdependence needs.  What Jim emphasizes is that these needs are always there simultaneously and all the time in an organization. At a higher, coarse-grain level, leaders guide the emergence of the new order at a larger scale more than any individual.  Individuals can influence emergent organizing. Drawing on work in the animal kingdom, there are lessons at how these systems emerge based on the threats, energy and information that gets fed into the system:  from random milling around, to internal circulation structures, to collective directional alignment.   Each has different levels of order and form at the macro-level.  Given this there are different practices that speak to these levels of form:   Community building: practices that create dependence, belonging and group identity.  This practice is answering questions such as: who are we and who is them? Who do I trust (and not trust)? Am I safe here? It creates a sense of belonging, security, and More »

Authority or Community ? Two models of leadership emergence.

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. More »