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

Looking for content and documents from our Gatherings? Login

  1. Marga Biller

    Scribing Workshop 1: Creating a Visual Narrative

    by
    In response to member interest in gaining a better understanding and skill around creating visual narratives, LILA will again be hosting a series of graphic workshops. These will be facilitated by Kelvy Bird and Sita Magnuson and are provided as part of your membership in LILA. These sessions will take place on the afternoon prior to each of the three remaining LILA gatherings.
  2. Marga Biller

    Paradoxical Thinking with Wendy Smith

    by
      Wendy Smith from the University of Delaware joined us on a conference call as we continue the exploration of the theme of Flexpertise   Wendy’s research focuses on strategic paradoxes – how leaders and senior teams effectively respond to contradictory agendas.  She has studied how organizations and their leaders simultaneously explore new possibilities while exploiting existing competencies, and how social enterprises simultaneously attend to social missions and financial goals.  
  3. Marga Biller

    The 9th Annual LILA Summit June 9, 2015 in Cambridge, MA

    by
    The 9th annual LILA Summit will be held on June 9th 2015 in Cambridge Massachusetts. The Summit will be the culmination of the exploration of the theme of Flexpertise. We will engage with current and past members, a small group of invited participants and guest faculty to reflect on our understanding of the how to develop adaptive practices in organizations in order to be able to meet novel and creative challenges. We will also identify future areas of interest. Dr. Deborah Ancona (MIT) and Dr. Kathleen Eisenhardt (Stanford) will be the guest speakers.
  4. Marga Biller

    January Member Call: Paradoxical Thinking with Wendy K. Smith

    by
    Wendy Smith from the University of Delaware joined us on a conference call as we continue the exploration of the theme of Flexpertise   Wendy’s research focuses on strategic paradoxes – how leaders and senior teams effectively respond to contradictory agendas.  She has studied how organizations and their leaders simultaneously explore new possibilities while exploiting existing competencies, and how social enterprises simultaneously attend to social missions and financial goals. To listen to the call click on the following link: https://lila.webex.com/lila/ldr.php?RCID=6bf4ed0e4291666b22c8d0efd789247a    
  5. Marga Biller

    Leaders as Problem Finders

    by
    The LILA Community explored the Problem Finding Organization. Michael Roberto shared his finding that leaders at all levels must hone their skills as problem-finders to identify and correct problems and prevent catastrophe.
  6. Marga Biller

    The Crowd as Innovation Partner with Karim Lakhani

    by
    What is the link between organizational flexibility and its ability to innovate? How does expertise contribute to innovation? How can novel organizational practices drawn from the open source community and scientific contests contribute to how organizations flexibly innovate? Karim R. Lakhani’s research on innovation can help LILA address these and other questions.
  7. Marga Biller

    Know What You Don’t Know : How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen

    by
    Comment
    Michael Roberto shared his finding that leaders at all levels must hone their skills as problem-finders to identify and correct problems and prevent catastrophe. Roberto identifies seven skills and capabilities necessary to become an effective problem-finder. To research this point, extensive interviews were conducted with roughly 150 managers of enterprises from private and public sector, often across different levels within the same company. Individuals were asked to describe how they tried to prevent failures from taking place. Roberto identifies seven skills and capabilities necessary to become an effective problem-finder. This reminded me of the work that Markus Baer presented describing the issues that experts face in problem formulation. He mentioned that expertise can make it difficult to make sense of things collectively and that expertise impacts collective sense-making. Therefore, he proposed that problem solving may be better thought of as problem formulation. Moving straight to problem solving can create problems; it often works better to focus more energy on formulating the problem. To read the summary of Michael Roberto book titled: Know What You Don’t Know : How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen click the more button.
  8. Marga Biller

    Critical Knowledge Transfer by Dorothy Leonard

    by
    Comment
    As you may recall, Dorothy Leonard who is the William J.Abernathy Professor of Business Administration Emerita at Harvard Business School joined the LILA Community during the last several years as part of her research into the recently published book "Critical Knowledge Transfer." It is based on original research, numerous interviews with top managers,and a wide range of corporate examples, When highly skilled subject matter experts, engineers, and managers leave their organizations, they take with them years of hard-earned experience-based knowledge—much of it undocumented and irreplaceable. Organizations can thereby lose a good part of their competitive advantage.

Harvard Graduate School of Education