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

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  1. Marga Biller

    Dr. Erik Dane shared his research on Flexible Expertise

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    During the October gathering, were joined by Dr. Erik Dane wh0 share his research on the topic of Flexible Expertise.         Dr. Dane is Associate Professor of Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. His research focuses on cognition in the workplace. Through field research and laboratory experiments, he examines topics such as attention, creativity, expertise, intuition, and mindfulness (rice.edu). In a recent article, he writes about the trade-offs between expertise and flexibility. His construct of “cognitive entrenchment” explains when expertise may lead to inflexibility and when it may lead to flexibility. To learn...
  2. Marga Biller

    Managing Complexity – How Organizations Navigate Strategic paradoxes

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    Managing Complexity – How organizations navigate strategic paradoxes Dynamic work environments are complex and the changing conditions of ambiguity, uncertainty, conflicting goals, contradictory messages, and competing perspectives create barriers to effective performance. We are asked to take a long-term view and to make short-term decisions that increase profits. We are asked to learn new things and to perform at highest levels. We need to innovate and to operate in predictable ways. We oscillate between centralized and decentralized operational structures. We organize work closely for control and want people to show initiative and self-organize. We encourage collective identity and reward individual...
  3. Marga Biller

    Organizational Unlearning with Bill Starbuck

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    William Starbuck, professor emeritus at New York University and Courtesy Professor in Residence at Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon, presented his work on organizational unlearning. Starbuck began with a historical overview. Prior to the 1950s, nobody thought of the idea that organizations could learn. As scholars began to study organizational learning, they (perhaps naively) assumed that it was a good thing; that learning meant the firm would do better in the future. Study after study showed that it was instead a mixed bag; learning both helps and hurts. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars began...
  4. Marga Biller

    Innovation Adoption as Unlearning with Janet Pogue

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    Key Questions/Themes: What behaviors currently inhibit innovations that need to be ‘unlearned’ and what new behaviors need to be supported or encouraged? How can ‘triggers’ and/or the physical environment be leveraged to reinforce behavioral change? How can we engage early adopters in making the innovation their own? And then, foster to go viral? Summary of Session Content Janet Pogue is a Principal in Gensler’s Washington D.C. office. She co-leads the firm’s Workplace Practice and is a frequent writer and speaker on the critical issues affecting the design of high performing work environments. In this session, she shared on her views...
  5. Marga Biller

    Strategic Leadership & Organizational Learning: Dr Dusya Vera

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    Dusya Vera, from the University of Houston, shared her research on what leaders do to support organizational learning.  She began by offering an overview of an org learning framework that she and Mary Crossan developed to represent the various levels of “stocks” and “flows” that support learning.  For example, there are individual stocks of competence, capability, and motivations.  There are group learning stocks such as the group dynamics that support the development of shared understanding.  And there are organizational stocks such as the alignment between nonhuman storehouses of learning and systems that support learning as a competitive advantage.  In addition...
  6. Marga Biller

    Leaderful Practice by Joe Raelin

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    Joe Raelin, from Northeastern, shared his thinking about the need for shifting our thinking away from leadership as what a single person does to leaderful practice.  The roots of the word don’t help us, he reminds us: it comes from an anglo saxon word that means to step in front of.   Years ago he was struck by how popular the notion of leaderless groups, which seemed odd.  Because there was lots of leadership in these groups.  So he became interested in the notion of leaderful groups. What he notes is an interesting shift from conventional to leaderful leadership.  A shift...
  7. Marga Biller

    May 2014 Chair Call: Conversation Research and Potential Themes

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    This chair call focused on reviewing the two potential themes for 2014-2015 as well as an overview of the collegial learning research that LILA has been conducting. The two proposed themes were: Flexpertise: Developing Adaptive Practices in Organizations Juice: The Emotional Life of Engagement and Burnout at Work To listen to the audio click the link: https://www.learninginnovationslab.org/?p=2230  
  8. Marga Biller

    April 2014: Changing Systems Animation

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    This year at LILA, we explore the theme of unlearning, this time, adopting a systems perspective. Unlearning is what we face when we are trying to learn something new, but prior learning gets in the way. LILA’s own David Perkins notes that even though we can’t really UNlearn, it is helpful to have a name for this type of learning as it presents unique challenges. While trying harder often succeeds in moving outdated skills to the fringes of our repertoire, some things resist even our most earnest attempts at sidelining. In these stuck cases, Dave suggests that, instead of trying harder, we change the game. Before imagining how we might design game-changers for our organizations, we look at several tools, models, and theories to test if and how they might help us understand the nature of system stuckness.
  9. Marga Biller

    Unlearning to Learn: A 10,000 Foot View

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    Unlearning to Learn:  A 10,000 Foot View David Perkins offered his third installment of a “10,000 ft.” view synthesizing where we are in our story about Unlearning for the year. He began by reminding us that our three “quests” have been to define, understand and foster Unlearning, and that today’s synthesis would focus on our progress in these quests through the systems lens. Defining Unlearning Perkins situated his synthesis by noting that from the start of the year we’ve held a big idea: unlearning is necessary when we face interference from prior learning. We’ve come to see, he says, that...
  10. Marga Biller

    April 2014 Member Feedback

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    Laurent Bernard:   thought the experiment was a good one.  As you observed , the main question that the team has in minds is : how do I apply and can transfer insights in a practical way.  In my group ; we could have been a bit more disciplined in the exercise which would have enabled better outcomes – we spent some time to select which case is the best.  May be one idea is to create an Alpha company that would serve for the business case ? not too many data but each group working on the same Alpha this...

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