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

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  1. 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...
  2. 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  
  3. 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 While trying harder often succeeds in moving outdated skills to the fringes of our repertoire, some things resist even our most earnest attempts at sidelining.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.
  4. 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...
  5. 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...
  6. Marga Biller

    April 2014: Team Debrief and Feedback

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    Day 1 What went well Morning session experiment Conversation was generative Going around the room revealed common misunderstandings about the model Energizing, depend understanding People liked the 4Q’s, hadn’t understood them before, could bring back to CEO Flipping learning round and cafe’s worked well Katie’s framing was very helpful and integration of content pieces Lisa did a good job of relating her topics to unlearning Good momentum between ITC today and DDO coming tomorrow Opportunity for Tamara to observe Food was great What to do differently How to move the conversation to an organizational systems level Would be good for...
  7. Marga Biller

    The Emotional Decision Maker

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    A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in the last few decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in thinking about decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute powerful, pervasive, and predictable drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices. The present paper organizes and analyzes what has been learned from the past 35 years of work on emotion and decision making. It also proposes an integrated model of decision making that accounts for both traditional (rational-choice theory) inputs and emotional inputs, synthesizing scientific findings to date.
  8. Marga Biller

    Can Everyone Reflect?

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    The November 2012 Chair Call featured Dr. Lisa Lahey, co-founder of Minds at Work, Instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-author of Immunities to Change (with Dr. Robert Kegan).  Dr. Lahey walks us through key concepts in adult developmental psychology which suggest that certain stages of adult development pose particular challenges when confronted with reflective opportunities. She will provoke us to consider differences in “socialized” vs “self-authoring” ways of making meaning and what can be done to create the conditions for adults to develop more complex capacities for reflection in the workplace.          ...
  9. Marga Biller

    The Future Learner At Work – Video Summary

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    Stanford's Byron Reeves shared his thinking and research on "total engagement" and the role that games do and could play to foster engagement in the workplace. He's been interested in what can we steal about what we know about how the brain activates engagement and motivation and drop them into workplace context to improve engagement.
  10. Marga Biller

    Unlearning Urban Traffic Engineering and Street Design with Ben Hamilton-Baillie

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    In our own organizations, we often try to improve performance by clearly defining work processes and procedures expecting that these will produce the expected outcomes. Yet in many cases they don’t. By exploring the Shared Space approach, we hope to gain some insights into such questions as: How might we identify what needs to be unlearned before trying a systemic change? What systemic mindsets and habits have to be unlearned before change can be initiated? Does unlearning have to occur simultaneously throughout the whole system or can it be a gradual and in pockets? How do you design systemic cues into the environment in order to prompt different actions and sustain the new behaviors ?

Harvard Graduate School of Education