Marga Biller

April 2014: Team Debrief and Feedback

by Marga Biller
April 23, 2014

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...
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The Emotional Decision Maker

by Marga Biller
April 15, 2014

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.
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Can Everyone Reflect?

by Marga Biller
April 7, 2014

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. ...
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The Future Learner At Work – Video Summary

by Marga Biller
March 28, 2014

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

by Marga Biller
March 16, 2014

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 ?
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8th Annual LILA Summit

by Marga Biller
February 26, 2014

This year's LILA Summit will be the culmination of the exploration of the theme of Unlearning to Learn. The LILA Community has spent the year thinking about how mindsets, habits and systems affect our ability to unlearn. For this last formal gathering on the theme, we will be joined by Dr. Bill Starbuck and Dr. Tim Wilson who will provoke our thinking by sharing their research on how individual and organizations can unlearn. The Summit is open to all past members and faculty of LILA and by special invitation. To register, please contact amanda_nourse@harvard.edu.
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February 2014 Member Feedback

by Marga Biller
February 26, 2014

Josh Alwitt The session was enjoyable and I had some good takeaways from the discussion that I think could help me in my work here. The LILA format continues to have tremendous potential for sparking breakthrough thinking in the adult learning field. It’s clear how much effort the LILA team puts into these sessions and the vetting of speakers and participants must be difficult work. It was my 14th gathering and I would say it ranked towards the lower end when I look back. The energy seemed a little flat and here are some thoughts on why that might be:...
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February 2014 Team Feedback

by Marga Biller
February 26, 2014

Feedback Day 1 What went well Good attendance Topic is engaging Translation from graphic workshop to doing it here was good Things kept moving well, no lags Content from speakers is really interesting and good juxtaposition Things aren’t buttoned up right now which is good People were talking about it and trying to make sense of the concepts Members were making insightful, thoughtful comments Food was great Used video from past session in the opening section – got good feedback from members Things to consider for tomorrow and next time If the person who nominates the topic doesn’t go to...
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Last Year’s Focus

by Marga Biller
February 24, 2014

The starting point for our exploration of flexpertise was recognition of the incredible power of expertise. Our world runs on expertise – technical, political, economic, management, etc. Any one of us can live a good life knowing only a little about microcircuits or international finance or water shortages because other people know a lot, and we benefit from their knowledge. Departments in organizations can get away with knowing only a bit about X or Y because some other department or an outsourcer does it expertly. It’s a wonderful and amazing system. However, as individuals and organizations, we often don’t make...
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March Chair Call – Unlearning at the Systems Level: What We can Learn From the Shared Spaces Concept

by Marga Biller
February 16, 2014

“Imagine a city with no sidewalks. Not because the cars have disappeared, or because the pedestrians have been banished to bridges and tunnels, but because all kinds of traffic are sharing the public spaces. The conventional division of the space of our streets no longer valid. – We understand human behavior much better now than we used to, says Ben Hamilton-Baillie. He is an architect at a a small company providing specialist knowledge and experience of innovative solutions for reconciling traffic movement with quality public spaces in cities, towns and villages.” (From an interview with Ben Hamilton-Bailiie by Ola Bettum and...
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