Donald MacLean (University of Glasgow) and Benyamin Lichtenstein will be the two Guest Faculty members at the October 2017 LILA gathering focused on Unlearning for Emergence in Organizations. During this gathering we will explore questions such as: We will address such questions as: 1. What is emergence and how does it differ from other forms of change? 2. What shifts in knowledge and mindset are needed to understand emergence as a viable and valuable part of the organizational change process? 3. What are the practices and protocols that enable the organization and its members to sense, learn, and recombine to adapt to signals surfacing in the extended ecosystem, the organization, and its surroundings? 4. What types of leadership and organizational practices are necessary for engaging with emergence in ways that harness the adaptive potential at the core of this dynamic while honoring deeper shared purposes and intentions at the core of organizational missions? 5. What challenges do leaders and others face as they engage emergence with the intent of shaping a more adaptive future?

Dr. Alex “Sandy” Pentland directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program and co-leads the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives. Pentland’s research focuses on social physics, big data and privacy. His research helps people better understand the “physics” of their social environment, and helps individuals, companies and communities to reinvent themselves to be safer, more productive, and more creative. Pentland shows that, in fact, humans respond much more powerfully to social incentives that involve rewarding others and strengthening the ties that bind than incentives that involve only their own economic self-interest. Sandy has...

  Dr. Gert Jan Hofstede is a Dutch population biologist and social scientist in information management and social simulation. Currently a professor at Wageningen University, Dr. Hofstede explores the interplay of the contrasting forces of culturalevolution, societal change and cultural stability. In exploring the generic dynamics of human social behavior, Dr. Hofstede contends that people are not unpredictable, but ill-understood. He uses simulation gaming and social simulation as methods that integrate knowledge from many fields to generate information that can be applied in all kinds of practical contexts. Much of his current work focuses on computational modelling of the social side of complex adaptive systems. This work links to a pioneering study of...