During the June 2015 LILA Summit, Deborah Ancona focused her presentation on distributed leadership. Deborah and her team have researched a lot of really cool organizations, but the question is: how do we create an organizational structure that supports innovative teams? What is it that enables these kinds of teams and distributed leadership to function? We live in an uncertain world. Innovation, agility, and speed matter a lot. We are moving into the “knowledge era,” characterized by flat, loose structures and decentralized leadership. Those organizations that have started out flat and loose also need to grow, and it’s a tough balance between too much and too little structure.

Genlser is a is an American design and architecture firm headquartered in San Francisco that has a large number of practice areas they work in and so need to monitor progress in many fields from hospitality to health care. They took on the question what does it mean to be a success at Gensler? They have come up with a developmental model for talent development that spans the early stages of career when people are more generalists (skills exploring), all the way through to expert (skills sharing) at the emeritis stage of career. Between career beginning and ending are stages of refining, narrowing, leading, and defining skills. They have worked to come up with a four part definition of success that holds for all stages of career development: Connect, Learn, Lead & Deliver.

Kathleen enthralled our LILA community with compelling arguments on coping with complexity with simple rules. This brief captures the features of simple rules, why they work, and how to create (and update) them. Each major point is illuminated with examples (indented) of simple rules effective for the respective organizations or further explanation. Simple rules may be different even in similar situations if the people are different. Indiegogo and Kickstarter are both crowdfunding websites but they have different values which are reflective of the founders’ values. Indiegogo, founded by Berkley graduates, has a rule to fund anything as long as it is legal. It’s liberal, egalitarian, and for everyone. Kickstarter, who’s founders have a background in art curation, fund only if it fits one of their thirteen categories. They follow the model of curation—some criteria must be met.

Like more and more people, I have a Fitbit — a little device that captures a lot of information about me: how much I walk or exercise, how well I sleep and even what I eat. After months of ubernardsing it, I wanted to share some of my findings and ask whether we can learn something from the Fitbit experience that we can replicate in the work environment. My goal is not to talk about wellness best practices, but to provide some thinking about how we can better manage change. I’m thinking about transformational learning, which uses new skills to gain a new perspective and new behaviors.