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

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  1. Marga Biller

    Improvisation Capability and the Flexible Firm by Dr. Dusya Vera

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    February 19, 2015
    In the LILA October 2014 meeting, we argued that flexible experts have certain skills and abilities, dispositions, traits, metacognitive and self-regulatory skills, and experiences. Dr. Vera suggested that improvisation is one of those competencies that people develop at an individual, a team, or an organization level. She began the lecture by proposing the following questions: Is it enough to have a few people improvising? Or do you need an entire organization to improvise?
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  2. Marga Biller

    How to run a company with almost no rules – Ted Talk by Ricardo Semler

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    February 19, 2015
    What if your job didn’t control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don’t have to). It’s a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what work, and life, is really all about. Bonus question: What if schools were like this too?
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  4. Katie Heikkinen

    Building Dynamic Capabilities by Maurizio Zollo

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    February 17, 2015
    In this first talk, I’ll go into what dynamic capabilities are and why they are important… and then how. How do you know you have a dynamic capability and how can they be developed? I’ll also juxtapose different directions for strategy. As learning academics and practitioners, we need to make distinctions between the various strategic directions. You can apply dynamic capabilities toward multiple strategic directions and goals; how do you determine which to pursue? Finally, I’ll bring in sustainability. That is the ultimate challenge. It doesn’t get more complex than that.
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  5. Katie Heikkinen

    Flexpertise: A 10,000 Foot View as of February 12, 2015

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    February 17, 2015
    This is a talk shared by David Perkins at the February 2015 LILA gathering. The idea is to provide a wrapper for some of the things that were shared at the October and February LILA gatherings. As David described, the talk has 4 themes: defining flexpertise, understanding it (why would we want it), valuing it (what is it worth), and fostering it (what do we do to get more flexpertise, when we want more of it).
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  6. Marga Biller

    Superflexibility with Homa Bahrami: Audio Recording

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    February 12, 2015
    Homa Bahrami is an international educator, advisor, and author, specializing in organizational flexibility & team effectiveness in dynamic, knowledge-based industries. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, where she has been on the faculty since 1986. She is the co-author of a major textbook (with Harold Leavitt) "Managerial Psychology: Managing Behavior in Organizations", published by the University of Chicago Press, and translated into many languages. Her latest book "Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises", published by Springer (second edition, 2009) focuses on practical approaches for organizing and leading knowledge workers in dynamic settings. Homa serves on several boards in Silicon Valley and Europe and is active in executive education and executive development in the US, Europe, and Asia. Click more to access the recording of the call.
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  8. Marga Biller

    January Member Call: Paradoxical Thinking with Wendy K. Smith

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    December 15, 2014
    Wendy Smith from the University of Delaware joined us on a conference call as we continue the exploration of the theme of Flexpertise   Wendy’s research focuses on strategic paradoxes – how leaders and senior teams effectively respond to contradictory agendas.  She has studied how organizations and their leaders simultaneously explore new possibilities while exploiting existing competencies, and how social enterprises simultaneously attend to social missions and financial goals. To listen to the call click on the following link: https://lila.webex.com/lila/ldr.php?RCID=6bf4ed0e4291666b22c8d0efd789247a    
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  9. Marga Biller

    Know What You Don’t Know : How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen

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    Comment November 19, 2014
    Michael Roberto shared his finding that leaders at all levels must hone their skills as problem-finders to identify and correct problems and prevent catastrophe. Roberto identifies seven skills and capabilities necessary to become an effective problem-finder. To research this point, extensive interviews were conducted with roughly 150 managers of enterprises from private and public sector, often across different levels within the same company. Individuals were asked to describe how they tried to prevent failures from taking place. Roberto identifies seven skills and capabilities necessary to become an effective problem-finder. This reminded me of the work that Markus Baer presented describing the issues that experts face in problem formulation. He mentioned that expertise can make it difficult to make sense of things collectively and that expertise impacts collective sense-making. Therefore, he proposed that problem solving may be better thought of as problem formulation. Moving straight to problem solving can create problems; it often works better to focus more energy on formulating the problem. To read the summary of Michael Roberto book titled: Know What You Don’t Know : How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen click the more button.
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