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

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  1. Why tightness is terrible and terrific

    by
    February 8, 2017
    Michele Gelfand’s work in social psychology explores how micro changes in behaviors connect to larger shifts in values in cultures.  Her work has looked the effect of social norms across cultures. Her concept is that there are qualitative differences in tight groups (with strong norms, litter tolerance for deviance, more orderly) vs. loose groups (weak norms, high tolerance for deviance, less orderly). Her research showed that tight groups coordinate well amidst threats of survival, both human made (e.g. tribal conflicts) and natural (e.g. natural disasters).  Tightness can be activated, too, by real of natural threats. And the situations, such as libraries...
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  2. Marga Biller

    How To Kill Your Culture with Mary Jo Hatch

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    January 4, 2017
    Mary Joe Hatch will share the research she conducted about "the top and middle managers’ experiences and understandings of how organizational identity and culture were entangled with transformational change as it unfolded over a 5-year period in Carlsberg Group. Combining ethnography and grounded theory methods with engaged scholarship, our work sits between research and practice, speaking directly to the experience of managers at the same time that it researches both the content and processes of organizational identity and culture. The study shows that engaging in processes of reflecting, questioning, and debating about their organization’s identity led middle managers and employees both to support and resist new organizational identity claims made by top management. Within these identity activation processes we found frequent references relating new identity claims to organizational culture.
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  3. Marga Biller

    December 8 Member Call featuring Monica Worline

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    November 30, 2016
    Monica’s scholarship is animated by one of the classic puzzles of organizing: as humans, we hold tremendous potential for capable action, but we are easily swayed into inaction by hierarchy, social norms, conformity, and other regularities of group life. Monica uses her writing, research, and teaching to ask how organizations can enliven the people who work in them, especially in the face of adversity. Monica will share her thinking about creating positive organizational cultures specifically through four frames roles, network ties, routines and values.
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  4. Marga Biller

    Changing Organizational Culture is Hard! by Mats Alvesson

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    November 21, 2016
    Based around a case-study, Mats shared the findings regarding the reality of organizational change. From planning and inception to project management and engagement, the explored the views and reactions of various stakeholders undergoing real life change processes. Drawing on theories of organizational culture, Mats helped us to understand how organizations can promote change without alienating the people needed to implement it.
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  5. Marga Biller

    Understanding Culture by David Perkins

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    November 3, 2016
    As Dave Perkins shared prior to his synthesis, this is not an attempt to summarize everything that the LILA community explored during the October 2016 gathering, rather it is a way a 64,000 view that might help advance our thinking on the topic.   Defining Adaptive Cultures Individual cultural knowledge is largely tacit – we don’t know what we know (we just behave) Iceberg: like the being roughly 90% under water, not knowing like this is not just limited to culture, but to all fluent knowledge (example of grammar, used implicitly) The 10% of explicit knowledge is very important to...
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  6. Marga Biller

    Beaver – a Boston area school and LILA member embraces ‘unlearning’ strategies for students, teachers

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    October 17, 2016
    The Research and Design Center at Beaver Country Day School, just outside of Boston, is being framed as a Library 2.0. As construction workers focused on the physical space outside, a group of teacher leaders grappled indoors with the concept of unlearning. The school is embarking on a one-year quest to rethink teaching and learning strategies in advance of the opening of the “RaD.”
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  7. Marga Biller

    The Science of Evolution: What Makes Humans So Different

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    September 19, 2016
    LILA October guest Michael Muthukrishna has written about how culture has evolved in the human species, and this perspective can help us begin our exploration of adaptive cultures in organizations. Muthukrishna and co-authors argue that humans are “an ‘evolved cultural species,’” which “has evolved to socially transmit complex behavior-shaping information between generations” (Chudek, Muthukrishna, & Henrich, 2015, p. 2). Our species has attained “cumulative cultural evolution,” which is where our culturally transmitted behaviors “are more complex, sophisticated and well-adapted than anything a single asocial or non-cultural individual could devise alone in their lifetime” (p. 2). No single person could ever re-create the world we live in.
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  9. Marga Biller

    Unlearning to Learn – LILA Summit Animation

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    June 13, 2016
    One of the ways in which LILA supports the learning of its members is to create an animated short presenting key ideas from the year long exploration.  The theme during the 2013-2014 season was Unlearning to Learn.  Below is the transcript from the animation in case you would like to read more about what is presented in the animation. Unlearning to Learn This year at LILA, we take a whirlwind tour of unlearning, approaching it from three angles: mindsets, habits, and systems. Here, we take stock of our two main quests around unlearning: understanding it and fostering it. Unlearning...
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  10. Sue Borchardt

    October 2016 Animation: Understanding Culture in Organizations

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    June 7, 2016
    The sheer scope of Culture’s sweep makes a pithy definition difficult, a challenge further amplified by the dynamic, overlapping, and nested cultural contexts we strive to make sense of. Culture is often named as contributing to the success or failure of organizational efforts such as globalization, mergers & acquisitions, and cultivating diversity. One place to start when exploring whether and how cultural forces might be leveraged to help organizations adapt to internal and external change, is by asking: how do cultures work? and how do they adapt?
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Harvard Graduate School of Education