April 2016 Featured Speakers
Learn more about the April 2016 Featured Speakers at the LILA gathering focused on exploring the topic of Paradoxes of Learning and Performing.
Looking for content and documents from our Gatherings? Login
-
-
Lessons for Volkswagen on organizational resilience by Christopher Kayes
D. Christopher Kayes guest faculty at LILA in April 2016 and Professor and Chair of the Department of Management at the George Washington University School of Business has written a blog post for Oxford online regarding organizational resilience. -
Usable Knowledge: The 3 Stances towards Learning at Work
Most of the skills we need to do our jobs — the ability to complete tasks, collaborate with colleagues, circumvent obstacles, and plan for future assignments — are skills we learn at work, not before. But when employees learn by doing, they don’t always recognize when and how the learning is happening — and likewise do not consider the best ways to optimize their learning as they carry out tasks. -
Journal of Workplace Learning Publishes LILA Research on Informal Learning Conversations
Informal learning conversations with colleagues is a powerful yet understudied source of self-directed, professional development. This study investigated the types of learning 79 leaders from 22 organizations reported they learned from 44 peer-led conversations over a two-year period. Survey data suggests empirical evidence of five learning outcomes – informational, conceptual, operational, reflective, and social learning. The study describes these categories, the overall distribution of these types of learning in the community, and how most conversations were “rich” in a particular outcome. It concludes with possible explanations for these patterns as well as potential lines for future research. -
Paradoxical Leadership Introduction by Dr. Wendy Smith
Dr. Smith, who had spoken to LILA last year in a member call, framed her keynote presentation today around the question of “What is the nature of paradoxes?” She expressed that her goal for this talk was to provide us with level-setting language to inspire reflections, push-back, and questions over the course of this conference and beyond. Her follow-up talk tomorrow will focus on potential approaches we can apply to manage and leverage the paradoxes we face in our organizations and daily lives. She suggested that, over the next year, one possible measure of success we may want to use is to see if we can shift viewing our challenges from “problematic” to a “source of possibility.” -
Flexpertise and Productive Disruptions by Michelle Barton
Michelle began her talk by suggesting that in complex, dynamic and unpredictable situations, flexpertise resides in a process of collective knowing and not as a store of aggregated individual knowledge. Drawing from studies of wildland firefighters among others, we discuss how flexpertise can be created through operational processes designed to simultaneously engage different parts of the system to discern, interpret, and respond to dynamic conditions. We argue that organizational systems have patterned ways of behaving and relating and these patterns can be counterproductive in times of dynamic uncertainty. One aspect of flexpertise is the ability to halt dysfunctional momentum by deliberately introducing creative, productive disruptions—short sense-making breaks that interrupt a group’s habitual response patterns. When groups pause and reflect on their own patterns, they are better able to identify and apply relevant expertise when and where it is needed and to create new, adaptive solutions. Because flexpertise (in this case) is collective, cooperative, and fluid, there are also critical implications for managing the relational systems underlying operational processes and for leaders who want to build ‘flexpert’ systems. -
Flexpertise: Developing Adaptive Practices in Organizations Video
in 2014 the LILA Community explored the theme of Flexpertise: Developing Adaptive Practices in Organizations. The brief animation highlights some of the key ideas and questions that the LILA members investigated and applied to real organizational challenges. Click the image to view the animation. -
How to Break the Expert’s Curse by Ting Zhang
We have the pervasive problem of the expert-novice gap. Consider an illustrative example from an interview with a medical student. During her first weeks, she admits that she did not know something basic when she walked into the operation room: “where do I stand.” Her attention would be better directed on the substantive procedures in the OR. Experts find it difficult to relate to novices, though they themselves were once novices. This is because one, they have imperfect memory which leads them to mistakenly think that they have always known what they know now. Two, experts are victims of the curse of knowledge, so they assume the uninformed parties are knowledgeable. Three, difficult processes have become automatic for experts, and experts underestimate the amount of time it takes novices to learn. -
What Is LILA Video
Interested in getting a sense for the LILA Community? Click this post to watch the animation. If you are interested in learning more about becoming a member, please use the contact link on the website. -
How to run a company with almost no rules – Ted Talk by Ricardo Semler
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?
