About the Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA)
Founded in 2000 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, "Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA)" is a consortium of researchers and practitioners who are leaders in the field of organizational effectiveness, learning, innovation and change. They collaborate by sharing experimental work and emerging thinking in order to generate effective future practices. With the input of academic experts from a variety of disciplines, these leaders collectively become a ‘learning lab’ in which they learn with and from one another about the contemporary challenges of human learning & innovation in organizations. LILA is an invitation only learning community that actively explores how current research can inform the decisions they take on key challenges and initiatives in their organizations.
LILA has three main goals:
Create social connections.
Generate high-trust relationships among top global Chief Learning/Innovation Officers across industries and with top academic thinkers and researchers in the fields of organizational learning and innovation.
Craft intellectual insights.
Develop powerful conceptual frameworks that synthesize the latest research and illuminate the challenges facing leaders and organizations.
Have practical impact.
Members support one another in making real advances on the organizational challenges they face through soliciting critical feedback on organizational initiatives, exploring questions in small and large group formats, and reporting in on their progress throughout the year.
From September to June, the LILA community explores a theme that connects to current member challenges. It convenes three 2-day gatherings at Harvard University, each of which focuses on a topic within that theme. At each gathering, members are provided research briefings and book summaries that synthesize the latest research and thinking on the topic from a variety of disciplines. Members may present “learning rounds” in which they have the opportunity to invite feedback from others on particular initiatives or challenges. After the gathering, members receive comprehensive documentation of key ideas and discussions, and articles that recap central insights.
Between the gatherings, Chair members engage in monthly conference calls on contemporary issues of practice, which are largely defined by members themselves. Members also keep in touch via our website through ongoing blogs and discussion hosted by other members, LILA researchers, and thought leaders from a variety of academic institutions. The online website contains the briefing documents for all of the events that LILA has hosted since its inception in 2000.
The exploration concludes with a 2-day Summit that recaps and synthesizes insights and progress made during the year. Member organizations can send several additional representatives to this gathering that will also include LILA alumni Chairs, Associates, and faculty guests.
To date LILA has hosted over 76 gatherings and produced over 90 research briefings and insight articles on themes around knowledge, organizational effectiveness, learning, collaboration and leadership in organizations. Recent areas of focus have included Millennial Matters: Understanding the Impact of the Next Generation on Organizational Performance (2005), Developing Leadership in an Uncertain World (2006), New Models of Decision Making (2007), The Future of Learning (2008), Leading Insight and Impact (2009), The Effective Collective (2010), Developing Wisdom in Organizations (2011) Learning from Work (2012) and Unlearning to Learn (2013) and Flexpertise: Developing Adaptive Practices in Organization (2014), Managing Complexity(2015), Adaptive Cultures (2016) and Emergence in Organizations (2017). In 2018, we are exploring the theme of Collective Mindfulness.
Membership in LILA
LILA's practitioners are Chief Learning, Talent Transformation and Innovation Officers as well as senior level Organizational Effectiveness professionals from non-competing industries who have established themselves as leaders in their field. At LILA they collaborate to share challenges, ideas, and innovative practices, and to explore current issues in the field through in-depth conversations with academic experts from a variety of disciplines. By limiting the size of the group to twenty-five member organizations and by encouraging continuity of membership, LILA members engage in a deep level of confidential, collaborative inquiry and problem solving.
The membership options provides for maximum engagement with the LILA Community.
Chair + Associate Membership: This creates two physical, non-competing seats at each of the gatherings for a Global Sector Chair and a colleague of their choice. The Chair also participates in the monthly conference calls and provides online access to research assets developed by the community over the past decade. The Chair may invite up to two additional colleagues to the annual LILA Summit. The annual fees are $30,000.
Chair Only Membership: This creates one physical, non-competing Global Sector Chair seat at each of the gatherings and monthly conference calls as well as online access to research assets developed by the community over the past decade. Chairs may invite one additional colleague to the annual LILA Summit. The annual fees are $18,000.
LILA Theme 2018-2019
Collective Mindfulness: Shaping the Human Systems in Organizations
In dynamic environments, how might we create the conditions that improve the quality of interactions in order to nurture collective sensemaking and collective action? What are the states of dynamic organizations as they evolve and change? Exploring collective mindfulness—defined “as the collective capability to discern discriminatory detail about emerging issues and to act swiftly in response to these details (Weick, Vogus & Sutcliffe) might provide some answers. This year, LILA turns its attention to understanding how to nourish the organization and the systems whose future we hope to shape. Systems which are first and foremost human ones. With this perspective, we take into account that a key to organizational change involves not only rethinking the shape of the organizational chart, or reimaging the spaces where we work, but also in tending to what makes us human: the personal, the aesthetic, the narrative, the emotional, and most crucially, the relational.
Conceptualizing organizations as social systems invites us to envision the human networks that exist within that system. When the interactions within the social systems are working well, the organization moves as a collective. However, when they are out of sync - blocked from interacting with each other, it can seem as though a dynamic organism has come to a dead halt.
Drawing on the fields of cognitive psychology, neurocognitive science, collective mind theory and organizational science we will explore questions such as what are the mechanisms that support collective mindfulness? How might we shape the social systems to create thriving ecologies? How might the macro and micro narratives come into conversation to further strategic paths? How can collective mindful organizing amplify the desired states? We will engage the theme through these three topics.
The Relational: Understanding Collective Mindfulness
October 2018
We interact with the world every day on multiple levels. So why is it that some of the interactions are more fruitful than others? How is it that we come together with a common understanding and move together collectively? The answer may partially lie in the concept of collective mindfulness. Organizations that practice collective mindfulness constantly scan their environment (both internally and externally) and intentionally surface assumptions, while at the same time develop the capacity for action. It is through the relational interconnectedness at multiple levels that collective mindfulness emerges. Research has shown that mindfulness at the individual level has a positive impact on wellbeing both psychologically and physically. At the organizational level, collective mindfulness leads to increased engagement, productivity and innovation in “human systems. Interestingly these effects were found not only in stable environments but also in complex and dynamic environments. So how might we nourish this collective mindfulness? This session will look at questions such as what are the characteristics of collective mindfulness, how does collective mindfulness emerge, can one measure collective mindfulness, how does collective mindfulness shape the social practices, what type of collective mindfulness leads to collective action and what are the dangers of collective mindfulness?
The Personal: Understanding Identity and Micro-Narratives
February 2019
If we are to engage with collective mindfulness, an important area of inquiry might be to get a better understanding of how individual identity plays into both driving collective mindfulness and is influenced by the context in which the individuals find themselves. Individuals and groups engage in sensemaking and sensegiving activities as a way of reinforcing, reinventing or renegotiating identities. Narratives are a mechanism through which this identity shaping process is revealed and hold clues about what is going on within the organization as individuals construct, interpret, and act within their own narratives. They also reveal what is happening outside of the organization – in the marketplace that might impact the life of the organization. While stories have a beginning, middle and end, narratives are unfolding and implicate an evolving identity both at the individual and organizational level.
In this session, we will investigate the interplay between identity and narratives as a way to better understand how to engage in adaptive sensemaking that leads to collective mindfulness. We will look at questions such as how narratives are constructed? How do they influence the system and are influenced by the system? What are the identity related tensions that surface in narratives and how can one shape them? How might we foster collective curiosity that engages individuals to question assumptions, learn and act mindfully?
The Emotional: Understanding the sources of organizational vitality
April 2019
Our exploration of organizations as human systems would not be complete if we didn’t consider the emotional life of organizations. We wonder, what are the leverage points that contribute to a state of organizational vitality? Vitality might be loosely defined as an environment where creativity and innovation thrive (Stacey,1996). Conditions that affect vitality include such elements as how information flows and who has access to it, the quality of the relationships that exist in the organization, how much diversity exists and is encouraged and how ready the organization is to challenge the status quo. These elements contribute to organizational performance by influencing the emotional life and avoiding the typical fragmentation that can happen when there is a lack of collective mindfulness. An organizations vitality can signal its ability to respond to necessary changes so that it thrives rather than stagnates.
In this session we will explore such questions as how do you identify these leverage points which can move an organization into a virtuous cycle of vitality? What are the leadership behaviors and organizational practices that lead to organizational vitality? How does the emotional life of an organization contribute to collective mindfulness? What does a mindful learning organization look like?
13th Annual LILA Summit: Collective Mindfulness: Shaping the human systems in organizations
June 2019
As we bring our exploration of the theme to a close, we will revisit some of the framing questions that we outlined at the start of the year and pause to reflect on what we have learned so far. We will invite past and present LILA members and faculty to round out the conversation. There are a limited number of spots reserved for potential members. If you are interested in attending, please provide your information below.