“The store of wisdom does not consist of hard coins which keep their shape as they pass from hand to hand; it consists of ideas and doctrines whose meanings change with the minds that entertain them”
At The Intersection of Theory and Practice
For each session of the cycle, our team creates a research briefing for the participants in advance of their arrival onsite. These documents highlight research from the guest faculty as well as others who have influence on the topic. Members can feel confident when they make strategic decisions that these are informed by what research says works. These briefing documents help us to create a shared understanding in advance so we can make the best use of our time together. These briefings can be shared by members with their teams to amplify the learning throughout their own organizations.
Session Animations
These animations are created after each one of the LILA session and represent a distillation of how the community came to understand the ideas that were presented and discussed. Members have used these to prompt conversations and action in support of strategic initiatives in their organizations.
Recent Publications from Guest Faculty
Guest faculty often share their pre-publication insights with the LILA community as a way to gather feedback about their work. This provides LILA members with a glimpse into innovative ways of thinking about the challenges they face in their organizations.
Michele Gelfand
Scribner, 2018
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers; How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World
In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers celebrated cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand takes us on an epic journey through human cultures, offering a startling new view of the world and ourselves. With a mix of brilliantly conceived studies and surprising on-the-ground discoveries, she shows that much of the diversity in the way we think and act derives from a key difference—how tightly or loosely we adhere to social norms.
Why are clocks in Germany so accurate while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why do New Zealand’s women have the highest number of sexual partners? Why are “Red” and “Blue” States really so divided? Why was the Daimler-Chrysler merger ill-fated from the start? Why is the driver of a Jaguar more likely to run a red light than the driver of a plumber’s van? Why does one spouse prize running a “tight ship” while the other refuses to “sweat the small stuff?”
In search of a common answer, Gelfand has spent two decades conducting research in more than fifty countries. Across all age groups, family variations, social classes, businesses, states and nationalities, she’s identified a primal pattern that can trigger cooperation or conflict. Her fascinating conclusion: behavior is highly influenced by the perception of threat.
With an approach that is consistently riveting, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers thrusts many of the puzzling attitudes and actions we observe into sudden and surprising clarity.
Learn more about Michele’s new book here.
Read popular press articles by Michele here.
Damon Centola
Princeton university press, 2018
How Behavior Spreads; The Science of Complex Contagions
New social movements, technologies, and public-health initiatives often struggle to take off, yet many diseases disperse rapidly without issue. Can the lessons learned from the viral diffusion of diseases be used to improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? In How Behavior Spreads, Damon Centola presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior--in voting, health, technology, and finance—occur and the ways social networks can be used to influence how they propagate. Centola's startling findings show that the same conditions accelerating the viral expansion of an epidemic unexpectedly inhibit the spread of behaviors.
While it is commonly believed that "weak ties"—long-distance connections linking acquaintances—lead to the quicker spread of behaviors, in fact the exact opposite holds true. Centola demonstrates how the most well-known, intuitive ideas about social networks have caused past diffusion efforts to fail, and how such efforts might succeed in the future. Pioneering the use of Web-based methods to understand how changes in people's social networks alter their behaviors, Centola illustrates the ways in which these insights can be applied to solve countless problems of organizational change, cultural evolution, and social innovation. His findings offer important lessons for public health workers, entrepreneurs, and activists looking to harness networks for social change.
Practical and informative, How Behavior Spreads is a must-read for anyone interested in how the theory of social networks can transform our world.
Learn more about the book and download a free chapter here.