Author: Pat McLagan

ARTICLES to stimulate fresh thinking and practical action for personal and business change

 Blog Image

Upgrade Yourself As a Learner: Reason #4 (of 5) Help Others Learn

One of the defining features of our species is our ability to codify and pass information on to the next generations. We are all teachers as well as learners.  The social aspect of learning is part of our genetic makeup. Researchers recently noticed that a two week old baby recognizes body language indicating that an […]
Blog Image

Upgrade Yourself As a Learner: Reason #3 (of 5) Co-Evolve With Technology

Beware. Under your radar, technology is changing work and life much faster than you think. Machines and software are becoming exponentially more intelligent and influential (even manipulative).  As they get smarter, they do more than make information more accessible, or manufacture tangible things, or do what used to be manual, dangerous, or analytical tasks faster […]
Blog Image

Out of Disruption, Personal Transformation 5 Steps for Breaking Through

2020’s health and leadership crises are accelerating the inevitable. Whatever your job is today, it will change. It may even go away. You can count on your work, career, and life taking  different shapes than you’ve planned..  As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776 during another time of crisis, “These are the times that try men’s […]
Blog Image

Upgrade Yourself As a Learner: Reason #1 (of 5) Ongoing Work and Career Success

It’s clear by now that the skills and knowledge you bring to work today will be insufficient or even obsolete tomorrow.  This is true for professional and specialist skills as well as manual or service skills, which need continual upgrading and adaptation. It is also true for broader capabilities – like decision-making, communicating, thinking creatively […]
Blog Image

5 Big Reasons for Upgrading HOW You Learn

There is a learning crisis both at work and in the world. It affects our ability to thrive in fast-changing times – at work, in careers, at home — lifelong.  It’s a crisis because our ability to continually evolve is essential for quality decisions and creating the future of society, organizations, and our and our […]
Blog Image

SMART Learning 4.0 — a Learning Upgrade for Our Times

Our brains need a learning upgrade today.  It’s an upgrade that must draw on practical, advanced, and science-based approaches we can use when we are learning alone, learning with others, and when we support others’ learning. It also has to be powerful enough for drawing lessons from past experience, learning in the present moment, and […]
Blog Image

It’s Time to Upgrade Your Brain’s Learning Software

Everything is changing around us. It was challenging enough to deal with the “then normal” pace of change before COVID19. But it’s clear, even bigger changes in work and relationships are on the horizon.  This creates a massive learning challenge (opportunity!). We all need upgraded and new skills and attitudes about work, family, careers, social […]
Blog Image

Just say “NO!”

NUGGET: Say “NO” to changes that will not add value We often hear a scary statistic about change:  40, 50, 60, 70% of all changes in organizations are viewed as failures.  They don’t achieve desired goals, they fall apart or are abandoned before they are complete, they overrun costs by orders of magnitude, etc.  These […]