Power up Your Mind

Citation

Mattacks, K. (2002), "Power up Your Mind", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 23 No. 4, pp. 232-234. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2002.23.4.232.3

When a book promises on the cover, as this one does, that the author’s suggestions will “transform your life” and that I should “read it and leap”, I fear an evangelical approach, a series of homilies and ill‐researched ideas and am on my guard.

Bill Lucas is CEO of the Campaign for Learning, a national charity working to promote learning as essential throughout our lives. In Power up Your Mind, he contends that today’s businesses and organisations need to adapt and change quickly and effectively. This puts a premium on learning and the assumption is that, for learning to be effective, an understanding of how the brain works is essential. The author draws on research from science and psychology in aiming to connect this understanding with the reality of the workplace and translates what we know about the brain into useful insights for work so that we can “learn faster, work smarter”.

At the heart of Power up Your Mind is a model of how to learn – ready, go, steady. These three stages need to be taken together to help us use our minds more effectively. The book is structured using this model and is divided into three main parts looking at what happens before and after you learn:

1. 1

   Get ready to learn. Getting the emotions and environment right and “switching on” your mind.

2. 2

   Go for it. Becoming a competent learner.

3. 3

   Steady as you go. Putting learning into practice.

The final part has an A‐Z of brain‐based approaches to work and life and a creative (and more useful) troubleshooting guide offering solutions to common problems we may encounter while using our mind. This follows the “unpacking” and “switching on” theme of the first section. Power up Your Mind concludes with a useful resources section that will enable readers to follow up some of the references throughout the book.

There are some good, practical ideas in this book – so good that I can almost forgive Bill Lucas for scattering the word “learnacy” throughout the book. This is the learning equivalent of being numerate or literate. To be fair, it is not his phrase but Guy Claxton’s (author of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind) and is about how we might use our mind to perform more effectively. More compelling for me was the quote from John Holt the educationalist writing in the 1960s:

Since we cannot know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try and teach it in advance. Instead we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

The model is useful and Lucas builds on it by introducing the 5Rs (as distinct from the 3Rs) – resourcefulness, remembering, resilience, reflectiveness and responsiveness. Each merits a separate chapter that, like others in the book, is scattered with personal observations from business leaders, activities, questions and tips. Every chapter concludes with an “at a glance” summary of what you have learned, key ideas and key techniques and approaches.

I particularly liked the chapters on resilience and reflectiveness. There are practical tips to help resilience; on what to do when learning gets difficult and when you get confused – what we do when continuity runs out on us! I would have liked more on building reflection into different processes at work. In today’s pressurised business environment the emphasis is more akin to “Fire, aim, ready”. People may fear admitting to mistakes and get discouraged from the active reflection so key to effective performance.

There are minor irritations including a mixture of US and British spellings. At least one quote is duplicated and the Web site for the book was still “coming soon” two months after the publication date.

The author summarises Power up Your Mind as a user’s guide for busy business people to the way their mind works. I believe it succeeds in its aim to apply practical knowledge of how the brain works to learning to learn more effectively. It is unlikely to transform my life but I did enjoy it. I will use many of the ideas myself, in my job and in my part‐time teaching. That is a better test for me than whether I leapt out of my seat!