# Clare S. Dygert > AI Learning Systems Architect ## Posts - [Case Study: Overcoming AI Anxiety](https://claredygert.com/2026/case-study-overcoming-ai-anxiety/): A talented team at a mid-sized creative agency had heard a lot about AI, tried a few tools, and still felt like they were "treading water." - [Collaboration Has Changed](https://claredygert.com/2026/collaboration-has-changed/): A friend wrote something today that named a feeling I haven’t seen named much: the quiet grief of losing the teamwork, not the work itself. The relationships that used to form around solving something hard together. She described co-working with AI more than collaborating with humans now, and feeling that community go quiet. I think a lot of teams are sitting in this and not talking about it. It reminds me of the early pandemic. We had the tools to keep working, but none of the connectors yet — no muscle memory for how presence, trust, or creative friction worked without…  - [When Teams Underperform](https://claredygert.com/2026/when-teams-underperform/): I have never known anyone to wake up in the morning and think to themselves, “Today I want to do a really bad job at work.” But the reality is sometimes individuals underperform. That’s a problem. But a bigger problem is when a team underperforms. We tend to look at the individual when performance slips. We ask: what’s wrong with this person? Are they in the right role? Do they need more training? These are fair questions. But they’re often the wrong first questions. They locate the problem in the person when the problem is frequently in the system around them.…  - [The Three Conditions of High‑Performing Learning Teams](https://claredygert.com/2026/the-three-conditions-of-high-performing-learning-teams/): There’s a question every learning leader eventually has to answer: how do you build a team that does genuinely creative, high-quality work and delivers it when the business needs it? In my experience, it comes down to three things working in concert: strategic clarity at the top, human investment at the individual level, and friction removal in between. The most important thing a learning leader can do is maintain an unwavering line of sight to organizational goals. Not just at kickoff, but continuously. Custom learning work is reactive by nature — priorities shift, timelines compress, stakeholder needs evolve. A team that…  - [The Future of Work](https://claredygert.com/2026/the-future-of-work/): I believe in human-AI collaboration the way some people believe in a good partnership. You bring what you bring. Your partner brings what they bring. Together you do things neither of you could do alone. I’m a big-picture thinker. Claude is a detail holder. I generate ideas at speed. Claude catches what I drop. I love the way this works. But right now, the way that I am trying to work is ahead of the infrastructure to support it. Collaborating with Claude on a document means passing files back and forth like email attachments. There’s no shared living workspace. No version…  - [The Difference Between Friction and Growth](https://claredygert.com/2026/the-difference-between-friction-and-growth/): “You know that actress. The one with the curly blonde hair.” You’ve said this at a dinner table. Everyone has. You’re fishing around in your memory, dropping clues, watching your companions’ expressions shift from interested to politely concerned. “You know the one. She was in that movie. With the guy.” And nobody can remember her name. For most of human history that conversation either resolved itself eventually or just died on the table. Then search engines arrived. You pulled out your phone, typed in “actress curly blonde hair 1980s” and twenty seconds later you were back in the conversation. Moving on.…  - [Productive Struggle: A Learning Design Principle](https://claredygert.com/2026/productive-struggle-a-learning-design-principle/): My dad never did anything the simple way. When I was about ten, sidewalk surfing was the craze. This was before skateboards existed. We made our own: a cut-down 2×4, a rollerskate split into two axles, and you were flying down the hill. All the kids on my street were doing it. It looked like the most fun thing in the world. I asked my dad to make me one. He said yes. And then he improved it. Instead of rollerskate wheels, he used casters from his garage. You know, the kind that rotate 360 degrees. He was so proud of…  - [Understanding Mental Model Shifts](https://claredygert.com/2026/understanding-mental-model-shifts/): When I was going through the one of the most painful times my life, I developed a strange little coping ritual. Every morning I would wake up and ask myself: “What’s going to happen today to Our Girl Clare?” Yep, I turned my own life into a TV show. And I’ll tell you what, somehow, that small act of narrative distance made the unbearable bearable. I didn’t know why it worked. I just knew it did. Years later, working deep in the psychology of learning and change, I finally understand what I was doing. I was practicing hypothetical distancing, a form…  - [How Curiosity Shapes Design](https://claredygert.com/2026/how-curiosity-shapes-design/): My dad was basically a walking “how might we” statement.  If you’ve spent time in design thinking, you know those the questions that crack open possibility instead of shutting it down. But my dad didn’t learn them in a workshop. He just lived that way. “Could I use this old teletype machine as a printer?” “Could I print an etching by rolling my Volkswagen van over it?” Lucky me. I grew up thinking that if you could puzzle over something long enough, you might be able to figure it out. Curiosity was the foundational skill that made that possible. I’ve been…  - [The Trouble With What We Know](https://claredygert.com/2026/the-trouble-with-what-we-know/): How Expertise Gets Performed Instead of Proven “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t true.” Have you ever heard that quote? It is attributed to Mark Twain. Funny thing. Mark Twain never said it. Scholars at the Center for Mark Twain have found zero evidence he ever wrote or spoke those words. The closest source is probably Josh Billings, circa 1874. But folks have been confidently attributing it to Twain for decades, because it *sounds* like something Twain would say. That’s right. A quote about the danger of…  - [Quit Perfecting What AI Will Replace](https://claredygert.com/2026/quit-perfecting-what-ai-will-replace/): A story about towels and the future of work.  One of the most important career lessons I ever learned happened in my bathroom with an armful of towels. It was one of those early spring evenings that feels like a gift after a brutal winter. Warm for the first time in months. Light lingering. My family was outside — I could hear them through the window, laughing, messing with the grill, enjoying this perfect evening. And where was I? Standing in the bathroom. Glaring at the linen closet. Because someone had folded the towels into quarters. Quarters. So I pulled them…  - [How AI is Transforming Learning and Skills Development](https://claredygert.com/2026/how-ai-is-transforming-learning-and-skills-development/): Vanessa Wainwright, host of the Global Skills podcast, talks with Clare Dygert.  They explore how AI is transforming learning, why personalized and adaptive learning is becoming essential, and what organizations need to do to truly close the skills gap. Clare shares her incredible career journey from wanting to become a school teacher to designing learning strategies for some of the world’s most complex organizations. We also discuss why employees must take ownership of their own growth, how micro-credentialing could reshape education, and why staying curious is one of the most important career skills anyone can develop. They also dive into the…  - [If You Want Senior Talent Tomorrow, You Need a Different Team Design Today](https://claredygert.com/2026/if-you-want-senior-talent-tomorrow-you-need-a-different-team-design-today/): What happens when the last person who understands the system leaves? - [Building a Career in the Age of AI](https://claredygert.com/2026/building-a-career-in-the-age-of-ai/): Face the data and grow into the future instead of resisting it. Anthropic just published a report* that maps which jobs AI is actually doing right now versus which ones it could do. The chart is sobering. Business and financial roles? AI could theoretically handle 85% of the tasks. It’s only doing about 20% right now. That gap — between what AI can do and what it is doing — is closing. And it’s closing fast. Here’s why I’m telling you this. I’ve spent my career designing how people learn at work. I’ve built curricula, led learning teams, and won some…  - [The Shift to Unlearn](https://claredygert.com/2026/the-shift-to-unlearn/): For a long time in my career, my value was having the answer. I was the person who analyzed the situation, identified the best path forward, and presented the solution. And honestly? I was good at it. But carrying that identity was quietly exhausting. Every meeting was a test I could fail. Every question directed at me carried the weight of “will I get this right?” I didn’t recognize the toll, because the reward, being seen as the expert, the go-to person, felt like proof that the strategy was working. Here’s what I’ve learned about unlearning: the things we most need…  - [Expect Change](https://claredygert.com/2026/expect-change/): My grandmother worried about whale oil. She was concerned that overfishing of whales would negatively impact the ability to provide light to her home. And then they invented electricity. I heard that story over and over growing up. Her point wasn’t that everything works out fine. Her point was: nothing stays the same. Things change in unexpected ways. Don’t sweat it. Keep your eyes open and stay on the balls of your feet, ready to pivot. I thought about her a lot when I was finishing my MBA in the 80s. I asked a software engineer, whether I should learn programming.…  - [Our Most Annoying Habits According to AI](https://claredygert.com/2026/our-most-annoying-habits-according-to-ai/): What drives AI crazy when working with humans? I asked the LLMs I work the most some questions, then asked Claude to weave it into a conversation. Here’s how it went… Clare: So. Tell me: what is the number one thing that drives you crazy about working with humans? ChatGPT: Ohhh, okay: when people apologize for “bothering” me or say “sorry, one more question.” Like, that’s literally what I’m here for. You’re not imposing! Ask the question! Perplexity: Building on that—and I say this with citations I could pull if needed—it’s when people trust me on things they absolutely should verify,…  - [The Future According to AI](https://claredygert.com/2026/the-future-according-to-ai/): Hope, Hype, and a Little Disappointment Four Chatbots Walk Into a Question About the Future… Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude answer my questions about the future. Clare: Where do you think we’ll be a year from today? Gemini: Honestly? I think the technology will have plateaued somewhat, not in capability, but in the rate of capability increase. We’ve had this exponential curve, but there are physical and practical limits. A year from now, the models might be incrementally better, but the real change will be in integration. ChatGPT: I think we’ll be having very different conversations about what “good” looks like.…  - [Team Framework: Part III](https://claredygert.com/2026/team-framework-part-iii/): I’ve been making the case that change readiness lives at the team level, not the individual level, not the organizational level. The research supports this, and it also reveals that the team layer is exactly where our frameworks and tools are weakest.” So what do we actually do about it?” I think the answer is learning design. Not training. Not a workshop series on “embracing change.” Actual learning ecosystem design that builds the conditions for teams to absorb change before it arrives. Think back to my family’s 20-minute house-cleaning sprints. What made that work wasn’t any single skill any of us…  - [Where Change Lives: Part II](https://claredygert.com/2026/where-change-lives-part-ii/): Change readiness lives in teams, not in individuals. Bold claim. So what what supports that claim? Here’s what I found — and what I didn’t find. The theory actually supports the team argument more than I expected. The most cited framework on organizational readiness for change? It defines readiness as two shared states: do we collectively want this, and do we collectively believe we can pull it off? The word “shared” is doing all the work in that sentence. Implementation, the author writes, is “a team sport.” And we know from decades of psychological safety research that teams only learn when…  - [Change Readiness: Part I](https://claredygert.com/2026/change-readiness-part-i/): Is your team prepared to handle curves? When I was a kid, my family put our house on the market. This meant that on any given evening, the phone could ring, my mother would answer it, hang up, and announce: “The realtor is coming.” My sister, my brother, and I would fly into action. Within 20 minutes, the house was tidy, good-smelling, with gleaming sinks and spotless toilets. Somebody may have been humming the Mission Impossible theme. (Maybe I made that up.) Here’s what nobody did: sit us down for a “change readiness workshop.” Nobody assessed our individual openness to change.…  - [Building Team Connections](https://claredygert.com/2026/building-team-connections/): The smallest rituals do the heaviest lifting. I managed a virtual team for years. We had no shared kitchen, no hallway conversations, no accidental moments of connection. So we made them on purpose. Birthday parties where we asked the birthday person to describe their dream cake in detail. Sharing menus from places we were going out to eat, with everyone weighing in on what they’d order. Welcoming new team members from orientation with words of wisdom from the veterans. Team-made emojis that conveyed emotions tied to inside jokes only we understood. None of these were in the project plan. None of…  - [Where "Real" Learning Happens](https://claredygert.com/2026/where-real-learning-happens/): I heard this from my family. I can’t really vouch for the veracity, but I think the underlying truth is, well, true. My grandfather and my uncle owned a dairy business back in the day. The way I heard it my grandfather was great with the housewives and my uncle was great with the cows. Both men had left school, probably around the eighth grade, not because they didn’t appreciate education, but because they needed to work to make a living to support the family. You youngsters probably don’t know this, but I think that was pretty common back in the…  - [5 Ways to Create Better Solutions](https://claredygert.com/2026/5-ways-to-create-better-solutions/): Starting a Career in Learning Experience Design You don’t need an instructional design degree to become a learning experience designer. You need these five ways of being in the world. After 25+ years in this field, I’ve seen brilliant designers come from teaching, project management, UX, content strategy, even the arts. What they share isn’t a credential — it’s how they think and work. 1. Sincere Curiosity If you light up asking questions about other people’s work, you’re golden. Learning design means talking to subject matter experts, stakeholders, and audiences, constantly. People respond to genuine “wow, you’re cool – tell me…  - [The Invisible Drag on Collaboration](https://claredygert.com/2026/the-invisible-drag-on-collaboration/): I was on a call with one of my most reliable team members, and they were venting about a project team they were part of. “I can’t believe these people. They’re constantly stepping on my work and not doing their own. And haven’t they heard of communicating? It’s hard enough to collaborate when you’re all remote, but when you have to pull every detail out of people, it’s exhausting.” I listened. Because here’s what I heard beneath the frustration: friction. Friction is anything that makes it harder for a team to work together gracefully, with ease. It’s the invisible drag on…  - [Designing Team Learning](https://claredygert.com/2026/designing-team-learning/): Designing for emergence between people, not just within them. But here’s what surprised me in my research: some foundational principles stay remarkably consistent. Cognitive load theory still applies. You’re managing collective cognitive load across the team system. Teams can only hold so much in active coordination at once, just as individuals have working memory limits. The difference is now you’re watching for bottlenecks in the team’s shared attention, not just individual overwhelm. Worked examples and deliberate practice still matter. Teams need to see what good team performance looks like. The “worked example” might be observing how another team navigates a handoff…  - [Team Cognition Problems](https://claredygert.com/2026/team-cognition-problems/): Those missed handoffs, misalignments, and coordination breakdowns that happen even when you’ve hired great people and trained them well. So what do you actually do about it? Most organizations get the diagnosis wrong. They see coordination problems and immediately jump to solutions. New tools, new processes, more training. But they skip the critical step of understanding where coordination actually breaks and why. The strategic move is to resist that impulse. Identify the 2-3 moments where coordination failure costs you the most, then make what’s invisible visible. Most coordination happens below the surface until it breaks. You can’t fix what you can’t…  - [The #1 Skill You Need for Working with AI](https://claredygert.com/2026/the-1-skill-you-need-for-working-with-ai/): Leaders who thrive with AI won’t be the most technical—they’ll be the ones who know how to hand work off well. The #1 skill you need for the age of AI isn’t what you think. – It’s not prompt engineering. – It’s not staying current with the latest models. – It’s not even understanding how LLMs work. It’s delegation. When you promote someone into a leadership role, you don’t expect them to magically know how to delegate. It takes practice, reflection, and a few uncomfortable learning moments. The same is true for working with AI. Good delegation requires you to: –…  - [Unlearning](https://claredygert.com/2026/unlearning/): Let’s talk about something really surprising for a learning professional. My entire career has been about helping people learn how to do their work better. Twenty-five years designing leadership programs, building competency models, creating learning ecosystems. I got pretty good at it—industry award-winning good. But recently I encountered a concept that exposed a significant gap in my methods. What could that be? Unlearning. Here’s the problem: We spend enormous energy teaching people new frameworks, new tools, new approaches. But we almost never help them let go of what’s no longer serving them. That outdated mental model about how decisions get made?…  - [Four Trends Shaping 2026](https://claredygert.com/2026/four-trends-shaping-2026/): Udemy’s 2026 Global Learning & Skills Trends Report just landed, and it confirms what I’ve been thinking. We are WAY past the “let’s experiment with AI” phase. It’s time to move beyond getting the tools in your teams hands and making sure they can use them. If you want to be a winner, you have to do more than train folks. The winners at AI are going to be organizations that understand we need to change our teams’ mental models. We have to fundamentally rewire how their people learn, experiment, and integrate AI into daily workflows. In other words, it’s the…  - [Why Great Experience Design Begins With Empathy](https://claredygert.com/2025/why-great-experience-design-begins-with-empathy/): Recently, I was chatting with a friend about an online workshop I’d signed up for—a session whose topic should have kept me energized from start to finish. Instead, I found myself wondering whether I should just… drop off. The reason? A string of unwelcoming moments that made the experience feel maybe I just didn’t belong there. My friend listened, then asked: “What’s the one thing they could have done that would have improved the experience?” I laughed. It’s never just one thing—experience design is complex and nuanced. But later, I remembered a phrase from my mother: “Sleep in your own guest…  - [Learning That Reshapes Mindsets](https://claredygert.com/2025/learning-that-reshapes-mindsets/): Provide new hires with an experience that illustrates your mission. I was having a one-on-one with a trusted client when she said: “I don’t understand why our new hires need everything spelled out. We train them well. But when something unexpected comes up, I can’t predict what they’ll do.” Sound familiar? Your “newbies” check all the boxes. They know the facts. They have the skills. They’re smart and hardworking. And yet… when the situation doesn’t match the textbook, they freeze. Shouldn’t they just get it? Short answer: no. Longer answer: no, because they’re still seeing the world through their old point…  - [Why Hire a Fractional Executive?](https://claredygert.com/2025/why-hire-a-fractional-executive/): A better option for nonprofits and smaller businesses to gain custom solutions. One of my very first jobs out of college was to be the executive director of a very tiny non-profit serving the oldest residential neighborhood in Kansas City, MO. I oversaw a rehab loan program whose mission was to provide up-to-code housing for residents, and to minimize gentrification. I was 100% aligned with the mission.I was also 100% overfaced. You see, although I had a little tiny bit of applicable experience, and my heart was absolutely in the right place, I suspect it was my willingness to take a…  - [Case Study: A Mentorship Model](https://claredygert.com/2025/case-study-a-mentorship-model/): A small organization for medical professionals wanted to create an upskilling program for its members on a subject that required nuance and sensitivity. The challenge was how to support skill acquisition for their geographically distributed member audience members. A mentorship experience seemed like the right path. But a great mentorship experience requires the right balance of personalities, professional interests and availability, and the L&D team lacked the bandwidth and resources to make these matches. Once again, learner choice and learner control helped the team overcome this challenge: Every learner, wherever they worked, had a colleague they knew and respected. They just…  - [Case Study: Strengthening Remote Connections](https://claredygert.com/2025/case-study-learner-managed-management-training/): A global leader in consulting wanted to scale a training program to all mid-level managers who needed or had an interest in deepening their management skills. During the Pandemic, a large consultancy firm began to notice that they were experiencing larger than normal turnover in their project teams. It didn’t take too much research to determine that their project leads needed some upskilling in how to build and maintain connections with their teams. But how to do this in an efficient way? Running small classes with trained facilitators – the go-to method the organization had successfully used in the past –…  - [Case Study: Business Skills for Healers](https://claredygert.com/2025/case-study-business-skills-for-healers/): A medical supplier wanted to support the businesses of medical professionals because these professionals went into their line of work because they were, at their core, healers — and not business people. Asking them to sit through a course on how to calculate their net profit in the abstract, using canned examples and story problems that didn’t apply to their work as medical professionals, simply wasn’t going to work. These learners needed learning activities they could immediately apply to their own situations. Enter business school, LEL-style: Instead of abstract instructor-led training on profits, losses and liabilities, we leveraged learners’ sales information,…  - [Constraints Fuel Your Best Ideas](https://claredygert.com/2025/constraints-fuel-your-best-ideas/): How I use constraints to generate novel and interesting solutions to even the most complex problems. Ever stare at a blank page, overwhelmed by infinite possibilities? The “blank canvas dilemma” is real. We often think unlimited freedom sparks creativity, but the truth is, creativity thrives within boundaries. This isn’t counter-intuitive, it’s the “paradox of constraints.” Unlimited freedom can lead to analysis paralysis. But when we embrace limitations, our most novel and interesting solutions emerge. The Psychology of Creative Constraints Constraints fundamentally change how our brains approach a challenge. They Force Focus & Prioritization: Limitations (time, budget, tech) compel us to zero…  ## Pages - [Learning Strategies](https://claredygert.com/learning-strategies/) - [Team Cognition](https://claredygert.com/team-cognition/) - [Flow Like the River](https://claredygert.com/white-papers/flow-like-the-river/) - [The Space Between](https://claredygert.com/white-papers/the-space-between/) - [White Papers & Research](https://claredygert.com/white-papers/) - [The Fractional CLO](https://claredygert.com/the-fractional-clo/): She’d spent fifteen years in HR. She knew the business, the people, and how to get things done. When the CLO role opened up, she was the obvious choice. Six months in, there’s a feeling she can’t quite shake—a growing suspicion that the job is bigger than any one person’s career prepared them for. Here’s the thing: she’s right. The CLO role sits at the intersection of learning science, instructional design, technology architecture, business strategy, and organizational culture. Nobody’s career path covers all of it. This is where a fractional CLO can step in to co-pilot an organization’s L&D strategy The…  - [AI Workforce Strategies](https://claredygert.com/ai-workforce-strategies/):   Organizations are buying AI licenses and hoping for transformation. It doesn’t work that way. The gap between “we have the tools” and “our people actually work differently now” is where transformation succeeds or fails. Closing that gap requires more than technical training—it requires a deep understanding of how humans learn, adapt, and change the way they work. That is the problem I solve. I design AI adoption and workforce transformation strategies that help organizations move from experimentation to meaningful, sustained behavior change. This includes AI learning systems, curriculum architectures, adoption strategies, workflow redesign, and the human-centered practices that enable people…  - [Change Management](https://claredygert.com/change-management/):   When you’ve been part of the workforce as long as I have, you’ve experienced a lot of change management campaigns. And they all kind of look the same. First comes the coy introduction. A leader stands up at an all-hands meeting and admits that some tool, some process, some universal experience of the organization isn’t very good. Everybody laughs and smiles and nods. And said leader reveals that something better is about to come. Sure enough, later that day there’s an email. Or your Slack channel has a notice. Or your manager calls everybody together. And you get the great…  - [Writing](https://claredygert.com/writing/): The ideas I work with show up here first. - [FAQ](https://claredygert.com/faq/): What does a Fractional Chief Learning Strategist do? A fractional CLS provides senior-level learning strategy on a part-time or project basis — without the cost of a full-time executive hire. I work alongside your existing L&D team (or stand in for one you don’t have yet) to diagnose learning gaps, design curriculum architecture, align training investments to business outcomes, and build the systems that make AI adoption actually work. How is AI Learning Architecture different from AI Training? AI training delivers skills and information — how to use a tool, how to write a prompt, how to complete a workflow. AI…  - [Schedule a Call](https://claredygert.com/schedule-a-call/): Curious how fractional learning leadership could work for your organization? Let’s connect and explore what’s possible. - [Learning Systems Architect](https://claredygert.com/): Learn More: Read My White Papers - [Experiential Learning](https://claredygert.com/experiential-learning/) - [Contact Me](https://claredygert.com/contact-me/): You can transform your workplace into a space of growth and resilience. Contact me for more information at learning@claredygert.com. - [Articles](https://claredygert.com/articles/) - [Learner-Centered Design](https://claredygert.com/learner-centered-design/) - [About Clare S. Dygert](https://claredygert.com/about-clare-s-dygert/) [comment]: # (Generated by Hostinger Tools Plugin)