Gold and blue logo with image of interlocking arcs and all-caps text: BridgeLabs.

I’m currently delivering courses through the BridgeLabs partnership with my longtime associate, Lauren Moloney-Egnatios.

Since we started working together in 2016, Lauren and I have been driven by one thing: our shared passion for equipping leaders and students with skills for forging common ground.

With our decades of living, learning, and working abroad, along with our leadership experience in the workplace and classroom, we’ve delivered dozens of skills-focused workshops and courses for hundreds of professionals and students from six continents.

Visit the BridgeLabs website to learn more.

Our approach? It’s all in the name.

Bridge

Every human is unique. The way I like doing things may not work for you. Good things happen when we adapt — when we choose to do something in a way that fits someone else’s preferences. In our field, this is known as “bridging.”

We often feel threatened when someone else’s work style is different from our own. Normally, we see this as a function of a “character flaw”: something you do bugs me, so obviously there’s something wrong with you.

Sound familiar?

Bridging changes all that. When we begin to see our work styles as a function of culture and our individual quirks, we can free ourselves from the judging machinery of our brains. We can see our own behaviors and others’ behaviors from a distance. We might even chuckle at the folly of humanity.

We also need to look honestly at the power dynamics in our lives and workplaces. Where do we sit? Have we got more or less organizational authority? More or less privilege? Where and how can we use the power and privilege we have to do more of the bridging — so that our colleagues feel like they belong?

Labs

We humans are creatures of habit. We think we know what works, and we tend to stick with it.

That’s not a recipe for learning or growth. We have to keep trying new things, seeing how they work, and try again. In the field of human-centered design, which infuses every aspect of our work, this is known as “prototype and iterate.”

There is no such thing as perfect knowledge. There is only learning and growth. Life is one big lab.

Meet the Team

Lauren Moloney-Egnatios
Co-Founder

  • Lauren is an Organizational Development Strategist, Consultant, and Global DEI/intercultural communications facilitator. She works with organizations across the U.S. and abroad to promote better understanding, collaboration, and leadership across differences so that more people experience belonging and success in the workplace and beyond.

    Lauren brings 15 years of experience in the fields of Organizational Development and Intercultural Communications as an adult-learning designer and facilitator, organizational development consultant, learning and development manager, and intercultural leadership educator. Prior to starting her business, she served as the Director of the Center for Global Competence Education with AFS International, and as Assistant Director of the Robertson Center for Intercultural Leadership at U.C. Berkeley’s International House, where her leadership in partnership with Jason’s helped grow the social enterprise into a premier intercultural and global DEI training and consulting organization, designing and facilitating custom intercultural leadership programs across industries and sectors for U.S. and global customers.

    She has lived, worked, and led teams across the U.S. and abroad: primarily in Spain where she lived for four years, and gained fluency in the Spanish language; and also in Lebanon (one of her heritage countries) where she gained conversational Arabic skills, Morocco, Costa Rica, and the Netherlands.

  • Lauren was awarded her M.A. in International Communications from the School of International Service at American University in Washington D.C., and a B.A. in Organizational Development and Spanish from the University of Michigan.

Jason Patent
Co-Founder

  • Jason is an organizational leader, consultant, author, thought leader, instructor, and workshop facilitator in the fields of global leadership and global diversity, equity, and inclusion. He loves partnering with organizations of all kinds to create thriving workplaces and classrooms where people feel they truly belong, and where they can devote their full talents.

    In his seven years as Director of the Robertson Center for Intercultural Leadership (CIL) at U.C. Berkeley’s International House, Jason, in partnership with Lauren and the CIL team, built out a suite of impactful workshops and courses for students from all six continents, and for organizations from local nonprofits and governments, to top universities, to Fortune 100 companies.

    Jason has served as American Co-Director of the Hopkins–Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China; Inaugural Director of the Stanford Program in Beijing; Consultant at Gap International; and Vice President, Communications & Marketing at Orchestrall, Inc.

  • Fluent in Mandarin, Jason has a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, an M.A. in the same field from Stanford University, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from U.C. Berkeley.