𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐂𝐚𝐧’𝐭 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭

I’ve written a lot over the past few weeks about ways AI can support Networks, CoPs, and Showing Your Work/Working Out Loud. It can do a lot of things to amplify our efforts, corral our messy work habits, and generate rivers of content.

But AI can’t:

♦create trust
♦generate reciprocity
♦produce psychological safety
♦substitute for shared experience

𝘊𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 is where those things happen, in organizations where people are allowed to talk with each other, given opportunities to get together, enabled to voice concerns and objections, and can admit problems or mistakes without fear of the sky falling. That's a culture that fosters trust, reciprocity, inclusion, and psychological safety, values shared experience, and provides “collision spaces” like break rooms and water-cooler corners, both literal and virtual. Culture is about transparency. Culture permits the existence and effective use of the things I’ve been talking about for the past 20 years: strong networks, communities, CoPs, and showing your work/working out loud.

One—ok, two-- of my lasting concerns with conversations regarding “culture” is that the word itself is devilishly hard to define, and often it feels like the onus for creating an effective/productive/supportive culture is on management alone. Workers may not create enterprise-wide culture, but we absolutely help shape local culture. I mean, every team and community and department has its own culture, right? Its own norms and ways of working? (They’re called micro-cultures, btw.)

What culture(s) are you a part of? What can you, as an individual, do to help shape it? As an L&D practitioner, what influence might you have over it?

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 Assessing the Value of Online Interactions

Note: This originally appeared as a "Nuts and Bolts" column in Learning Solutions Magazine, October 2012. 

A good deal of my time is spent providing workshops and conference presentations on social learning and the use of social media to support and extend social learning in the workplace. In every session, it seems, someone comes just to challenge me to “prove” that all this isn’t a waste of time, that there is performance-enhancing value in social connections and interactions, particularly of the online variety.

They usually want some magic metric, some formula like, “two hours on LinkedIn + four comments in groups = tangible outcomes for the organization.” It doesn’t work that way. A great deal depends on how the worker chooses to spend that time in social channels, how well he filters and curates information, how she chooses the people with whom she’s interacting. The quality of those interactions depends in turn on many other issues, including trust, a willingness to ask for and offer help, and time invested in developing ties deeper than those purely at the surface. Likewise, a worker expected to improve performance and support organizational goals must know what the expectations are around that.

Value creation

Etienne Wenger (of CultivatingCommunities of Practice fame), Beverly Traynor, and Maarten De Laat have recently published a new conceptual framework for understanding and assessing value in such interactions. It includes a nice overview chart (figure 1) that I’ve found helpful in addressing concerns of my audience members.

Figure 1: Wenger, E., B. Traynor, and M. De Laat. Chart from Assessing Value Creation for Communities of Practice and Networks: A Conceptual Framework. Used with permission.

Immediate value

I’ll use myself as an example of how the chart helps shine light on real activity and outcomes. I spend a lot of time on Twitter because there are so very many smart people there, who at any hour of the day or night are talking about something I often didn’t even know I wanted to talk about.

I mostly follow learning, training, and eLearning people, but I also like some fiction authors and a few experts in other fields. Those people who only talk about what their cats had for breakfast? I don’t follow them. But it’s important to note: I am very active on Twitter. I engage, and talk, and interact with people. I drop in on several live Twitter chats a month. I try to contribute as much as I take. I like to think I help. So in looking at Wenger et al’s first column: I feel I get immediate value from the quality of interaction and reciprocity, I am given food for thought that I do reflect on, and I make it no secret that I am having fun.

Potential value

Moving across the chart to the second column: From my participation, what is the potential value? I’ve certainly developed a lot of connections, many in other parts of the world who offer very diverse viewpoints. I find I’m often inspired to read up on a new area or check out a new app or other tool.My views on learning have shifted considerably over the past five years as I’ve recognized firsthand the power and potential of increased support for social learning in the workplace.

Applied value

Now, moving to the third column, we look to see whether dots are connecting. I spend a lot of time on Twitter, I make a lot of connections,I read about things that interest me. But am I getting applied value? Do I leverage those connections? Have I engaged enough with my personal learning network so that, if I ask for help, some people might respond?

Let’s revisit an example I used in a previous column, one spurred by a phone call from one of our agencies.

I tweeted this (Figure 2):

Figure 2: Leveraging connections on Twitter: original tweet asking for help

In two minutes’ time I had several responses, including this one (Figure 3):

Figure 3: One of the many immediate responses

I found the document, scanned it to see if it seemed okay, and sent it on to the agency. They said it was just what they needed. This amounted to a four-minute interruption in my day.

So you tell me: Is there applied value? Am I using my connections and implementing advice?

Realized value

Moving to the next column on the chart from Wenger et al, “Realized value.” I gave the customer a good response in four minutes. Is that a reflection on my personal performance? How about my organization’s reputation? Let me ask it another way: when’s the last time you called a government agency and got a good answer in four minutes?

Reframing value

In terms of the last column of Figure 1, “Reframing value”: I don’t know that I’ve changed my institution (yet), but I’ve influenced ideas around new ways of working. And while I’m not asked for evidence that I am effective, whenever I get a solution or innovative idea via one of my social channels, I take a screenshot or write a quick note and send it on to management anyway.

So, in looking for value in online interactions, try to get past the idea of a magic metric. I can’t tell you that my spending x hours on LinkedIn and tweeting y times per day will get you the result I got in the example above. I can tell you that my choice of when, with whom, and how to engage is what helped drive that result.

What can we do?

So what can we do? Help workers begin to articulate the ways in which interactions have solved a problem, reflected on their personal performance, or reflected on the organization’s reputation or performance. Start asking, “What did you learn today/this week? How has that affected your performance? How does it help the organization?” Help connect dots between social interaction and access to expertise, and between those connections and new tools and reframing ways of working. And please do review the full text of the piece by Wenger, Traynor, and De Laat, available at https://www.betterevaluation.org/sites/default/files/Wenger_Trayner_DeLaat_Value_creation.pdf .

 "𝐖𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧."

Years ago I was a facilitator for a highly structured commercial management training program, essentially a discussion planning system. The first "Key Principle" was "listen and respond with empathy." Participants scripted and rehearsed and delivered on the principle, usually pretty convincingly, before moving on to telling the practice employee they were in trouble, or being laid off, or would have to start working Saturdays...

I remember back then a certain L&D author writing, "We are very good at teaching people to pretend to listen," and thought at the time, "We are good at teaching people to pretend to be empathetic."

Can empathy be taught? To AI? There are lots of research reports looking at what aspects of human behavior/communication AI can successfully be trained on. Here are 2, one from Ziao et al. and the other from Kumar et al., that crossed my path this week. Ziao et al. explicitly discuss using LLMs to teach "empathy"; Xiao et al., which I see as related, focus on whether AI can move beyond tasks to deeper aspects of teamwork like collaboration and "fragile communication".

My interest is in how empathy is defined. Xiao et al.’s study participants view empathy as an inner social state that is difficult for machines to replicate. Kumar et al. define empathy for their study as a set of linguistic strategies (prescriptive behaviors like validating emotions).

What do you think?

Kumar, A., Poungpeth, N., Yang, D., Lambert, B., & Groh, M. (2026). Practicing with Language Models Cultivates Human Empathic Communication. arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.15245

Xiao, Q., Hu, X. E., Whiting, M. E., Karunakaran, A., Shen, H., & Cao, H. (2025). AI Hasn't Fixed Teamwork, But It Shifted Collaborative Culture: A Longitudinal Study in a Project-Based Software Development Organization (2023-2025). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10956

 𝐔𝐬𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤: 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐎𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞

Lots of ideas in my 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬 focused heavily on making thinking visible in simple, no-friction ways; these translate really well to using AI as a lightweight documentation and communication layer.

For instance:

1. 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥, 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭
Share small pieces of progress. Don’t wait until something is polished.
Showing your work might include:
quick reflections
partial solutions
emerging questions
early drafts

𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘈𝘐 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘏𝘦𝘭𝘱:
AI can help you turn rough input into something shareable quickly.
Examples:
From messy notes, ask AI to draft a short team update.
Record a voice memo. Have AI convert it into a brief “what I’m working on” post.
Drop in a rough outline. Ask AI to organize it into a readable summary.
This reduces the barrier that perfectionism can create.

𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐎𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬
Learning often happens when people can see how decisions were made, not just what the final result was. An important part of successfully executing your role is understanding that 𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘱𝘶𝘵.

That includes:
tradeoffs considered
assumptions
uncertainty
what changed along the way
articulating decisions

𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘈𝘐 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘏𝘦𝘭𝘱
AI can help structure narratives about decisions.
Examples:
“Turn this into a short reflection: situation, options, decision, lesson.”
“Summarize the reasoning behind this plan in plain language.”
AI becomes a thinking partner that can externalize judgment, helping you make your expertise more visible.

𝐋𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞
As I mentioned in an earlier post, a significant reason people don’t show their work is that documentation feels like extra work layered onto “real” work. (I remember one senior manager requiring so many “activity reports” that writing the reports themselves became a significant activity.) Look at ways of making sharing lightweight and habitual.

𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘈𝘐 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘏𝘦𝘭𝘱
AI reduces the cognitive and time cost of sharing.
Examples:
Convert meeting transcripts into key takeaways.
Draft a quick lessons-learned post from bullet points.
Generate a short explanation of a process change.
Instead of writing from scratch, let AI help you refine. This supports the idea that showing your work should feel like a natural extension of doing the work, not a separate task.

See also Bozarth, J. 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘢𝘺𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘏𝘰𝘸-𝘛𝘰𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘖𝘶𝘵 𝘓𝘰𝘶𝘥. Wiley/ATD.