I can create a beautiful change or transformation plan and it doesn't guaråantee that something will be accomplished.   

I can also spend 30 minutes with a leader, ask three questions that reframe how they're thinking about a problem and save three months of unnecessary work. 

Guess which one of those is easier to put into an annual review? 

For years, for roles like change management, project management, HR, communications and strategy, a lot of the work was made visible by what was produced. Things like the stakeholder map, the impact assessment, the communications plan, the slide deck on the strategy with over fifty slides that somehow took the entire week to create.  

That was the evidence that you had done the work, created the deliverables and the boxes were all checked. I’m not trying to sound dismissive when I say this because in many cases those deliverables are very important but for those who have been working for a long time, we also know something else. 

The deliverable is rarely where all the value lives. The value is often what happened before, around or after the deliverable was created. And AI is making that distinction much harder to ignore. 

AI is rapidly changing what people can see. I use AI regularly in my personal and professional work. Just today I had ChatGPT, Codex and Muse all open and simultaneously building skills, running scheduled tasks and doing research and this is my “day off”. 

AI can help me analyze information, challenge my thinking, research patterns, draft an approach and turn a blank page into something I can react to quite quickly. 

Things that used to take hours or days can now take often just minutes. And honestly, I think this is fantastic. I have no desire to go back to spending half a day formatting a document or creating a PowerPoint deck. 

But there is a consequence that we honestly aren’t talking much about. 

When AI does more of the visible work, what becomes visible about your contribution? 

Because the valuable part of your work might have been that you noticed that the one super difficult stakeholder wasn’t included in the stakeholder map. Or that you recognized that three separate issues were actually part of a much bigger singular problem. Or maybe your contribution was convincing people to not do half of the things they had planned. 

Good luck putting “I prevented everyone from doing half of the work that was written down” in an accomplishments section on your annual review. Even though that might have actually created more value than six different deliverables. 

We have been using output as a proxy for value for a long time. It’s been easy to point to the evidence of what we contributed. I created X, I delivered Y, I completed Z. The deliverable was the visibility for the expertise behind it. 

We are seeing that AI is starting to break that connection. 

If AI helps create the first draft of the assessment, summarizes the interviews, drafts the communications, and builds the initial project plan, listing everything that you produced tells me little about the value you added. 

That doesn’t mean that your value disappeared. It means we need better evidence for it. 

And for experienced professionals I think this means that we have to start noticing something that we have stopped noticing. 

Some our most valuable work has actually become invisible to ourselves. 

The longer that you’ve done something the easier it is to dismiss it as common sense.

“obviously I would talk to that person first”, 

Why? 

“that timeline isn’t going to work”

How do you know?  

“something about this doesn’t feel right”

What are you seeing? 

“You’re solving the wrong problem”

What told you that? 

“I’ve seen this before”

Ok. What have you seen…

This is where it gets interesting because buried deep in those questions and answers are years of pattern recognition, mistakes, observations, relationships, context and judgement. 

You’ve done it so many times that you might not even recognize it as expertise. But other people can’t see something that you’ve stopped seeing yourself.

That’s the problem because with AI the artifacts you used to create that made your work visible are now easily created by anyone. 

In the age of AI we need a different way to document value. Instead of only keeping track of what you produced, start keeping track of what you noticed, understood or influenced. 

I’ve started thinking about it in this sequence. Notice > Decision > Impact 

What did I notice because of my experience? What changed because I noticed it? What happened as a result? 

Now compare: created a stakeholder assessment with identified an overlooked decision-maker whose early involvement prevented a late-stage escalation. 

Those two things tell me something very different about your value. One tells me what you produced, while the other tells me why having you in the room mattered.  That is the evidence that we need to get much better at capturing and making visible. 

Your Anchor for this week 

Pay attention to the moments when you hear yourself saying, 

“Obviously…”

“I’ve seen this before…”

“Something isn’t right…”

“That’s not going to work…”

“Are we asking the right question…”

And instead of moving on, stop yourself for a minute and ask yourself: 

• How did I know that? 

• What did I notice? 

• What changed because I noticed it?

• What impact did that have?

You might find that your most valuable work that you do has never appeared on a project plan or in a performance review. AI isn’t making that work less valuable. 

But it is making it much more important that you learn to make it visible.

What I'm loving 

Your AI Chat History.  Instead of using AI to only create your next deliverable, try using it to uncover your expertise hiding behind your last one. Give it an example of where your recent judgement changed the direction of the work. Tell it what you noticed, what you recommended and what happened next. Then ask, "Help me identify the expertise and the judgement I demonstrated in this situation. What did I recognize, connect, question, or influence that someone with less experience would have missed?"

You might be surprised at how much of your expertise you've just been treating as something you just do. 

This week ask yourself, "what do I see now that I wouldn't have seen ten years ago, even if I'd have access to the exact same information." There is probably a lot more experience hiding in your answer than you realize. 

AI isn't making that expertise less valuable but it is making it much more important that you learn how to make it more visible. 

Remember, you're still the author of what comes next. 

Warmly, 

Heather

Anchored in Possibility™
The future belongs to those who know who they are when everything changes.