A few times this year I’ve dived into an area of AI that I’d deliberately put off. New things arrive in waves, and I’m always a bit hesitant. Often when that new wave of tech is coming tt feels like I’ve only just adopted the last shiny thing.

Skills in Claude was one of those. I’d played around with it and built a few ways of using it. Then I went to the Digital Workplace Conference in Melbourne earlier this year and the thing I learned most there didn’t come from the stage. It came from one word: skills.

I wrote recently about that confusion. People kept saying “Skills” about Copilot Cowork, and I kept nodding, because I’d spent months building Skills in Claude. Slowly it dawned on me that we weren’t talking about quite the same thing.

The way I learned it is the interesting part:

• I heard it in a session.
• I asked about it over coffee between sessions, and found plenty of people as unsure as I was.
• I went home and sat with it, muddled, for a few days.
• Then I wrote it up and went back to building, this time knowing what I was building.

The same idea got worked through in four completely different places. I only noticed that afterwards, because there’s a model I keep coming back to that describes exactly this. I’ve no doubt written about it before. Still, I’m always amazed at how few people know it, and how little we draw on ideas like this in learning and adoption programs.

Four places learning happens

In Campfires in Cyberspace, David Thornburg describes learning through a handful of very old metaphors. They’re places people have learned for as long as there have been people.

• The campfire – Gathering to learn from an expert or a storyteller. One voice with many listeners.
• The watering hole – Informal and peer-to-peer. People share what they’ve found, and everyone is learner and teacher at the same time. The gathered around the watering hole to do a task, but during this shared ideas and knowledge.
• The cave – Somewhere private to think. It’s where outside information becomes your own understanding.
• Life – Where you actually use it. The real task we do in our daily work or life.

What I like about it is how unfussy it is. There are no levels and no acronym. It just asks where the learning is happening, and who is there.

We live at the campfire

If I map most of the technology learning I’ve seen (and plenty I’ve built), it sits around the campfire:

• The live training session
• The webinar
• The launch town hall
• The recorded video (This is really just the campfire on demand: still one voice and one direction, just with a pause button)

There’s nothing wrong with a good campfire. Campfire stories have always held value, and they provide a great opportunity for someone who knows something well to explain it clearly, which can be a great start. I wrote a while back about access versus interaction, and I stand by it: a well-made presentation is a good thing.

But it’s only a start. A lot of programs treat it as the whole thing, then wonder why it doesn’t stick.

The watering hole is where it gets real

The coffee conversations at that conference did something no session could. Someone said “oh, we hit that too”. Someone else had a workaround they shared, and I explained my bit back to them. I was learner and teacher across morning tea in about 15 minutes.

That’s the watering hole, and I think it’s the space we underinvest in most. It’s where people check their understanding against someone like them, and it can be where things become “how we do it here” instead of “how the trainer said to do it”.

In the digital workplace we already have most of the plumbing for this, like online communities, Teams channels, champions networks and show-and-tell sessions. What I feel is usually missing is the design. A community with no prompt and no host is just an empty water trough.

The cave gets cut first

The cave is the one I’m most protective of.

It’s the quiet time, like those muddled days at home after the conference processing all the bits of ideas and information. That’s where the information turned into an idea or opinion I could actually stand behind.

In learning design, the cave is the reflection activity. In my experience it’s the first thing cut when time or budget gets tight, because it doesn’t look like much. A question and some space doesn’t demo well. It’s hard to measure and gauge purpose or value.

There’s a newer wrinkle here too. AI can be a lovely companion in the cave, something to think out loud with. But it can also quietly do the thinking for you. I wrote recently about the cost of hard thinking we’re giving away, and this is where it shows up. A good cave has a question in it, not an answer.

Life is where it counts

Then there’s life. The real task with real stakes and often when nobody is watching.

This is where most learning is either confirmed or quietly abandoned. It’s also the space we design least, because it happens after the course is “complete”.

It doesn’t take much to change that:

• A job aid at the point of need.
• A nudge a week or two later.
• A manager asking “did you try it?”
• A colleague nearby sharing a new trick, or just chatting about the new tech.

These are what make life a learning space rather than the place learning goes to fade.

A quick map for your next program

If you’re designing something at the moment, try this. Draw four boxes on a piece of paper and put every activity in your program into one of them.

Then look at the shape.

• All campfire? Add one watering hole moment, with a real prompt and a host.
  
• No cave? Add one reflection question, and protect the time for it.
  
• Nothing in life? Design the first real task, and the nudge that follows it.

You don’t need all four in equal measure. You just need to know which ones you’ve left out.
We put lots of thought into this in the learning we design and deliver at work. It’s not just a live session on an app for an organisation. We talk about what happens after and along the learning journey for an employee. Or, we build reflection activities and content or time with people to help them explore learning in different ways. Not just a 1 hour session and walk away. That isn’t success.

Back to the coffee

I’ve been on stage at that conference, so I’m not knocking the campfire. I like a good campfire. It’s often where ideas begin, or where we realise what we don’t know. That can set off a whole chain of thinking and exploring, just like the Skills moment did for me.

But if you asked me what actually changed how I work this year, it was:

• the conversation in the coffee line,
• the muddled week at home,
• and the work from home day where I sat down and built the thing properly.

The stage started it, and then everything else finished it.