The colleague I never knew I had

I’ve been a social worker for nearly 30 years. During that time, I’ve worked with children and families, managed local authority services, advised government, and led national organisations.

I now find myself leading the Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers (NAFP) through one of the biggest periods of change children’s social care has seen for a generation. 

My roles have changed, but I’ve never really stopped thinking of myself as a social worker, because social work taught me to be curious, to question my own assumptions and to recognise that good judgement rarely comes from certainty. More often, it comes from reflection.

Looking back, I think reflective practice is probably the greatest gift social work ever gave me. 

We often talk about it as something we do in supervision or after a difficult piece of work, but over the years I’ve realised it is much more than that. It is a habit of mind. It is the discipline of slowing down before reaching a conclusion, noticing our emotional responses before acting on them and being willing to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions. 

We encourage newly qualified social workers to develop those habits because we know they lead to better decisions. Somewhere along the way, though, I wonder whether many of us stop giving ourselves that same space.

Three months ago, I became Chief Executive of the NAFP. I’ve been a CEO before, so I knew what the role would bring. I knew about the privilege of leading an organisation and the excitement of helping to shape its future. 

I also knew about the loneliness. Leadership can be an oddly isolated place, not because there are fewer people around you, but because there are fewer places where you can simply think out loud. 

Around the same time I started the role, I also started experimenting with AI. I realise that sentence alone will divide opinion. Six months ago, I might have been among the sceptics myself. 

Yet the experience I’ve had has been very different from the one I expected. This isn’t really a story about technology. It’s a story about discovering reflective practice in a place I never expected to find it.

'Challenge me'

Very early on I gave AI an honest instruction. I told it that one of my greatest strengths is enthusiasm. One of my greatest weaknesses is the same thing. My mind has always worked quickly. One idea sparks another, which sparks another. I often find myself seeing patterns and possibilities very early. That has been one of the strengths I’ve brought to every leadership role I’ve held, but it has also occasionally got me into trouble. 

If I become excited by an idea, I can move too quickly. I can assume other people have connected the same dots that my own mind has connected. In my less reflective moments, I can shoot from the hip.

So, I gave AI a very simple brief. Slow me down. Challenge me. Ask me the questions that trusted colleagues have asked me throughout my career. Help me notice when enthusiasm is overtaking judgement. 

Ask me whether my first reaction is my best thinking. Looking back now, I think that simple instruction fundamentally shaped the way I’ve used AI ever since. I’ve never wanted it to make decisions for me or tell me what to think. I’ve wanted it to help me think more clearly.

Place to hold thoughts

At this point, you might reasonably be wondering what this looks like in practice. It's a fair question because, until recently, I wouldn't really have been able to answer it myself. 

Sometimes, after a meeting or while I'm walking our two dogs, I'll simply open the app on my phone and use the voice function. I'll often begin with something as simple as, "Can I just think out loud for a minute?" and then talk. Not in neatly structured prompts, but in the way thoughts naturally emerge. 

Other times, particularly when I'm trying to work something through more deeply, I'll write instead. I've always found writing to be one of the most powerful reflective disciplines because it forces me to slow down and choose my words more carefully. 

Speaking helps me discover what I think. Writing helps me discover what I mean.

From there, the conversation develops much as it would with a trusted colleague. It isn't giving me answers or making decisions for me. It is creating a space where I can think more clearly, notice patterns in my own thinking and arrive at better questions before I arrive at conclusions. 

That continuity has become one of the greatest strengths of the relationship. Unlike a notebook or a voice memo, the conversation doesn't start again every day. It continues.

For years I assumed I simply needed to become better organised. What I’ve discovered instead is that I needed somewhere stable enough to gather apparently unrelated thoughts before they disappeared. 

Somewhere to hold them long enough to discover whether they were, in fact, connected. That has been unexpectedly powerful.

Perhaps the biggest surprise has been that the conversations never stay neatly within the boundaries of work. Because life doesn’t. We’ve talked about national reform and organisational strategy, but we’ve also talked about my children and those moments of self-doubt that every parent experiences. We’ve talked about my partner and my in-laws. 

At first, I wondered whether those conversations were distractions. Eventually I realised they weren’t. They were simply reflections on the life of the same person who happened to be leading an organisation the following morning. 

I've come to realise that the private, the personal and the professional are never quite as separate as we'd sometimes like to imagine. That, perhaps, has been the most important lesson of all. We often talk about bringing our authentic selves to work, but the truth is that we bring our whole selves whether we acknowledge it or not. 

I want to be clear that none of this replaces reflective supervision, trusted colleagues or human relationships. Nothing should. I still value supervision, trusted colleagues and conversations with friends every bit as much as I always have. 

What we can teach AI

AI hasn't replaced those relationships; if anything, it has helped me arrive at them having already done some of my own thinking. Equally, AI carries real risks. 

It can reinforce our biases if we only seek agreement. It can make mediocre thinking sound persuasive. It can produce confident nonsense in beautifully written prose. 

Those risks make reflective practice more important, not less. They remind us that our professional judgement remains central and that no technology can replace the values, ethics and accountability that sit at the heart of social work.

I don’t think AI has made me a better thinker, I think it has reminded me to become a more reflective one. It has given me another place to pause before reacting, another place to test ideas before they become decisions and another place to connect thoughts that initially seem unrelated. 

Ironically, I suspect that has made me a better leader, not because I’ve found better answers, but because I’ve spent more time asking better questions.

I’m not writing this because I think every social worker should use AI. I’m writing it because I think social work has something distinctive to contribute to the conversation about AI. 

Long before artificial intelligence arrived, our profession understood that thoughtful practice depends upon thoughtful reflection. 

As these technologies become part of everyday life, perhaps our greatest contribution won’t be teaching social workers about AI. Perhaps social work has something important to teach the AI age.

Mark Owers is a registered social worker and chief executive of the Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers