Behavioral Theories & Concepts™ Workplace Series - Volume 1 | Issue 2
The Relational Repetition Deficit™
By Kenn Wayne
Published by Kennology Theory Coaching Group
Something is happening at work that deserves more attention than we've given it. We are getting better at eliminating core job friction.
If we need information? Search it. Summarize a meeting? Let AI do it. If you need to write the difficult email? Generate it. Need ideas? Prompt for them. Need to analyze a problem? Upload the data. Need an answer from someone with more experience? Increasingly, you may not need to ask a cross-functional team member at all.
From a productivity standpoint, much of this is progress, but from a human development standpoint, I think we need to ask a different question.
What if some of the friction we are eliminating in the workplace was actually developing us?
Not all friction is bad. Sometimes friction is where people learn how to work with people. And if we continue removing those moments from work without understanding what else disappears with them, organizations may eventually discover that they have created something they never intended: A highly technologically capable workforce that is becoming increasingly underpracticed at working through human relationships.
That deserves our attention.
We Have Been Measuring What Technology Gives Us. What About What It Removes?
The conversation around AI at work has understandably centered on productivity, efficiency, cost, speed, and capability, and yes, those benefits are real. AI adoption is also moving quickly.
Gallup reported in July 2026 that 52% of U.S. employees now use AI in their roles, with 30% using it frequently. Forty-seven percent said their organizations had integrated AI tools to improve productivity, efficiency, or quality.
Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index provides another interesting piece of the picture.
Its analysis of more than 100,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot conversations found that 49% supported cognitive work such as analyzing information, solving problems, evaluating, and thinking creatively.
Only 19% involved activities categorized as working with people. Now, that does not prove AI is making people less relational. It does, however, give us a reason to start asking what happens when increasingly more work can be accomplished without another human being being necessary to the process.
Quietly, something else happens when we remove the person. We remove the interaction. And when we remove enough interactions, we may eventually remove the practice.
The Relational Repetition Deficit™
I call this emerging risk The Relational Repetition Deficit™.
The Relational Repetition Deficit™ occurs when technology, automation, or work design reduces the frequency of human interactions required to accomplish work, thereby reducing opportunities to practice the interpersonal behaviors necessary to work effectively with other people.
Think about how human competency actually develops.
You learn how to disagree by disagreeing.
You learn how to listen by listening.
You learn how to negotiate by negotiating.
You learn how to read a room by being in rooms.
You learn how to repair a damaged relationship by navigating damaged relationships.
You learn how to communicate with difficult personalities by communicating with difficult personalities.
You learn patience because somebody tests it.
You learn influence when authority alone isn't enough.
You learn collaboration when someone sitting across from you sees the problem differently.
These aren't merely "soft skills." They are repetitional skills, and repetition on this scale really does matter.
We May Have Misidentified Friction
Corporate America has spent decades trying to remove friction from work, and usually for good reason.
Things such as:
Unnecessary meetings.
Slow approvals.
Duplicated processes.
Information bottlenecks.
Administrative work.
Poor systems.
Those things absolutely should be challenged. But we have been operating from an assumption that deserves examination: Friction equals inefficiency, and I would agree that sometimes it does. But sometimes friction is developmental.
Consider the young employee who once had to walk over to an experienced employee and say: "I don't know how to do this. Can you help me?"
That interaction wasn't efficient. But something happened inside it.
The younger employee practiced vulnerability.
The experienced employee practiced mentorship.
A relationship formed.
Knowledge transferred.
Context was exchanged.
Trust potentially increased.
The employee learned not only what to do, but perhaps why the organization did it that way.
Now imagine the same employee asks an AI system.
They may receive the answer faster.
They may even receive a better answer.
But the answer and the experience are not necessarily the same thing.
Efficiency measures the completion of the task. Development measures what happened to the person while completing it.
Two very different measurements that should not be ignored, and that deserve equal analytical review.
This Is Bigger Than AI
We should be careful not to turn AI into the villain. It isn't.
AI acted as an accelerator of something that was already in motion, that looked something like this:
Remote work reduced certain spontaneous interactions.
Digital communication replaced many conversations.
Messaging replaced phone calls.
Email replaced meetings.
Self-service technology replaced people.
Automation replaced handoffs.
Search engines reduced our dependence on institutional knowledge.
Now generative AI can increasingly replace the need to ask another human being altogether. Each innovation may make perfect sense independently. But organizations rarely stop to examine the cumulative behavioral effect.
What happens to human competency when humans become increasingly optional to completing work?
For many organizations, leaders and employees, that is the question.
The Skills We Need Most May Be the Skills We Are Practicing Less
TRIGGER ALERT - Here is where this gets uncomfortable.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that nearly 40% of skills required on the job are expected to change by 2030. But employers aren't only looking for technical skills. Analytical thinking, resilience, leadership, social influence, and collaboration remain critical alongside growing technological capabilities.
Microsoft's 2026 research points in a similar direction. As AI assumes more work, employees reported that quality control and critical thinking are becoming increasingly important human capabilities. So now we have an interesting contradiction developing.
Technology is increasing the value of human capability at the same time that technology can reduce some of the interactions through which human capability has traditionally developed.
That should concern leaders, not because technology should be slowed down, but because human development must speed up. (You may want to read that again)
We Cannot Train Our Way Out of Everything
Organizations love training. It is the "band-aid" that is offered to help heal many corporate "deep-knife wounds."
When a competency gap appears, we create a course to close the gap.
Everything from communication, leadership, conflict, emotional intelligence, and collaboration learning is placed in a curriculum together to train.
Then everyone returns to work. But there is a problem.
You cannot PowerPoint someone into relational maturity.
Training can introduce concepts, and practice creates capability, but there is no substitute for navigating the actual moment when someone misunderstands you.
Or disagrees with you.
Or disappoints you.
Or challenges your idea.
Or communicates differently from you.
Or needs something you weren't prepared to give.
Relationships require repetition. This means the future workplace may need something counterintuitive.
Instead of removing every human dependency from work, leaders may need to intentionally decide which human interactions are worth protecting.
The Leadership Question Has Changed
The old question was: How can technology help our people work more efficiently?
Keep asking it.
But add another: What human capability might disappear if we automate this interaction?
Now, that question changes the entire conversation in your org.
Before eliminating a meeting, ask yourself, what useful interaction happened there?
Before automating a handoff, you can ask whether mentorship happened during that exchange.
Before replacing discussion with a dashboard, ask whether the discussion helped people understand each other's thinking.
Before celebrating independent productivity, ask whether independence is quietly becoming isolation.
Not every interaction deserves preservation, and no, that is not contradictory to what I have said here. Some meetings really should disappear, some processes really are terrible, and some conversations genuinely add nothing, as in zero value.
But organizations should learn the difference between administrative friction and developmental friction.
They should remove the first aggressively, but be intentionally careful with the second.
There Is Another Number We Should Be Watching
Gallup reported that only 31% of U.S. employees were engaged during the first half of 2026. That number hasn't improved from 2025.
More importantly, Gallup estimates that the decline from the 2020 engagement peak represents approximately 8 million fewer engaged U.S. employees.
At the same time, AI adoption continues to rise. Again, correlation is not causation.
The combination should force a broader conversation. We cannot build the future of work exclusively around how quickly people can produce.
We also need to understand whether people are becoming better at thinking together, disagreeing together, creating together, and solving problems together.
In short, businesses do not operate through technology alone. They operate through relationships of all types and on all levels.
Customer relationships.
Manager relationships.
Team relationships.
Vendor relationships.
Leadership relationships.
Community relationships.
Technology may change how those relationships operate or engage, but it does not eliminate their importance.
The Kenn Wayne Question Within The Question
The obvious question is this: How much more productive can AI make our workforce?
The question within the question is: What happens if the workforce becomes more productive individually while becoming less capable relationally?
That is a very different vision of the future of work. And I don't believe organizations should wait until the deficit becomes visible before they begin thinking about it.
The next competitive advantage may not belong to the organization with the most AI.
Most organizations will eventually have access to similar technology. The advantage may belong to organizations that figure out something much harder: How to build technologically amplified people without producing relationally diminished ones.
The future of work will certainly involve machines. But the future of business will still highly involve people. And people require something technology cannot practice for us. Relationship.
And as we all should know at this point: Everything Starts With Relationship.
About Kennology Theory Coaching Group
At Kennology Theory Coaching Group, we help organizations understand the psychology behind workplace behavior so they can build scalable cultures where people thrive, leaders are equipped, relationships strengthen, and businesses grow.
Our work examines what sits underneath workplace behavior, including the patterns, relationships, systems, and human dynamics that traditional organizational solutions often overlook. Everything Starts With Relationship.
About Kenn Wayne
Kenn Wayne is the creator of The Kennology Theory™ and a corporate culture strategist whose work examines human behavior, workplace relationships, and the systems that influence how people experience organizations.
His work challenges leaders to look beyond surface-level workplace problems and examine the behavioral patterns underneath them because what organizations repeatedly practice eventually becomes what organizations become.
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