Reframe, Adapt, Lead
Dimension: Direction · Type: Stage
Three moves to keep the growth-mindset stance from drifting into a slogan: reframe what AI is doing to your role, adapt by stacking skills, lead by building learning rituals.
Introduced by Rathan Kinhal (EY Switzerland) at the Upskilling for the Future session of the UN Inter-Agency Career Week 2026, on 6 May 2026. Reinforced and extended at the The Skills Shift session by Matt Valente (UNICC), who added the 20-minutes-a-week rhythm as the operational form of the Adapt move, on 8 May 2026. Extended again at the Own Your Future, Make Your Role Matter session by Hannah Nash (10Eighty), who added the Reactive vs Proactive language shift mapping as a concrete operationalisation of the Reframe move, on 8 May 2026.
The framework
Three moves, operational rather than motivational. Reframe what is happening. Adapt deliberately. Lead the practice into the team.
When to use it
- When you are anxious about AI replacing parts of your job and need a structured way to think about it.
- When your team is in coping mode on a technology transition and you want to nudge it back toward a growth-oriented practice.
- As a quarterly self-check on whether you are actively investing in growth or just talking about it.
What you need
- Honest awareness of where AI or any other large change is actually affecting your role.
- A small amount of weekly time you can carve out for the third move (learning rituals).
The three moves
1. Reframe
The first instinct under technology disruption is replacement anxiety. The Reframe interrupts it.
AI replaces tasks. It does not replace your purpose, your judgement, your ethics, or your ability to lead. Those remain yours. The skill is to recognise which tasks in your work are being absorbed by AI and which parts only you can do, then redirect your effort accordingly.
Practice. Pick one project you are working on. List the tasks. For each, ask: “Is this a task AI can do, augmented by me?” or “Is this a task only I can do?” Move time and attention from the first category to the second.
2. Adapt
The second move is structural. Skills have a short shelf life; careers are now a portfolio of skills, not a ladder of titles. The response is to stack new skills onto existing ones, deliberately and continuously.
The two most durable competencies, the ones that compound across all the others, are curiosity and the ability to learn fast. Investing in those pays back in every transition.
Practice. Pick one skill at the edge of your current capability that compounds with what you already have. Set a 30 to 60 day investment plan, modest but specific. Run the Skill Matrix Audit at least every twelve months.
3. Lead
The third move is collective. Reframing and adapting alone produces an isolated learner; leading translates the practice into the team.
Three concrete ways to lead:
- Build learning rituals. A monthly team session on a new skill. A retrospective after each major project on what worked and why. A rotating “show me what you learned this week” slot in a team meeting.
- Share knowledge cross-functionally. Find people in adjacent functions who are practising what you want to learn. The fastest path to credibility in a new area is usually through someone who is already there.
- Use AI as a diagnostic tool, not a decision-maker. AI can surface options, identify trade-offs, and stress-test plans. The decision still belongs to you. This pattern protects judgement while still capturing the productivity gain.
The Reactive vs Proactive language shift
A small, operational sub-tool inside the Reframe move, contributed by Hannah Nash (Day 5 Session 8). A mapping from disempowering reactive phrases to their proactive equivalents:
| Reactive (disempowering) | Proactive (agency-restoring) |
|---|---|
| “I can’t" | "I can" |
| "If only" | "I will" |
| "That’s just how I am" | "I can choose to try this” or “I can learn by doing" |
| "That’s not my job" | "I can take the initiative" |
| "I’ll wait to be recognised" | "I can speak to” or “I can name what I’ve done” |
The operational rule: when you catch a reactive phrase coming out of your mouth or your inner voice, swap it for the proactive equivalent on the spot. Repeated enough, the swap shifts behaviour, because the language reveals where you have given up agency, and the corrected language re-asserts it.
Why it works: language is not just description, it is also instruction. “I can’t” is a closed instruction; “I can” is an open one. The closed instruction routes attention away from possibility; the open one routes attention toward it.
The session’s framing was direct: roughly 95% of career success is driven by mindset, and people with a more positive, proactive mindset have substantially higher success rates in whatever they set out to achieve. The language shift is the smallest possible operationalisation of that finding.
Use it as a daily self-check, not as a slogan. The point is the swap, not the affirmation.
The 20-minutes-a-week rhythm
Matt Valente (Day 5 Session 4) added a sharper Adapt prescription, tuned specifically to the speed at which AI tooling is now changing. The argument: a one-off training course will not get you there, because what was current nine months ago is already legacy today. The rhythm:
- 20 minutes, every week, on one tool or one new feature. Not two hours once a month. Not a weekend immersion. A fixed, recurring slot, on the calendar like a meeting.
- One tool or one feature, not many. Pick a specific Claude capability, or one Power BI integration, or one Lovable feature. Depth on one thing per week beats shallow coverage of many.
- Use the tool itself to learn. The most efficient way to learn AI is often to ask the AI. Tell it what you know, ask what else you can do, follow the rabbit hole. Supplement with the official learning paths from the major model providers.
- Capture the artefact. Each weekly slot should produce something, even small: a saved prompt, a one-paragraph note on what you learned, a workflow improvement. Without an artefact the rhythm is theoretical.
This is the operational form of the Adapt move when the relevant skill is AI fluency. For other skill domains the cadence may differ, but the principle (small, recurring, artefact-producing) is the same.
Worked example
A team lead in a country office of a large UN agency notices that her team is in coping mode on AI: people are using AI tools privately, but the team has no shared practice and no shared language about it. She runs the three moves over a quarter.
- Reframe. In a team meeting she opens by asking each member to name one task in their work that AI could absorb and one task that only a human can do. The conversation surfaces patterns: routine donor-report drafting can be partially automated; partner-relationship management cannot. The team’s shared mental model shifts from “AI is taking over” to “AI is taking specific tasks; we are still doing the load-bearing work.”
- Adapt. Each team member commits to one stacking skill over the quarter, drawn from the team’s collective skill audit. Three are AI-related (prompt engineering, agent building, AI-assisted M&E); two are human-skills-related (negotiation, facilitation). Each commitment has a specific 30-day milestone and a peer accountability partner inside the team.
- Lead. She introduces three rituals: a monthly Friday session where one team member teaches the others a new tool or pattern they have learned (45 minutes); a project retrospective at the end of every major deliverable, focused on what was learned, not what went wrong; a shared document where the team logs prompt patterns, AI-failure cases, and AI-success cases.
By the end of the quarter, the team has moved from privately experimenting to publicly sharing. The shared practice produces faster onboarding for new joiners and a tighter case for additional learning resources at the next budget review.
Pitfalls
- Treating Reframe as positive thinking. The Reframe is not “AI will not affect me.” It is “AI will affect specific tasks, and here is how I redirect my effort accordingly.” If the answer feels reassuring, you have probably skipped the analysis.
- Adapt without a specific commitment. “I will keep learning” is not an Adapt move. “I will complete the LinkedIn Learning prompt engineering track by end of June and apply the patterns to three real work problems” is.
- Lead without protecting time. Learning rituals fail when they are the first thing to drop under pressure. They have to be on the calendar like any other meeting.
- Mistaking AI productivity for AI judgement. AI is good at the diagnostic step. The decision step is still yours, especially in high-stakes career and policy contexts. Confusing the two is what produces low-quality automated outputs the recruiter or partner immediately recognises.
- Doing it alone. The Lead move is what makes the practice durable. A growth mindset that lives only in your head decays in three weeks.
When not to use it
When the question is not actually about growth but about coping with a specific shock (a sudden non-renewal, a major team restructure). The Reframe-Adapt-Lead arc assumes a calm enough state to plan. In a shock, prioritise stabilisation first.
How I use it
Personal note pending. Davide to fill.
Related frameworks
- Skill Matrix Audit, the recurring practice that supports the Adapt move.
- 5i Framework, the upstream stance the three moves operationalise.
- Notice, Pause, Shift, Act, the in-the-moment routine that complements the Reframe at a smaller timescale.
- Career Mapping, the gap analysis that often produces the specific Adapt commitments.
Notes compiled by Davide Piga. Last updated 2026-05-09.