Practical ideas for change leaders working through what AI asks of established practice
Knowing the change playbook needs to evolve is one thing. Working out what to do differently in your next impact assessment, sponsor conversation or enablement session is where it gets interesting.
Many of the change levers we know well still have an important role to play. Leadership and sponsorship, stakeholder engagement, communications, readiness and training all matter. AI gives us a reason to look more closely at how we use them.
Consider a few familiar situations…
A sponsor is encouraging everyone to use AI, but has little firsthand experience of it themselves. An impact assessment describes the future state, while employees are already finding different ways to work with the technology. A champion network is generating enthusiasm, but people aren’t bringing it the failures and doubts the organisation most needs to hear.
Each situation calls for a change response. The question is whether our existing approach helps us see what needs attention.
Where could the playbook stretch?
Take change impact assessment. Alongside asking who will do what differently, we need to understand how work is actually changing as people engage with AI. Which parts of the thinking are being handed over? What new checking or reviewing work appears elsewhere? What happens to the judgement people still need to develop?
Readiness needs a similar rethink. Access, awareness and willingness matter, but so do the conditions people are working in. Do they have time to learn? Can they question an AI output without feeling they are holding up adoption? Are managers being supported through changes to their own roles while being asked to guide everyone else?
These questions connect familiar change practices with the human experience of working with AI. They also help us make more deliberate choices about what people should become better able to do because the technology is present.
A Field Guide for putting that thinking into practice
Change Leaders Field Guide: AI Playbook Upgrade Ideas for Leaders of Change explores 12 change levers, comparing established cloud-era practices with what AI is asking us to consider. Each lever includes practical upgrade ideas and things to watch for, with questions and selected AI prompts to support your thinking.
The Field Guide covers 11 known change lever upgrade ideas. It also introduces a totally new change lever, Cognitive Impact Management. This is a new and distinct area of attention that looks at understanding how AI changes the thinking within the work, where mental effort moves and what that means for human capability over time.
Leadership and Sponsorship
Governance and Oversight
Change Impact Assessment
Organisational Readiness
Cognitive Impact Management (new!)
Middle Manager Enablement
Stakeholder Engagement
Resistance Management
Communications
Training and Enablement
Change Networks and Champions
Measurement and Value Realisation
Start with the work in front of you
You don’t need to redesign your entire change approach before trying something useful.
Choose one AI initiative and one lever that needs attention. Use the guide to examine your current assumptions, discuss what you are seeing with the people involved and identify an adjustment worth testing.
That might mean changing the questions in a readiness survey, helping sponsors share what they are learning, or following a productivity gain downstream to understand whether it has created more review work for someone else.
The guide provides starting points for those conversations. Your experience, the context and the people doing the work determine what to apply.
Get the Field Guide
Field Guide: AI Playbook Upgrade Ideas for Change Leaders
A 20-page PDF for change practitioners, transformation leads and leaders responsible for AI adoption. It includes:
Comparisons across 12 change levers
A totally new change lever! Cognitive Impact Management
Practical ideas for evolving your change approach
Questions and selected AI prompts to use in your work
Things to watch for as AI use develops
A Human-Centric AI introduction and six questions to take into your next AI change discussion
A final thought
The AI change playbook is still being written. We can contribute to it by examining what is happening in the work, testing adjustments and sharing what we learn.
Which part of your change approach could use a rethink first?
Written by Jo Grubb
Human Shift Advisory - 2026
A note on AI use in this article: For this article, AI helped with image creation, research discovery, pressure-testing ideas and editing. The thinking, synthesis, interpretation and conclusions remained human. Industry experience and expertise shaped the ideas and determined what to use, challenge, change or leave behind. This reflects the philosophy behind Human-Centric AI, which is the deliberate use of AI to strengthen what makes us human.