AI Change Framework
REIMAGINE is Tracy Sheen’s proprietary nine-step change framework for AI adoption in Australian organisations. Relationships. Evaluate. Identify. Map. Activate. Gather. Iterate. Narrow. Evolve. The arc names the stages people actually go through when an organisation moves from business as usual to AI-leveraged work. Built on the principle that AI rollouts succeed or fail at the human layer. The change-management companion to GIST methodology and HUMAN accountability. Backed by the award-winning book AI and U: REIMAGINE Business.
Why REIMAGINE exists
The pattern is brutal and consistent. The board signs off on a strategy. IT picks the tool. Communications drafts the rollout email. And nobody talks to the actual humans who will live with the change.
Six months later, the dashboards say the rollout is on track. The reality says people are quietly working around it, the productivity gains are theoretical and the leadership team is asking why nobody flagged the resistance earlier.
REIMAGINE was built for that gap. Nine steps that name the human-side stages an organisation actually goes through when AI changes the way work gets done. From Relationships at the start, where the change has its best chance of taking root, through to Evolve, where the new way becomes the only way.
Business as usual is dead. The question is what comes next.
48%
of Australian employees use AI in ways that contravene company policies. People are not waiting for the change to be done well.
36%
of organisations globally have a formal AI governance policy. The Map step is missing in nearly two-thirds of organisations.
14%
of Australian companies are seeing measurable revenue gains from AI, compared to 30% globally. Most rollouts stop at Activate. They do not get to Evolve.
The nine steps
Each step names a stage people go through when an organisation changes how work gets done. Skip a step and the rollout pays for it later. The colour rotation is a visual anchor, not a hierarchy. All nine carry equal weight.
Before any tool, any policy, any plan. Who is at the table? Who needs to be? What is the trust level between leadership and the people doing the actual work? Change without psychological safety stalls in the second meeting. Everything that follows depends on getting this right first.
Not the version told to the board. The version that lives in spreadsheets people keep secret, in workarounds nobody documents, in the gap between official process and actual practice. AI rollouts fail when they ignore what work actually looks like today. Evaluate is permission to tell the truth.
From everything the evaluation turned up, what are the real problems worth solving? The pain points people will pay attention to. The opportunities the leadership team can rally around. Not solutions yet. Just the territory named clearly so the team can agree on what they are actually trying to change.
What does the work look like once AI is doing the parts it should be doing? Which people, processes, tools and capabilities sit where? Map is the rollout plan in visual form. A map you can show people, not a strategy document nobody reads. Map earns the right to Activate.
Pilot. Prototype. The smallest possible thing that proves the map is right. The point of activation is not the win. It is the learning. People need to see the framework in motion before they will trust it with the real work. Activate is the rehearsal, not the performance.
What is the activation phase actually producing? What is working? What is not? What did the team learn about themselves under live conditions? This is the discipline most rollouts skip. Without it, the next decisions are guesses. Gather is the unglamorous step that makes everything after it credible.
Adjust the plan. Throw out the parts of the original map the evidence has invalidated. Iterate is not a soft word. It is the hard work of holding the framework loosely enough to change it when reality demands. The leadership teams that get this right are the ones who go on to Evolve.
From everything the iteration surfaced, what are the few things the organisation will actually commit to? The opposite of strategy by shopping list. Narrow is where leadership earns its salary. The discipline of saying no to good ideas so the great ones get the runway they need.
Embed the change. AI rollouts that get to Evolve become organisational capability. AI rollouts that stop at Activate become PowerPoint history. The framework loops back to Relationships when the next change cycle begins, because there is always a next change cycle.
The book that documents the framework
Each of the nine steps broken open with worked examples from corporate, government and not-for-profit Australian organisations. The book is the long version of this page.
Written for boards, executives and senior leaders in Australian organisations. Each chapter walks one of the nine REIMAGINE steps through real engagements: what the conversation sounded like, what the leadership team got wrong the first time, what they did differently the second time and what changed for the people doing the actual work.
Standards alignment
REIMAGINE is a change framework first, an AI framework second. The standards it anchors to reflect that.
Risk-aware change is risk management at every step. ISO 31000 principles run through Relationships, Map, Activate and Evolve in particular.
Continuous improvement is the throughline. The Gather, Iterate and Evolve steps operationalise the same principles ISO 9001 already requires of accredited organisations.
The Standard’s ten guardrails apply across the rollout. REIMAGINE names the human-side moments at which each guardrail gets tested in practice.
The eight ethics principles are the durable obligations the framework holds itself to across all nine steps. Especially Human-centred values, Accountability and Reliability.
In practice
Three places where leadership teams put the framework to work.
The framework structures the engagement. Discovery and Blueprint phases cover Relationships through Map. First Build covers Activate, Gather and Iterate. The Deployment Retainer carries the team through Narrow and Evolve.
Audiences leave with the nine-step arc as a mental model they can apply to their own organisation. The framework gives them language for what they are already going through and a sequence for what comes next.
Boards and executive teams use REIMAGINE to test the AI plan they have been presented. Which steps has the team done? Which steps did they skip? Which step is the rollout actually stuck on?
How it fits
GIST is the methodology. HUMAN is the accountability map. REIMAGINE is the change arc that ties them into a rollout people can actually live with.
Guardrails, Intent, Strategy, Practical Training. The four questions every leadership team must answer to use AI well. The decision layer that REIMAGINE sequences.
Read more →HUMAN FrameworkHabit, Unit, Macro, Audience, Neighbourhood. The stakeholders REIMAGINE has to bring with it at each step of the rollout.
Read more →Common questions
REIMAGINE is Tracy Sheen’s proprietary nine-step change framework for AI adoption in Australian organisations. Relationships, Evaluate, Identify, Map, Activate, Gather, Iterate, Narrow, Evolve.
The arc takes people from business as usual to AI-leveraged work. It is the human-side companion to GIST methodology and HUMAN accountability.
Yes. REIMAGINE was built specifically for AI adoption in Australian organisations, not adapted from generic change models.
It names the human-side stages people actually go through when AI changes the way work gets done. The framework is documented in Tracy’s award-winning book AI and U: REIMAGINE Business.
GIST is the methodology. HUMAN is the accountability map. REIMAGINE is the change arc. Together they form a complete system.
GIST tells leadership teams what to decide. HUMAN tells them who needs to be in the conversation. REIMAGINE tells them what people will actually go through as the change rolls out.
Activate. Most AI rollouts start strong with Relationships, Evaluate and Identify, then jump straight to Activate without doing Map properly.
The result is a pilot that proves nothing because nobody agreed in advance what success looks like. Map is the boring step that earns the right to Activate.
The complete REIMAGINE framework is documented in Tracy Sheen’s book AI and U: REIMAGINE Business, a 2025 Australian Business Book Awards finalist.
The book breaks open each of the nine steps with worked examples from corporate, government and not-for-profit Australian organisations.