Consider the following scenario: A tech firm executive sends a memo to all employees announcing a new AI coding assistant. One engineer reads it and thinks: “Here comes the tool that replaces me.” Another reads the identical memo and thinks: “Here comes the tool that frees my team from the grunt work we never have time to complete.” Same announcement, same context, two different perceptions of reality. The difference comes down to framing: how you perceive and act on the world around you as change continues its relentless pace.
Across time and across fields—from psychiatry to education, social psychology and management—thinkers have identified a similar divide: between a mindset organized around knowing, being right, and self-protection and one organized around curiosity and learning. In all instances, the former tends to be the default mindset while the latter takes effort (and we would add, leadership) to instill. The terminology differs—irrational versus rational beliefs, fixed versus growth mindsets, prevention versus promotion orientations, or Model I versus Model II—but the opportunity they identify for reframing is much the same. The well-researched bodies of work on framing each point to small but profound internal cognitive shifts that allow us to treat the events that come at us in a more productive way. A way that helps us avoid crippling anxiety and enables us instead to problem-solve.
In today’s uncertain work environment, helping others make this shift has become a leadership imperative. As one of us (Amy) argued some years ago, organizational strategy today is a hypothesis for ongoing testing. Five-year plans and strategy decks go stale in months if not weeks. This is the context that makes reframing such a valuable competency.
Reframing involves leaders reading the context, pausing to notice its hidden assumptions, and finding useful ways to reframe situations that unlock new options. Whether managing daily operations or strategy decisions, leaders can unleash effort and creativity by inviting their teams to reconsider where they are and what possibilities exist.
There is evidence that leader reframing changes how people perceive a situation such that they can respond to it constructively. We are not talking about “spin,” or sugar coating an unpleasant truth. We’re talking about recognizing the meaning we unconsciously layer onto reality that is not a necessary or factual aspect of that reality. Leader reframing is a disciplined practice that questions, and invites others to question, constraints to unlock new capacity.
Consider five useful cognitive shifts to help teams navigate uncertainty. Each can be deliberately imposed on a team by a leader.
1. Reframe a threat as an opportunity
This is about repositioning what appears to be a threat or roadblock to explore how it might instead drive growth. Amazon’s experience with third-party sellers illustrates this reframe. By 2018, third-party sellers on Amazon’s platform had grown at a 52% compound annual rate since 1999, more than double the growth of Amazon’s retail business. “Third-party sellers are kicking our first-party butt,” Jeff Bezos noted to shareholders. “Badly.” The classic strategic frame would lead a company to view that growth as a competitive threat to be contained or overcome. Amazon took a different approach, building Marketplace so that outside sellers could use Amazon’s platform in exchange for a fee. The sellers Amazon might have fought became a central driver of its platform’s expansion.
Today, executives guiding teams through AI-induced stress have the chance to make an analogous reframe. When employees (quite naturally) view AI tools as job killers, it’s worth exploring how those tools may serve as work enablers instead. Shifting the conversation from “what does this take from us” to “what does this free us to achieve” can help rechannel energy from individual self-protection to collaborative problem-solving.
2. Reframe failure as a precursor to success
Any team engaged in innovation will experience disappointing setbacks along the way. new opportunities, some attempts will inevitably fall short. Although it’s not a new idea that failure can be reframed as a stepping stone toward success rather than evidence of incompetence, the opportunity to make this frame explicit is often lost in the chaos of organizational life. Let’s return to Bezos to see how this reframe works.
In 2014, Amazon had spent roughly $170 million developing the Fire Phone, sold about 35,000 units, and discontinued it within 18 months. By traditional metrics, it was a significant setback. Bezos, however, treated it as an intelligent failure, which Amy’s work defines as an experiment carried out in new territory, in pursuit of a goal, with a thoughtful hypothesis, and kept small enough to be manageable. While $170 million sounds massive to most of us, size is relative. This loss represented less than 17 hours of Amazon’s total revenue in 2014. Fire had been a calculated bet that barely dented the company’s daily cash flow.
Moreover, much of the hardware engineering from the Fire Phone resurfaced two years later in the Kindle and Echo lines. Research on failure dynamics across science, startups, and security suggest that initial performance between those who ultimately succeed and those who stagnate is often remarkably similar. The difference tends to lie in whether each iteration builds systematically on past feedback. Leaders who reframe intelligent failure as useful data help teams learn faster. Without that perspective, teams are at risk of being unwilling to try anything new.
3. Shift from “No, unless” to “Yes, unless”
When teams recognize that intelligent failures are part of progress, leaders can shift a default mindset that shapes decision making in many companies. A defensive inertia makes defaulting to “No, unless you can prove otherwise” the norm. This stance unintentionally signals distrust and slows organizational learning. The leadership reframe here is to flip the default to “Yes, unless there is a clear risk.” Examples of this shift include:
- PTO policies: Shift from “No time off unless accrued and pre-approved” to “Yes, take time off unless it interferes with deliverables” (Netflix model).
- Side projects: Shift from “No work on unassigned tasks unless approved” to “Yes, use 20% of time for exploration unless core tasks suffer” (historical Google model).
- Customer support: Shift from “No deviations from script unless call time targets are met” to “Yes, do whatever it takes to help the customer unless it violates ethics” (Zappos model).
4. Question presumed constraints
Unexamined assumptions about what is possible limit organizational work in invisible ways. For instance, traditional banking assumed that small loans to low-income people were inherently unprofitable and risky. Muhammad Yunus founded Grameen Bank to offer micro-credit to impoverished entrepreneurs—explicitly challenging this assumption. The venture demonstrated that low-income borrowers maintained repayment rates within a bank’s risk appetite, helping spark a global industry.
Or, consider the story of high jumper Dick Fosbury, who took on the unquestioned assumption that athletes had to clear the bar facing forward. His backward “Fosbury Flop” offered a fresh approach that reshaped the sport.
It’s not a requirement for leaders to figure out which constraints should be challenged on their own. Rather they must invite teams to brainstorm possibilities together. Seems to us that challenging presumed constraints is a team sport.
5. View people and situations as dynamic, not static
When Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix placed sixth in the individual 10-meter platform final at the 2024 Olympic Games, she broke down in tears. As her father consoled her, Andrea wept, “It was just not meant to be.” Her father gently interrupted: “It wasn’t meant to be today. You did your best, Andrea. Some days you win, and some days you lose.” By adding a single word, today, Andrea’s father shifted the frame from a permanent fact into a point in a dynamic journey.
Leaders can help teams move past the trap of treating current performance, skills, or workplace friction as permanent facts. A team in conflict, a missed quarterly target, or an employee struggling with a new skill need not be seen as a fixed attribute. Describing them instead as true for now, but open to change through effort and learning, alters what a team sees as worth attempting.
- Static assumption: “This department is bad at cross-functional communication.”
- Dynamic reframe: “Currently, our communication tools create friction across teams. Here is how we might adjust our meeting rhythm this quarter.”
Someone who views expertise as a fixed asset will naturally perceive a new technology or advance in the field as threatening. Someone who views expertise as a work in progress is more likely to experience the same change as an opportunity to learn.
Designing and communicating a reframe
A reframe is unlikely to work by announcing it in an all-hands meeting or taping it, like a slogan, to a wall. To make a new perspective stick, we recommend leaders follow a three-step sequence:
- Define the challenge and articulate the current frame: With interest and energy, point to the potential assumptions that may be operating and leading to anxiety or hesitation.
- Articulate a new frame: Share the proposed reframe with a small group of stakeholders, preferably from varied groups in the organization, to get feedback, surface unaddressed concerns, and refine the narrative before sharing it widely.
- Repeat and reinforce: Consistently weave the new frame into regular workplace touchpoints—such as team syncs, 1-on-1s, and project updates—until it displaces old assumptions and becomes a trusted tool for navigating change.
Leaders cannot predict or control every wave of disruption, but they can offer thoughtful perspectives to help their teams interpret and navigate the terrain. In doing so, they can help transform uncertainty from a source of friction into an opportunity for ongoing learning and adaptation.
