A framework for AI that actually fits your working day.
Most advice about AI at work starts with the technology. Here’s a tool. Here’s a prompt. Here’s a use case. But the reason so many organisations are stuck isn’t a tools problem – it’s a workflow problem. Your team doesn’t know where AI fits in their day.
That’s what Plan Learn Make Play is for. It maps the four modes of knowledge work and helps you figure out where AI helps, where it gets in the way, and where you still need to do the thinking yourself.
Plan is all the coordination—emails, scheduling, meeting prep, forms, budgets, comms plans. It’s the work that expands to fill your calendar if you let it. Each new commitment generates a cascade of enabling tasks: agree to write a report and suddenly you’re buried in research, subtasks, and back-and-forth emails. Agree to organise a conference and the planning work multiplies faster than you can track it.
The good news? Much of this work is structured and repeatable, which makes it well- suited for AI. Drafting routine responses, summarising meeting notes, prepping briefings, building agendas. Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that using AI to take on routine tasks lowered burnout scores by 15%. When AI handles more of the planning work, it frees up space for everything else.
Learn is everything you’re reading, processing, making sense of. AI can summarise and surface what matters. But the struggle of engaging with ideas is where understanding happens. Skip that, and you get cognitive offloading, which is the quiet outsourcing of thinking that erodes your judgement over time.
Make is the high-value creation, like reports, presentations, and strategy papers. AI works here as a co-pilot, not a ghostwriter. Hand it the whole task and you’ll likely produce “workslop”— content that looks polished but lacks substance. And, more troubling, it costs organisations millions in rework.
Play is the open-ended, strategic thinking: brainstorming, scenario modelling, exploring possibilities. It’s unstructured by design because that’s where new ideas come from. Use AI as a sparring partner: test arguments, roleplay conversations, model what happens when your strategy meets a competitor’s. Play is what enables your best big-picture, long-term thinking — and it’s the mode that gets squeezed hardest when Plan takes over.
Plan Learn Make Play is the framework we teach in our AI dexterity sprint, a one-week program where you’ll map AI to your own working day, build the skills to use it well, and leave with a practical plan for your team. If your people are already using AI (and they are), this is how you make it deliberate and productive.