Implementing change within an organisation is notoriously difficult; there’s a reason it’s often referred to as ‘turning a tanker around’.
A new initiative is launched – usually involving an immense amount of effort and time – and people might engage optimistically. But before long, things begin to slide, old habits creep back in, and your tanker drifts right back to where it started.
It’s something that leaders grapple with so much in coaching and development conversations that this is a two-part blog series. We’ll first look at the main blockers and why change is so difficult to implement, and the follow-up blog will run through the insights and solutions we have gleaned from years of experience that contribute towards long-lasting, sustainable change.
When an organisation implements changes, people don’t go back to their old ways because of a lack of effort – change fails to stick because organisations have a natural resting state or equilibrium which is harder to shift.
There are established structures, deeply embedded habits and just a ‘way that things are done’. You can introduce new practices, but you’ll often find things like how meetings are run and who makes decisions simply slide back to what is comfortable and familiar.
We call it the ‘snap-back effect’, where change sits outside the familiar and ‘normal’ established patterns. You can see this when someone returns from a training course full of enthusiasm, only to find their day-to-day role remains the same. People are left trying to behave differently in an environment that still rewards the old way.
When the conveyor belt of meetings, decisions, deadlines, and delivery keeps moving, people will default to what’s easiest and fastest. Considering the mounting pressures of so many workplaces, it’s no surprise that people default to the path of least resistance.
People may have been shown a new process or way of working, but if there’s no sufficient pause to actually accommodate it, embedding change for the long term is going to be difficult. Even when ‘bedding in’ time is allowed, organisations often vastly underestimate how long it takes for new processes to be truly embedded.
That’s why it’s worth considering who is the ‘champion’ of this change within an organisation.
If it’s being driven by a specific individual, like a consultant or a project manager, you run the risk of only succeeding whilst that person is actively involved. We should never focus on implementing change if we are not also focused on ensuring it sticks.
Whoever is leading the change initiative needs to be as well versed in setting up accountability and embedding the conditions for sustained behaviour change as they are in delivering the change itself. Because ultimately, the real measure of success isn’t whether change happens in the moment, but whether it continues once the ‘change champion’ steps away, and whether it becomes part of how the organisation naturally operates.
This is something we always hammer home when we work on any change project, no matter how big or small: that short-term training or workshops are brilliant in creating awareness and motivation, but whilst they introduce new ideas, they don’t alter the system people return to. They are disconnected from real work and lack the monitoring and reinforcement that is essential over the crucial ‘change period’ and beyond.
Watch out for part two of this blog series, which looks at how to make change stick.