Does it feel like you’re launching changes, yet nothing seems to change? I hear that sentiment regularly from leaders and employees who are tired, confused, and frustrated over the numerous failed change initiatives.
Every story starts the same; leaders implement, and things look like they’ve improved. But before long, people seem to revert to doing things the way they have always done them.
That’s what I call Yo-Yo change.
And it’s erratic, exhausting, and expensive for your organization.
Breaking the cycle of yo-yo change isn’t about more planning. It’s about shifting your focus and deepening your understanding of change to form new habits.
You can check out the video here:
Embrace the Lazy
Our brain is lazy; it wants to do the most work with the least effort. Habits enable it to do that; they are our built-in autopilot.
Comment below if you have ever engaged in a behaviour without thinking about it. For example, reflect on your morning routine. Have you ever found yourself driving to work when you meant to go elsewhere?
It’s estimated that habits drive 43% of our daily activities[1]. Habits are essential for survival, and once developed, they are permanent.
You never really get rid of them. The best we can do is overwrite unwanted or unhelpful existing habits with new, desirable, and helpful ones that reflect the current environment’s context.
Your existing habits are like well-established roadways. They are quick, automatic, and familiar. New habits require you to build new roadways, but the old ones always exist.
It’s like building new roads to address traffic congestion in an already developed city. The new construction includes overlaying and rerouting some existing roads, as well as building new extensions or roads to shift traffic flow.
Because the old roadways are still present and the new ones are unfamiliar and initially can be slower, it’s easy to drift back to the old, smooth, familiar roadways.
The failure to recognize, prepare, and provide the time, space, and support people need to build new habits and make them as familiar and easy as their existing ones is one reason your organizational change efforts don’t stick.
At least four things are needed to develop new habits and ensure they become as comfortable as the old ones. And they are even more important if you expect people to do similar work differently or with new tools.
It’s like a new roadway; the pavement settles over time. The new route becomes familiar and easier to follow, while the old road, although still there, crumbles and fades.
Let’s explore the four things you need to create the new habits that sustain the changes in your organization.
- Identify the new behaviours and habits your team must adopt to live your outcome story.
The first step is to identify the new behaviours and activities that must become habits for the organization to live its outcome story.
When we start working with clients and ask them to identify the behaviours needed to achieve the intended outcome, they often talk about training.
Training is important and often necessary. However, it does not lead to sustainable behaviour change. Training focuses on imparting knowledge and skills rather than fostering the behaviours required to apply those skills consistently and automatically.
- Create time, space, and begin the unlearning process before learning is expected.
Imagine a town where the houses, shops, parking lots, schools — every inch of land is already in use. Now, let’s say the town council wants to build a new community centre. To do that, you will need to reuse an existing space.
Your adult brain goes through a similar exercise. Neuroscientists call it competitive plasticity. To learn something new, your brain must clear and reassign existing space.
Clearing and preparing the space is the unlearning process every adult must undergo to adopt new behaviours and habits.
Unlearning involves overwriting, unsynching neurons that fire together, and creating new connections and pathways so the new activity can become embedded in our long-term memory.
Different chemistry is involved in unlearning than in learning, and that makes unlearning harder than learning. Yet, it’s essential so you don’t get overloaded and can retain the new learning, behaviours and activities.
- Environment
Your habits are your brain’s shortcuts, automatic behaviours created and shaped by the situation and the environment.
Research shows that our habitual behaviours are rooted in our daily environment; they are cued and maintained automatically and unconsciously by our environment[2].
That’s why to achieve sustainable change and live your outcome story, you must align your environment with the desired behaviours.
For example, one company that prioritized teamwork saw a dramatic shift in behaviour when it incorporated one simple question into its employee performance evaluation:
What is one action you take consistently to help your team be successful?
Aligning the environment to support the change could mean changing policies and procedures, performance evaluation, expectations, or even the physical layout.
It may also require adjusting how you lead day to day.
- Repetition and Reinforcement – Time
One of the biggest mistakes leaders make during organizational change is believing they are done when implementation ends.
However, real change happens after implementation, during integration. Integration is where the new behaviours become habits. Ignoring or short-circuiting integration makes it easy for previous habits to pull people back into their old patterns.
As James Clear notes in his book Atomic Habits, it’s not time but repetition that determines habits.
That’s why the integration phase is so critical. People need time, space and, more importantly, support to reinforce those new behaviours and activities until they become, how we do things around here.”
Because we never truly erase old habits; we only overwrite them, the old patterns will re-emerge if there is insufficient reinforcement of the new.
And if you’d like an experienced guide to help you along the change journey, book a Change Strategy Call with me today. Let’s explore how a guided conversation can create the foundation for successful, sustainable change.
[1] Karabell, S. (2018). Making Change is not a matter of Willpower. Strategy & Business.
[2] Wood W. & Ruenger, D. (2016) Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 280-314
