Making Change Stick
The go-live party is over, the project team has moved on — and quietly, week by week, people drift back to the old way. It isn't sabotage. It's gravity. The organisation has a memory, and unless you design reinforcement into month 10 and beyond, the memory wins. Watch the snap-back happen below — then install the levers that stop it. About 15 minutes.
"I see my leaders behaving differently."
"I know why we changed, and I agree."
"The systems around me reinforce it."
"I can actually do it."
Go-live is the midpoint, not the finish
Most change plans end where the risk begins. Budgets, attention, and the project team are all scheduled around a single date — and on that date the new way is at its most fragile: skills are shallow, habits are one week old, and every system around them still remembers the old world. Nothing needs to go wrong for adoption to decay. Decay is the default — four forces guarantee it.
The influence model, in brief
The four quadrants in the simulator come from McKinsey's influence model, one of the most durable findings in change research: people genuinely change how they work when four conditions hold at once — they see leaders modelling it, they understand why and believe it, the formal systems around them reinforce it, and they have the skills to do it.
The word that matters is at once. Each quadrant covers a different reason people revert, so a missing quadrant isn't a 25% loss — it's a leak the other three drain through. Sustainment is a designed system, not an announcement: you are engineering the environment people return to on Monday, not asking them to remember a message.
Defaults beat willpower — at scale, it isn't close
Notice which lever carries the most weight in the simulator: changing the default. That's not an accident of our model — it's the central finding of a few decades of behavioural science. Willpower is a per-person, per-day resource that collapses under deadline pressure. A default is environmental: it works on every person, every day, at zero ongoing cost, including on the days nobody is paying attention.
🔁 This is ADKAR's R
If you've followed the change management path this far, you've met ADKAR: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability — and then Reinforcement, the letter most projects never budget for. Everything on this page is the R. Awareness through Ability get you to the go-live peak; Reinforcement decides where the curve settles afterwards.
The habit researchers put it plainly: you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Make the new way the path of least resistance — the default screen, the pre-filled template, the only process the onboarding deck contains — and the organisation's memory starts working for the change instead of against it. Environment design is reinforcement you only have to pay for once.
Build your stick plan
Theory doesn't survive contact with month 10 — commitments do. Name a real change you're landing right now, then write one concrete commitment per quadrant. Small and specific beats grand and vague: a commitment you can verify in a calendar is worth ten principles. Print it, or copy it into your project's sustainment page.
Your change
Target plateau: install levers in the simulator above to set a target.
- Role modelling — not yet committed —
- Understanding & conviction — not yet committed —
- Formal mechanisms — not yet committed —
- Talent & skills — not yet committed —
Sustainment owner: unassigned — the plan isn't real until this has a name
Who owns month 10?
Every project has an owner for go-live. Almost none has an owner for the month after — which is exactly when the old way makes its move. So before the project team disbands, ask the one question this whole page exists for: who owns month 10? A name, a metric, and a standing review. If nobody owns the plateau, the plateau will be the old baseline — the organisation has a memory, and it's patient.