Why Transformation Fails When We Focus on the Change Instead of the Behaviour

I’ve worked on enough transformation programs over the years to know that organisations can become very good at implementing change without necessarily changing very much.

A new system goes live, a new operating model is launched, processes are redesigned or structures change. There will usually be a communications plan, a training plan and a change plan, along with a very impressive PowerPoint presentation explaining what the future is going to look like. On paper, everything suggests the organisation has transformed.

Then you come back several months later and discover people are still finding ways to work around it.

The system might technically be live, but spreadsheets are flourishing alongside it. The new process exists, but teams have developed their own variations. Decision rights have been documented, but everyone still takes the difficult decisions back to the same senior leader. The organisation chart has changed, yet the relationships, informal hierarchies and ways work actually gets done remain remarkably familiar.

We tend to describe what happens next as a change management problem. I think it is often a behaviour problem that we haven’t defined clearly enough.

We confuse the thing we are changing with the change we need

If an organisation is implementing a new enterprise system, it is very easy for the system itself to become the transformation.

We talk about implementing SAP or Dynamics or Salesforce. We establish a program around it and measure progress through design, configuration, testing, training and go-live. There are milestones and deliverables and eventually a very clear moment when the organisation can say the system has been implemented.

But if you go back to why the organisation was prepared to invest millions of dollars in the first place, the technology itself was rarely the point.

The organisation probably wanted better visibility of information, more reliable data, faster decisions or less duplication. It might have wanted clearer accountability, a better customer experience, more consistent processes or fewer manual workarounds. Perhaps it simply wanted to be able to see what was happening across the organisation without piecing the answer together from multiple systems and spreadsheets.

Technology can help create those things, but achieving them will almost always require people to behave differently as well.

That distinction matters because we can successfully deliver the technology while failing to create the behaviours required to produce the value we expected from it. The project can therefore be technically successful while the transformation it was supposed to enable never really happens.

The behaviour is often hiding inside the business case

One of the most useful questions I think we can ask in transformation is deceptively simple:

What will people actually need to do differently for this to work?

I mean that quite literally. What will someone need to do differently on an ordinary Tuesday morning?

A salesperson who currently keeps customer information in their own notes might need to enter it into a shared system so somebody else can rely on it. A manager who has always made decisions independently might need to involve another function earlier. A project leader might need to maintain project information properly in one place instead of producing a separate report whenever an executive asks for an update.

At an organisational level, the behavioural change can be even more significant. Teams that have spent years optimising their own part of a process may suddenly be expected to make decisions based on what works best across the whole organisation. Leaders may need to stop accepting workarounds that solve an immediate problem but undermine the new way of working.

When we describe transformation at that level, we start to see what actually has to change. The technology may be an important enabler, but it is only one part of the environment in which those behaviours need to occur.

The current behaviour usually makes sense somewhere

This is also where I think organisations can become unnecessarily frustrated with their people.

When someone continues using the old process after a new one has been introduced, it is tempting to interpret that as resistance to change. Sometimes that may genuinely be what is happening, but I wouldn’t want to reach that conclusion before understanding why the existing behaviour is persisting.

People rarely maintain a workaround for absolutely no reason.

If I sit beside someone and watch how they actually do their job, I might discover that their spreadsheet is quicker. I might find that the formal process requires information they cannot easily access, or that another part of the organisation is still operating differently, which means following the new process actually creates additional work for them. I might discover that their manager talks about the importance of the new system but still asks for the old spreadsheet every Friday afternoon.

At that point, I become much less interested in whether the employee is sufficiently committed to the transformation and much more interested in what the organisation itself is reinforcing.

Because if we have designed an environment in which the old behaviour remains easier, quicker or more useful than the behaviour we want, telling people to embrace the transformation with greater enthusiasm is unlikely to solve very much.

Leaders are part of the behavioural environment too

I think this becomes particularly interesting when we look at leadership behaviour, because organisations can quite easily ask employees to work differently while senior leaders continue behaving in ways that reinforce the old operating model.

We might introduce clearer decision rights but continue escalating decisions because leaders are uncomfortable allowing them to be made elsewhere. We might say we want greater collaboration across functions while continuing to measure and reward leaders almost entirely on the performance of their individual function. We might ask people to use a single source of truth while executives continue requesting bespoke reports because that is how they prefer to receive information.

None of those things necessarily happen because somebody is deliberately undermining the transformation. In isolation, each decision might make perfectly good sense.

The problem is what they communicate collectively about how the organisation really works.

People are constantly learning from the environment around them. They notice which behaviours are rewarded, which rules can quietly be ignored, where decisions really get made and what senior people do when the pressure is on. Over time, those observations teach people far more about the behaviours that are expected of them than anything we put into a transformation plan.

Go-live is a terrible place to stop thinking about change

There is something psychologically satisfying about go-live because it gives transformation a finish line. Years of work have gone into reaching that moment, so I completely understand why organisations want to celebrate it as an achievement.

From a behavioural perspective, though, I think it is often much closer to the beginning.

A new system, process or operating model creates the conditions in which people can work differently. Once people begin interacting with it in real situations, under time pressure, with competing priorities and alongside all the habits and informal practices that existed before the transformation arrived, we begin to find out whether they actually will.

That is the point at which I become really interested in what is happening.

Where are people reverting to old behaviours, and why? Where are workarounds beginning to appear? Which parts of the new process are creating unnecessary friction? What are managers inadvertently reinforcing? Where has the intended behaviour genuinely become easier, and where are we still asking people to work against the environment around them?

I don’t necessarily see those observations as evidence that the transformation has failed. I see them as information about what still needs our attention.

I would start with the behaviour much earlier

None of this diminishes the importance of good technology, process design, governance, communication or training. Of course transformation needs those things.

Where I think we make transformation considerably harder is when we begin with the thing we are implementing and only later ask how we are going to get people to adopt it.

I would rather bring the behavioural question much further forward.

If this transformation succeeds, what will people actually be doing differently?

Once we can answer that clearly, we can start looking at whether the processes, systems, incentives, leadership behaviours, information flows and everyday working environment make those behaviours easier or harder.

And I think that changes the conversation.

Instead of assuming that transformation occurs when the new system goes live or the new operating model appears on a slide, we start paying attention to what is happening in the organisation itself. Are decisions being made differently? Is information being shared differently? Are old workarounds disappearing? Are leaders reinforcing the behaviours the transformation depends upon? Is the way work gets done actually changing?

Because ultimately, that is where I think transformation becomes real.

It happens when what people actually do begins to change.

And if we know that from the beginning, perhaps we can start designing transformation around the behaviour we need rather than hoping the behaviour will follow everything else.