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The Missing Step in Sustaining Improvements:
Adopting Practices“You can’t break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You’ve got to walk it slowly down the stairs.”
Mark Twain
A key challenge, perhaps the greatest challenge of any change initiative is to sustain the desired improvement over time. Particularly, change initiatives that require people to behave in new or different ways.
In pursuit of continuous improvement, organizations undertake dozens of change initiatives, including being more responsive to customers, making business process improvements, becoming lean, developing cross-functional collaboration, enhancing leadership, strengthening accountability, and so on. Unfortunately, many of these efforts will fail to result in meaningful improvements. They will be introduced with enthusiastic fanfare, and six to twelve months later, there will be little evidence that they had any lasting effect at all.
Failed change initiatives carry tremendous costs. Besides wasting resources, organizations are deprived of the fruits of their efforts. And each time an organization fails to follow through on a declared decision to change, skepticism increases, creating powerful barriers to future efforts.
How can we shift our strategy to address this shortcoming and realize the desired benefits of our efforts? What specific steps should we take? Creating change that is sustained entails four steps:
• Awareness of the need for change,
• Acceptance of the responsibility to change,
• Action to change, and
• Adopting practices.
The adoption of practices is the ‘how’ we use to achieve a desired change. It is where the rubber meets the road—yet it is often given only minimal attention. Emphasizing the development and adoption of practices is the critical breakthrough needed to sustain improvement.
Practices are actions that are repeated often enough and long enough so they become the norm. For example, to change an old pattern, a person must select a new practice and consistently repeat this action until it becomes a habit—a process that typically takes three to six weeks.
People tend to be creatures of habit: habits then become patterns. Similarly, organizations have a rhythm, a set of existing norms, and an underlying culture. Only through the judicious development and adoption of new practices can we substitute new behaviors for old ones. Recognizing this will enhance our ability to seed sustainable change initiatives. As Mark Twain said, “You can’t break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You’ve got to walk it slowly down the stairs.” Not all changes involve eliminating negative behavior, of course, but Twain’s quote does speak to change as a process that takes place over time.
Steps for Developing Practices
A. Drawing on your change strategy, generate specific, actionable practices that incorporate the desired change.
B. Select just a few practices to facilitate the change.
C. Test these practices with a willing group to ensure viability.
D. Adopt practices within various groups to expand the integration effort.
E. Conduct monthly reviews to determine progress, to elicit learnings, and to provide positive reinforcement.
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