Making Change Stick
Making Change Stick keeps the change your delivery programme landed adopted and improving as conditions move, and builds your own people's ability to reinforce and run it. The core is the capability your team carries, with an optional light rhythm you can keep us on for as long as it helps.
Making Change Stick keeps a delivered change adopted and improving, and we reinforce six things: we catch backsliding and reinforce the new way, anchor it into how the place actually works, make the wins visible, grow your change agents into a standing network, build change fluency in your leaders and managers, and re-measure adoption against your readiness baseline. The result is a change that holds and keeps getting better, run by your own people.
This is a blend you scope with us. The core is building your own capability to sustain the change: the reinforcement habits, the change-agent network, and the change fluency in your leaders and managers. On top of that sits an optional lighter rhythm - periodic re-measures against your baseline, health-checks, and course-correction with us as a critical friend. You can take the capability and run it alone, keep us on a light rhythm, or both, and that balance can shift as your people take more on.
81% of people who planned for reinforcement and sustainment met or exceeded their objectives, against 15% of those who did not. Reinforcement is what keeps a delivered change adopted rather than fading after go-live (Prosci, Best Practices in Change Management study, 2023).
When this helps
Clients bring us in for this stage once a change has been delivered and they want it to last. These are the situations we hear most often. If one sounds like yours, this is a good place to start.
The situation | How it helps |
|---|---|
You delivered a change and want it to last | Puts a reinforcement rhythm around the delivered change, so adoption holds and keeps improving instead of slipping once attention moves on |
A past change faded once attention moved elsewhere | Catches old habits creeping back and reinforces the new way, so this change does not decay the way the last one did |
You want to own and run it in-house | Builds change fluency in your leaders and managers and a standing change-agent network, so your own people reinforce and sustain the change |
You want a light critical friend, not a big programme | Gives you a periodic rhythm of health-checks and course-correction at a cadence you set, with ownership sitting firmly with your team |
The world is shifting and the change needs to flex | Re-measures adoption as conditions move and refreshes the approach, so the change keeps fitting the situation rather than going stale |
You inherited a delivered change that is quietly decaying | Reads where adoption has drifted, reinforces what is slipping, and hands your people the fluency to keep it alive |
What keeping it stuck involves
We reinforce six things, and lead with the moves that keep a delivered change from fading:
- Catch backsliding and reinforce the new way - We watch for the moment old habits start to creep back and act on it: recognition where the new way is working, and gentle corrective action where it is slipping. This is the reinforcement move that keeps a delivered change adopted.
- Build change fluency in your leaders and managers - We build your people's own ability to run change: leaders who read a situation and adapt their approach, and managers who carry a team through a transition. This fluency is what lets you sustain and evolve the change yourselves.
- Grow your change agents into a standing network - We turn the champions who carried delivery into a lasting change community of practice: people who reinforce adoption in their own teams, feed real signals back, and spread what works. This is the group that owns this change and carries the next one.
- Anchor the change in how the place actually works - We thread the new ways of working into your processes, incentives, recognition and onboarding, so they become the default rather than an initiative. Anchored this deeply, the change holds even when the leaders who sponsored it move on.
- Make the wins visible and keep sponsors present - We surface the proof that the new way is working and put it in front of people, and we keep your leaders visibly backing it. Visible results and present sponsorship carry the momentum that sustained adoption runs on.
- Re-measure adoption against the readiness baseline - We run a lighter recalibration against the picture your readiness assessment set at the start, tracking adoption, proficiency and utilisation to see whether the change is holding and where it is drifting. It is a periodic check, not a re-run of the full assessment.
Why these six
These six are what keeps a delivered change alive once the programme ends. The first three are the change service's home turf: reinforcement catches regression before old habits harden, change fluency puts the ability to run change inside your own people, and a standing change-agent network gives that fluency a home. The next two make the change part of the furniture - anchored into process and incentives, and kept visible so momentum does not drain away. The last one is the loop that tells you whether it is working: a light re-measure against the baseline your readiness assessment set, so drift shows up early.
They follow the established reinforcement frameworks - the Reinforcement building block in ADKAR, the Sustain Outcomes phase of the Prosci process, and Kotter's step on anchoring change in the culture - so the work covers what sustaining a change actually takes, not just a check-in. We use the frameworks to keep the work complete, never as a model to run at you.
How it works
The method keeps one thing going: a delivered change that stays adopted and keeps improving, run by your own people. It works by putting the capability inside your organisation and setting a light rhythm you can run, with us on call as much or as little as you choose. It works in four modes.
- We scope how much you hold and how much we hold - First we agree the blend: how much of the reinforcement rhythm and change fluency your people take on, and how much light ongoing support you want from us. You can take the capability and run alone, keep us on a periodic rhythm, or both. It is never a heavy retainer, and the balance shifts over time as your team takes more on.
- We build the capability into your people - We build the reinforcement habits into your leaders and managers, grow your change agents into a standing network, and set the routines that catch backsliding and reinforce the new way. This is the change fluency that lets your own people sustain and evolve the change without needing us in the room.
- We set a light rhythm you run - We put a simple cadence in place that your team owns: periodic reinforcement reviews, a re-measure of adoption against your stage-01 baseline, and a refresh of the approach as conditions change. It is a standing rhythm, not a programme.
- We step back, and stay reachable as you choose - The capability sits with your people, so we hand it over and move out of the day-to-day. From there you decide how present we stay: a periodic health-check, a call when something shifts, or nothing at all until you want us. The choice is yours to set and to change.
The thinking behind the method
Delivered change decays when nobody owns the reinforcement. The Prosci research is blunt about it: far more organisations plan for reinforcement than actually resource it, and the ones that skip it are the ones whose change slips back toward the old way within months of go-live. So the answer is not to keep an outside team parked on it. The answer is to put the ability to reinforce inside the organisation, where it can run for as long as the change needs it.
That is why the capability build is the core and the ongoing rhythm is optional. Your leaders, managers and change agents are the people best placed to catch backsliding, because they are in the room every day. Our job is to build that fluency into them, set a rhythm they can run themselves, and then get out of the way - available as a critical friend if and when that helps, never as a dependency the change relies on.
What you get
By the end, you have four things:
- A change that stays adopted and keeps improving - the change your delivery programme landed holds as conditions move, reinforced rather than left to fade.
- Your own people owning and running it - change fluency in your leaders and managers and a standing change-agent network, so the capability to sustain the change lives inside the organisation.
- A light rhythm and the loops in place - a reinforcement cadence and a re-measure against your baseline that your team runs, so drift shows up early and gets corrected.
- The option of us on call - a critical friend at the cadence you choose, from a periodic health-check to nothing until you want us.
Owned by your people, supported by us - as much or as little as you need, and less over time as your own fluency grows.
When we step back - and staying on call
This is the final stage, so it closes the loop. The capability sits with your people by design, so we hand the reinforcement rhythm and the change-agent network fully to them and move out of the day-to-day. You set how present we stay from there: a periodic health-check, a call when conditions shift, or nothing until you reach for us. It is never a standing dependency.
The re-measure against your readiness baseline is what keeps it honest over time. Most of the time it confirms the change is holding, or flags a drift your own team corrects. But when the world moves far enough that the change needs a bigger reset rather than a nudge, that same loop points back to the diagnostic, and the four-stage cycle begins again on the new reality.
Where this sits
Making Change Stick is the final stage in how we approach change management. It re-measures against the baseline the Change Readiness Assessment set at the start, and it sustains the change the Change Delivery Programme delivered - keeping the whole four-stage investment fit rather than letting it fade once the programme ends. When conditions move far enough to need a bigger reset, its re-measurement loops back to re-diagnose and the cycle starts again. It also stands on its own: if you have a delivered or inherited change that is quietly decaying, this is where to start.
Common questions
How is this different from the Change Readiness Assessment?
The Change Readiness Assessment reads your readiness from scratch and sets a baseline before a change begins. This re-measures against that baseline once the change is delivered, tracking adoption, proficiency and utilisation to see whether it is holding and where it is drifting. It re-measures, it does not re-assess. If you never ran the assessment, we set a light baseline to measure against instead.
How is this different from the Change Delivery Programme?
The Change Delivery Programme was the big programme that delivered the change through the messy middle and drove adoption. This is the ongoing rhythm that keeps that delivered change reinforced, anchored and improving afterward. It sustains and evolves the change, it does not re-deliver it.
Do we have to keep you on retainer?
No. The core of the work is building the capability into your own people, so you can take that and run it yourselves. The ongoing rhythm is optional and scoped with you: keep us on a light periodic cadence if it helps, drop to a call when you need one, or take it fully in-house. It is never a heavy retainer, and you are never required to keep us.
What will our own people be able to do?
Sustain and evolve the change without needing us in the room. Your leaders learn to read a change and adapt their approach, your managers can carry a team through a transition, and your change agents form a standing network that reinforces adoption and spreads what works. That change fluency also equips you to run the next change yourselves.
Isn't this just re-running the audit every so often?
No. The re-measure against your baseline is one part of it, and it is deliberately lighter than the original assessment. The larger part is active reinforcement: catching backsliding, keeping the wins visible, anchoring the new way into how the place works, and building the fluency in your people to keep doing all of that themselves. It is a standing capability, not a repeated audit.
How much of this can we run ourselves?
As much as you want, and more over time. Many clients take the capability build - the reinforcement habits, the change-agent network, the fluency in their leaders and managers - and run the whole rhythm in-house, keeping us only as an occasional critical friend. Others hold us on a light cadence for a while and taper it as their own people take more on. We scope the balance with you, and it is meant to shift toward you.
Ready to make the change stick?
Tell us what you have delivered and what you want to keep alive, and we will talk through what sustaining it would look like for you - how much capability to build into your people, and whether a light ongoing rhythm would help. You decide how much you hold and how much we do, and that balance can change as your own fluency grows.