You sent your whole team through a two-day training course. They got their certificates. They said the right things in the hallway for about a week. They were catalyzed, they were inspired. We love to see that happen.
And you can even say Lance did a great job, got them moving and inspired and thinking. And then nothing changed.
I call it organizational gravity, and it's strongest at the beginning. When people get back to their desks, they get swamped with the day-to-day work, and your change efforts die right there. It's really a reinforcement problem, not a training problem, and it's the reason that most transformations fail.
So I want you to be cognizant of the idea that change is slow. Slower than you want it to be. Change is expensive, with some studies estimating $500 to $2,000 per employee per year in cost. The question isn't whether you can afford to transform. You have to. It's whether you can afford to keep reinforcing nothing.
The Real Problem With Organizational Change
What I see all the time related to transformation planning comes down to a pattern. I'll give you a story. I have a VP of engineering who hires a consulting firm. They do this big assessment, run all these workshops, and build a custom adoption plan for the organization. They train 300 people over six weeks. A monumental amount of work. Month three, nothing has changed.
Teams are still working the same way. The daily standups are still just a status performance. The product backlogs are just a list of feature factory items. The VP is frustrated, the consultants are already gone, and the teams? Well, they actually liked the training. They thought it was cool. It just didn't connect to anything they do in the trenches, or it was too big.
Now don't get me wrong, I do plenty of educational training and I think it's really important. It helps create awareness, maybe even some desire or inspiration. In fact, awareness is the first step in a five-step journey. Leaders who confuse step one with the finish line will keep getting this result over and over again.
Organizational gravity is really strong. It's been built over years and supported by every hire you make across the organization to actually reinforce that culture. It doesn't change overnight.
The conventional response to a stalled transformation is just more training. Get another workshop, get a refresher course. Sometimes a new consultant can bring a slightly different framework. But to me, that's the wrong approach most of the time. Behavior change is not an event. It's an environment, or even a culture, if you want to think about it that way. Your job as a leader is to design the environment, not just fund the kickoff and check in a month later to see what happens.
The ADKAR Model: Where Most Organizations Stop Too Early
There are so many frameworks out there, but what I want to talk about today is the ADKAR model from Prosci. You can find it online, and I'll put the link in the description.
What I find is that most organizations invest heavily in the first three parts of the ADKAR model: Awareness, Desire, and Knowledge. They send the email, they run the training, they share the vision deck, and then they stop.
The problem is that you stopped right there. We need to also build Ability and Reinforcement, which is where the transformation actually lives. Ability means someone can actually perform the new behavior under real conditions. Not just in a classroom, not in a simulated sprint review. In a backlog refinement on a day when everything is on fire, they need to be able to handle those situations using what they learned in training.
Reinforcement is the environment that keeps that behavior going long after the novelty of the workshop wears off. Without it, people drift back to what they knew. That's organizational gravity. And that's not a character flaw. That's human nature.
People don't like change they didn't initiate. And if they didn't initiate the change, they need to know why we're changing and what's the benefit. James Clear talks about this in his book Atomic Habits. He makes the point that incentives can catalyze and start behavior, but identity sustains it. Until the new way of working becomes part of how the team sees itself, it's always just one bad quarter away from evaporating.
The new behaviors cost time and money, and a lot of times we're just not giving people permission to spend the time on them.
Kotter's Eight Steps: Why Most Transformations Unravel at the End
The second framework a lot of you are probably familiar with is Kotter's eight-step process for leading change. John Kotter has spent decades researching why organizational transformations either succeed or fail, and he published all of that data through Kotter International.
The eight steps are:
- Establish urgency
- Build a guiding coalition
- Form a vision and strategy
- Communicate that vision and strategy
- Remove barriers
- Generate short-term wins
- Sustain acceleration
- Anchor the changes in culture
Most organizations do reasonably well with steps one through five. The urgency usually exists because of a budget pressure or a board mandate. It's not always a real urgency, but they'll build a coalition, communicate it, and then declare victory somewhere around step six. Maybe a few early wins and then they stop.
Kotter is clear about this: the last two steps, sustaining acceleration and anchoring change in the culture, are where most transformations start to unravel. You can't anchor something in culture if you stop reinforcing it at month four.
Another interesting thing is that Kotter doesn't say you have to do all eight steps in exact order. He says you can't skip a step, but sometimes they go a little out of order. He's even said his editor forced him to put them in a numbered sequence.
When Scaling Kills Momentum
Here's what I see in practice. A company runs a successful pilot of a new operating model. Two teams get really good results, leadership's excited, and then they scale it across 12 teams. Three months later, eight of those 12 teams have quietly reverted to the old patterns because the manager who was championing it moved on, the coaching got defunded, or some structure went away that was actually keeping the behaviors visible.
Kotter would call that a failure at step eight. I call it a reinforcement desert. It's just arid and dry out there.
ADKAR and Kotter Are Complementary
These two frameworks aren't competing. They're complementary. Kotter gives us what he calls organizational choreography: the stages of large-scale transformation. ADKAR gives you the individual-level lens of how people are performing within that transformation.
Every person on your team is somewhere along that ADKAR journey, and our job as leaders is to know where they are and when to support their next step.
A Practical 30-60-90 Day Adoption Plan
Most leaders are used to a 30-60-90 format, so I like to start with something familiar. Whether you're rolling out a new AI tool, a platform engineering model, an HR policy, or just trying to make agile work in ways that aren't ceremonial, all of these are important types of transformation change.
Days 1–30: Awareness and Desire
This maps to the Awareness and Desire phase of ADKAR. Your job here is not to train everyone. Your job is to make the problem undeniable and make the direction clear.
Pick two or three examples from inside the organization of what the current approach is costing you. Use real data, not abstract metrics. Real stories. "We lost a customer because we couldn't ship a feature faster than our competitor. Cost us millions of dollars." That feature sat in review for six weeks. Make the status quo uncomfortable without attacking people.
Then introduce new behaviors gradually: one team, one practice, one observable signal of success at a time. Short-term wins aren't a checkbox for Kotter. They're the fuel that keeps urgency alive when the excitement of the launch fades.
Here's the key in the first 30 days: identify your guiding coalition. Not a steering committee, but a coalition. People at different levels of the organization who believe in the change and are willing to model it publicly. They are your cultural multipliers. And give them the time to do this. Saying yes to a new thing always means saying no to something, whether you acknowledge it or not.
Days 31–60: Building Ability
You're moving from people who know about the change to people who can actually do it under the day-to-day pressure of the organization. This is where coaching matters more than training. I do both, and training has to happen, but training happens in a room. Coaching happens at their work.
Pair someone with change champions during actual sprint planning, not a simulated one. Watch the retrospective outcomes. Are you having the right conversations? Are they happening? If not, that's your signal that ability has not yet been built.
Reinforce the behaviors you want to see, specifically and publicly. When you notice a team called out their dependency in a planning meeting and resolved it before it became a blocker, call that out. That 40-second conversation does way more than a two-hour workshop.
I'm reminded of Ken Blanchard. He has a saying that stuck with me in my early leadership training at FedEx Express: "Catch your people doing something approximately right and then celebrate that."
But also watch for resistance, and don't pathologize it. Resistance is a normal and expected part of change. People aren't bad because they push back. They're human. Your job is to understand what they're worried about and address it, not label them as "change resistors" and move on.
Days 60–90: Reinforcement and Culture Anchoring
By now you should have enough behavioral data to actually know what's working and what's not. Are people using the new tool? Are they running retrospectives or just holding them? Are decisions being made with evidence or just opinion?
This is the phase where you restructure the feedback loops. Change what gets celebrated. Make the new behaviors visible in metrics, not just in conversation. If you're trying to accelerate delivery, put lead time metrics on the wall. If you're trying to improve cross-team collaboration, make those cross-team dependencies visible in every planning event.
Here's the one leadership behavior that anchors everything: when something goes wrong, what do you do? If leaders respond to failure with blame and finger pointing, people will stop experimenting. But if leaders respond with curiosity, asking "What did we learn from that? What do we try next?", the new culture will start to take root. That's catalyst leadership.
Kotter calls this anchoring in culture. I call it the moment where you find out whether you actually meant it.
The 30-60-90 Is a Coaching Cadence, Not a Checklist
The 30-60-90 is not a checklist. It's a coaching cadence. Every 30 days, you're going to ask: Do people know why we're doing this? Do they want to do it? Can they actually do it? Is the environment reinforcing it?
If any of those answers are no, that's your highest-leverage work right now. That's where you're going to earn your salary, through leading change. And that's what Kotter calls his book: Leading Change.
What You Can Do Next Week
Pull up the last three retrospective outcomes from one of your teams. Read through the action items and ask yourself: how many of those were actually ever followed up on?
If the answer is most of them, you're on your way to a culture of reinforcement. But if the answer is not many, you just found your biggest leverage point for the next stage of your transition.
Retrospectives that generate orphaned action items aren't really retrospectives. They're complaint sessions. And worse, they build dissension in your change efforts.
So pick a team, pick your next retro, and personally show up to close the loop on the last two action items before you open new ones. This isn't an audit. It's a model you're trying to reinforce. You're showing that you take this seriously and you expect the same from your teams.
I know we're not supposed to be in retrospectives if you're a leader. But if what's happening is a complaint session, that's not really a retrospective anyway. Show up and say, "How could I help us?" Done consistently, that teaches the team more about what you actually value than any training session ever could.
After that, identify one person on your guiding coalition who can sustain that rhythm when you're not there. You can't do all of this on your own. And that's how you stop being the change and start building a culture that carries it forward.
Change That Sticks Is Not Dramatic
Change that sticks is not a big launch. It's not a new logo for an initiative or a keynote with a slide deck. Those things might be important to generate excitement, but lasting change is the slow, patient, consistent work of making the new way of doing things easier than the old way. And responding to setbacks with curiosity instead of blame.
You are tending to a garden that takes grace, patience, and mercy.
Kotter spent 30 years studying these things, and his conclusion lines up with what I've seen consistently in my 20 years of doing this: organizations that win aren't the ones with the best strategy. They're the ones with the greatest capacity for continuous change, and the persistence to stick with it.
That capacity is built through the reinforcement we talked about. Through culture. Through leadership that shows up every 30 days and asks: is this environment still supporting the behavior we need?
You have the frameworks now. ADKAR gives you the individual roadmap. Kotter gives you the organizational choreography. The 30-60-90 gives you structure. What comes next is entirely up to you.
After 20 years of this work, here's what I know: the teams that get there aren't the ones that trained harder. Training is a great door. Reinforcement is what happens on the other side of that door. Most leaders fund the door and forget about the hallway. Don't be that leader.
If you're thinking about bringing agile training or coaching into your organization, or if your transformation has stalled and you need help with the reinforcement side, check out our upcoming classes and courses. I'd love to help you along the journey.