Why the plan wobbles by Tuesday

The gap is measurable

In 2006 Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran pulled together 47 experiments in which researchers changed people's intentions and then watched what they did. A medium-to-large change in intention (an effect size of 0.66) produced only a small-to-medium change in behaviour (0.36) (Webb and Sheeran, Psychological Bulletin, 2006).

Put simply, getting people to mean it gets you roughly half way. That matters for change, because most change effort is spent on the meaning-it half: the vision, the town hall, the cascade deck. Communication is not adoption.

What closes the gap

The good news is that the second half has also been studied, and some of the answers are surprisingly simple.

The best known is what psychologists call an implementation intention. Instead of "I will give my team more feedback," you decide "when I finish the Monday one-to-one, I will name one thing that went well and one thing to change." A specific situation, linked to a specific action.

A summary of 94 studies with more than 8,000 participants found these if-then plans had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals, with an effect size of 0.65 (Wieber, Thürmer and Gollwitzer, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2015). In one study Peter Gollwitzer describes, every woman who made a specific plan for when and where to do a breast self-examination went on to do it, compared with 53 percent of those who only intended to (Gollwitzer, American Psychologist, 1999). That is one study, and results in workplaces will usually be smaller. But the direction is consistent.

And forget 21 days

You will often hear that a new habit takes 21 days. There is no good evidence for that.

When Phillippa Lally and colleagues tracked people forming a new daily habit, the time it took for the behaviour to become automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days (Lally and colleagues, European Journal of Social Psychology, 2010). A later summary put the typical figure at around 66 days (Gardner, Lally and Wardle, British Journal of General Practice, 2012). For a leadership team trying to change how it meets, decides and follows up, that means the support needs to last months, not a fortnight.

The pattern underneath

There is a line in our research notes we keep coming back to: the reliable interventions are structural, the unreliable ones are motivational.

Motivation matters. But it fades, and it competes with everything else in a busy week. Structure, meaning the cue, the slot in the diary, the default in the system and the question asked every time, keeps working when the motivation has gone quiet.

What we suggest instead

1. Turn every commitment into an if-then.

   At the end of the offsite, do not stop at "we will be more decisive." Ask each person: when, exactly, will this show up, and what will you do in that moment? Write it down.

2. Attach new behaviour to existing routines.

   The weekly team meeting, the monthly review, the Friday report. New habits stick better when they hang off something already in the diary.

3. Change the defaults.

   If you want shorter meetings, set the calendar default to 25 minutes. If you want decisions recorded, put a "decision" field in the template. Make the new way the easy way.

4. Plan for the obstacle.

   Ask "what will get in the way?" and make an if-then for that too. "If the client call overruns, I will move the one-to-one, not cancel it."

5. Support it for months.

   Book check-ins at 30, 60 and 90 days before you leave the room. Expect slippage around week three. It is normal, not failure.

6. Measure behaviour, not sentiment.

   A pulse survey tells you how people feel about the change. A count of what actually happened tells you whether it is happening.