Behavior Follows Conditions, Not Announcements

The VP asked the question we've heard a hundred times: "Why aren't people using it? We explained it in three town halls. We showed them the benefits. The training scores were high. What else do they need?"

Here's what she was really asking: Why won't people just do what we told them to do?

The answer is uncomfortable: People aren't resisting your change. They're responding to the conditions you built.

You can announce a new behavior all you want. But behavior doesn't follow announcements. It follows design.

The Awareness Delusion

Most change efforts operate on a seductive myth: if people understand the change, they'll do it.

So we explain harder. We add more slides. We schedule more sessions. We create better talking points. We launch another communication. And when adoption still doesn't happen, we assume people don't understand or don't care.

Both assumptions are usually wrong.

Your people understand perfectly. They understood in the first town hall. They're not stupid, and they're not obstinate. They're busy. And everything in their actual work environment is still telling them to do the old thing.

Understanding doesn't change behavior. Conditions change behavior.

You can explain the new expense approval process until you're hoarse, but if the old system still works, if their manager still expects same-day turnarounds, if the new process adds 15 minutes to their day with no time removed from anywhere else—they're going to find a workaround. Not because they're resistant. Because they're rational.

How Humans Actually Work

Here's the thing about human behavior that most change plans ignore: we run on defaults, not decisions.

You don't decide to check your phone when you're bored. You don't decide to take the same route to work. You don't decide to start meetings the way you always start meetings. You just... do. Because habits are efficient, norms are powerful, and making constant conscious choices is exhausting.

Now add: time scarcity, unclear priorities, role expectations from your manager that haven't changed even though the process has, and a well-founded suspicion that this initiative will fade like the last three.

This is the environment where you're asking people to "just adopt the new way."

It's not an energy problem. It's a design problem.

People don't need more motivation to change. They need fewer reasons not to.

The Five Levers of Actual Behavior Change

Real adoption happens when you design the conditions people work in. We use five levers to diagnose and build those conditions: Intention, Habits, Norms, Capacity, and Trust.

These aren't categories of "soft stuff" to check off. They're constraints. If any lever is set wrong, adoption stalls—regardless of how compelling your business case is.

Intention is whether people see the value in terms that matter to their actual work. Not whether they heard the vision. Not whether they agree change is needed. But whether they believe this specific behavior will make their specific job better, or at least not worse. A warehouse supervisor doesn't care about enterprise integration. She cares about whether her team can still hit their picks-per-hour target.

Habits are the automatic behaviors that take over when people are busy, stressed, or distracted—which is most of the time. The triggers, routines, and rewards that run without conscious thought. If the old system still opens when they click the desktop icon, habit wins. If the new process requires three extra steps and the old shortcut still works, habit wins. You can't will your way past a habit. You have to redesign the environment.

Norms are what the group actually rewards and punishes, regardless of what the policy says. If your best performer still uses the old method and nobody says anything, that's the norm. If managers praise people who "get creative" with workarounds, that's the norm. If the executive team talks about the new way but operates the old way, everyone notices. Norms trump formal authority every time.

Capacity is whether people have the time, tools, cognitive bandwidth, and authority to do the new thing. "Just add this" is not a plan when people are already at capacity. If the new process takes longer and you didn't remove anything else, you built failure into the design. If people need approval from someone who doesn't understand the change, you built a bottleneck. Capacity isn't about effort. It's about realistic constraints in an already-constrained system.

Trust is whether people believe leadership will support them when adoption gets hard, or punish them when it doesn't go smoothly. It's whether they trust that this change will stick, or if they should wait it out like the last one. Trust isn't built with reassuring messages. It's built with follow-through, transparency when things break, and credible messengers—not just cheerleaders.

All five levers matter. Always. You can't compensate for a broken trust lever with better training. You can't overcome a capacity problem with inspiring intention. The system only works when you design for all five.

Which Lever Is Breaking?

A manufacturing company rolled out new safety protocols. Compliance was abysmal. Leadership assumed people didn't care about safety (intention problem) and scheduled more training.

But here's what was actually happening:

Intention: Workers understood and valued safety. Not the issue.

Habits: The new protocol required stopping the line to log an incident. The old habit—keep the line running, report later—was deeply ingrained and tied to performance metrics.

Norms: Supervisors were still rewarded for throughput, not safety compliance. The unspoken message: keep moving.

Capacity: Logging took 8 minutes. Nobody adjusted the production targets. Workers had to choose between safety compliance and hitting their numbers.

Trust: The last safety initiative got quietly dropped after six months. Why would this one be different?

Leadership was solving for the wrong lever. More training couldn't fix a design that punished the behavior it claimed to want.

Here's how to diagnose which lever is failing:

• Intention: Can people articulate why this change helps them specifically? (Not the company—them.)

• Habits: What still triggers the old behavior? What makes the new behavior friction-full?

• Norms: What does the group actually reward? Who gets praised for what?

• Capacity: What got harder? What didn't get removed? Where's the time coming from?

• Trust: Do people believe leadership will support them through messy adoption, or punish imperfect execution?

Usually, it's multiple levers. That's normal. The point isn't to find the one problem. It's to see the system clearly.

What to Do About It

Once you know which levers are set wrong, the interventions become obvious. Here's one high-impact action per lever:

Intention: Stop explaining the change and start clarifying the tradeoffs by role. "Here's what gets better for you. Here's what gets harder. Here's what we're doing about the harder part." Specificity builds credibility.

Habits: Redesign the workflow to remove triggers for the old behavior. Make the new way the path of least resistance. If possible, make the old way impossible. Don't ask people to override habits—change the environment that creates them.

Norms: Get visible leaders modeling the behavior early and often, especially when it's inconvenient. Make adoption a topic in team meetings—not as enforcement, but as problem-solving. Align consequences with the behavior you want, not the behavior you're accidentally rewarding.

Capacity: Remove something. Seriously. What stops? What gets de-prioritized? What gets automated or eliminated? If you can't name it, you're adding work with no plan. Also: reduce friction in the new process. Every extra click is a reason to quit.

Trust: Be transparent when things break. Fix problems publicly. Use credible messengers—not just executives, but respected practitioners. Follow through on commitments, especially small ones. Trust is built in the boring middle, not the inspiring kickoff.

This is design work. It's not about generating enthusiasm. It's about removing the blockers that make the old way easier than the new way.

Adoption Is Engineered

Most change plans treat adoption like a motivation problem. Get people excited enough, and they'll push through the friction.

But excitement fades. Friction doesn't.

The real work of adoption is engineering the conditions where the new behavior is the obvious choice—not the heroic one.

Stop asking people to overcome bad design with good intentions. Start building environments where the behavior you want is the behavior that happens by default.

Want to know which levers are blocking adoption in your initiative? We can assess your change in 2-4 weeks and show you where it will stall and what to do about it. Book a call.

Because eventually, you have to stop announcing change and start designing for it.