Here are 5 steps change teams skip...
Nowadays, most change teams have more data than they know what to do with, from surveys, sentiment scores, adoption dashboards and more.... and yet when it comes change, they default to the same three things: get leadership buy-in, send comms, schedule training... none of these are wrong.. they are just incomplete.
I put together 5-steps that I see skipped (sometimes all, sometimes some... all are important)
1) Define the behavior precisely... This is not adopt the new system... it has to be something observable, like frontline managers enter client notes within 24 hours of a meeting.
2) Diagnose the barriers before jumping to solutions.. do you have a knowledge gap? a skills gap ? are social norms working against you? most teams skip this entirely and go straight to training, which only works if the barrier is knowledge... the truth is that often it isn't.
3) Check the quality of motivation... i've seen teams roll out well-designed workflows that nobody used, because the only reason people had to use them was leadership said so...that's not a problem you solve with a town hall.
4)Select strategies that actually fit the barriers you found.. again, a skills gap needs practice and feedback, but a cognitive load problem needs simplification.. remember not every problem needs a training program, and treating them all the same is how you waste six months.
5) Align the surrounding system - if the design, incentives and policies are pulling in a different direction than the behavior you want, it won't change...you can't ask people to collaborate and then rank them against each other.
Most of this isn't complicated or new... but it gets skipped because teams move straight from we have a problem to here's the solution without the diagnostic work in between.