The gap between 'rolled out' and 'adopted'

Anyone who, on the second of January, rolled out a “change initiative” in their life by signing up for the gym knows that rolling out a change initiative is the easy part; the hard part is translating it into adoption.

Deciding is not the same as acting. A decision made by the cortex, the part of our brain responsible for planning, does not automatically translate into behavior unless other parts of the brain, such as the basal ganglia, are on board. These parts do not act on abstract reasoning but on immediate experience. This is why merely believing that physical exercise is good rarely leads to consistency, whereas experiencing it as rewarding does.

The same dynamic applies in organizations. A change decided by top leadership does not translate into adoption unless it works within the lived experience of supervisors and workers. People adopt change not when they agree it makes sense, but when they experience it as making their work easier, safer, or more rewarding.

Organizations don’t execute decisions; people do

Change initiatives often fail because they rely almost exclusively on logical arguments: the strategy makes sense, the numbers add up, the direction is correct. But organizations, like brains, do not act through abstract agreement alone. They act through systems that are sensitive to friction, risk, and reward in day-to-day activity.

As a result, a change can be perfectly sound at the organizational level and still fail to be adopted on the ground. When this happens, the failure is often misdiagnosed as resistance or poor communication. More often, it is a mismatch between how the change is justified at the top and how it is experienced locally.

This applies even to mandatory changes driven by compliance or safety. A regulation may force the change to happen on paper, but actual adoption still depends on how the change is experienced locally. People will follow a new process reliably only to the extent it works within their daily reality; otherwise, they find workarounds. Mandates can compel compliance on paper, but even mandated changes are adopted reliably only to the extent they are made as frictionless as reasonably possible.

For a change initiative to work, it must therefore be designed not only to be correct, but to be adoptable. At a minimum, this requires the following three steps.

First, design to minimize adoption friction

Change initiatives usually begin with company-level strategic goals. However, once the target state is defined, the design process must consider the roles most affected by the change, starting with those where friction is highest, and adapt the initiative to minimize local friction: extra effort, additional risk, loss of autonomy, and other negative trade-offs imposed on individual workers. A change initiative that is sound at the organizational level but costly at the individual level will stall, regardless of how strong its business justification is.