Why Embedding Change Is Harder than Designing It – and What to Do About It

This article covers:

• Why landing change requires different conversations with different audiences
• How to build genuine capability rather than simply ticking the training box
• What prevents regression and when a change programme can truly be considered complete

This is the final article in our series on Oliver Wight’s latest change methodology, built on The Proven Path. The first piece explored why change starts with leaders in the Engage phase. The second covered how co-creation in the Enable phase builds the design team and the future way of working. Both lead to this: the final Embed phase, where designs reach the wider organisation and must survive contact with reality.

Embed is where ownership transfers. Everything done in Engage and Enable has been building towards the moment when the organisation says: “This is ours now. We designed it. We understand it. We own it.” Getting there is harder than most people expect.

Land the change for different audiences

The first element of Embed is Nurture, and it requires something that sounds simple but rarely happens well: tailoring the message to the audience. The design is consistent across the organisation, but the reason it matters isn’t.

A finance team cares about forecast accuracy and reporting cycles. A production team cares about shift patterns and workload. A sales team cares about whether this helps or hinders their ability to close deals. Same change, different stakes. If you communicate as though everyone has the same concerns, you’ll get polite nods and quiet resistance.

The design might be the same across the organisation, but the conversation about why it matters needs to be specific and personal. A single announcement from the CEO, however well-crafted, won’t achieve this.

Nurture means an ongoing rhythm of communication that responds to questions and concerns as they surface. Not a one-off town hall, but regular check-ins where people can say, “I don’t understand how this affects my role” or “This doesn’t work for our team because …” and tease out a real, useful answer.

The change agents developed in Enable are essential here. They’ve co-created the design. They understand the rationale. They can translate the big picture into something that makes sense for specific teams and specific people.

Watch for the early warning signs. For instance, people reverting to old spreadsheets, and meetings being skipped. Worse, language that suggests compliance rather than commitment: “We have to do it this way now” rather than “We do it this way because …” If you hear more of the former, the change hasn’t landed. It’s been imposed.

Build capability, not just awareness

The second element, Grow, addresses a gap that training alone cannot fill. You can read a book on how to drive a car. That doesn’t mean you can master a three-point turn when you first take the wheel. Organisations are surprisingly comfortable with the equivalent: sending people on a course, handing them a manual, and expecting proficiency.

Growing capability means creating the conditions for people to practice, make mistakes, and receive coaching rather than just instruction. The 70-20-10 model applies directly: roughly 70% of capability builds through on-the-job experience, 20% through coaching and mentoring, and 10% through formal training. Yet most organisations invest disproportionately in the 10% and hope the rest takes care of itself.

This is where situational leadership becomes important. When someone isn’t performing consistently in the new way of working, the instinct is to assume a motivation problem. Often, though, it’s a skill gap. Diagnosing the difference and responding appropriately requires people around them who have been trained to coach, not just to instruct.

It also requires the willingness to acknowledge when a part of the design doesn’t work and needs to be fixed. Not every element of a new process survives first contact with the real world. The organisations that embed change successfully treat it as an iteration, not a failure.

Think about what resources people require at the moment they genuinely need them: a two-minute refresher before a meeting, a checklist they can pull up on their phone, a short video showing exactly how to complete a task in the new system. These need to exist and be conveniently findable, not buried in a SharePoint folder nobody remembers.

How people learn has also changed significantly in the past decade. The availability of short-form content – three-minute videos, quick-reference guides, micro-learning modules – has shifted people’s expectations of how they’re enabled. Generational differences matter here, too. A one-size-fits-all approach to building capability will leave gaps that manifest as inconsistent adoption.

Prevent regression before it starts

The third element, Sustain, addresses the most human of challenges: the brain’s preference for familiar patterns. Given the opportunity, people will revert to old ways. Not because they’re resistant or uncommitted, but because established habits are neurologically easier than new ones. It’s the difference between “I now do it on Tuesday instead of Thursday and use the new platform” and “I’ll just do it the old way this once because it’s faster”. That “just this once” creates a gap that only widens.

Sustaining change requires three things working together.

1. Amplify the value that’s been realised. If the programme promised improved forecasting accuracy, better cross-functional alignment, or faster decision-making, make that visible. Track quick wins and make sure people see them. Nothing sustains momentum like evidence that the effort is worth it.
2. Reinforce behaviours through recognition. Gallup and Workhuman’s 2024 research found that only 22% of employees say they receive the right amount of recognition for their work, a figure unchanged since 2022.

Employees whose recognition experience fulfilled key criteria were up to nine times more likely to be engaged. This doesn’t need to be complicated. A small reward. An email from a leader acknowledging what someone has done well. Vocal appreciation in a meeting.

But don’t rely solely on leaders. Peer recognition can be equally powerful. I’ve seen team-voted awards – something as simple as a “most valuable player” nomination where the team chooses who made the biggest contribution – carry more weight than formal top-down programmes. When your colleagues notice your effort and publicly name it, that registers differently.

3. Hardwire changes into formal structures. Job descriptions that reflect new accountabilities. Reward mechanisms that incentivise new behaviours rather than old ones. Performance conversations that reference the new way of working, not just results. Without these structural reinforcements, you’re relying on willpower alone, and willpower has a limited shelf life.

Know when you’re done – and when you’re not

Embed has a formal conclusion. There’s a point where you should be able to close the change programme and say, with confidence, that the new way of working is now business as usual. But reaching that point honestly – not prematurely – requires ongoing questioning. What’s stuck? What needs course correction? Are people following the new process because someone’s watching, or because it’s genuinely how they work?

The temptation is to declare victory too early. Leadership attention drifts. The project team is reassigned. Sponsors have new priorities. And slowly, without anyone making a conscious decision, practices erode. The organisations that sustain change maintain regular check-ins long enough to be confident that new habits have replaced old ones, not just temporarily suppressed them.

This is the final piece of the change methodology founded upon the Proven Path, and in many ways, it’s the most demanding. Not because it’s intellectually complex, but because it requires patience, attention, and consistency at a point where most organisations want to move on to the next initiative. The organisations that complete Embed properly don’t just implement change. They build the capability to keep changing, which, given the pace of everything around us, may be the most valuable outcome of all.

Want to make change stick? Check out our Leadership & Change content, featuring expert insights, a panel discussion, and a visual report.