“It’s not about standing up in a town hall necessarily, and giving a great speech. It’s just about those thousand little opportunities that you have every day
Value Leak #5
to reinforce behaviours.” Becky Henderson-Hart Change Consultant, Project One
Reinforcement: early adoption can disappear when support, coaching and leadership visibility fade. Go-live is not the finish line. It is the point at which value creation begins. The most common, and most avoidable leak happens after go-live. It’s when the programme team disbands, the change resource rolls off, and the organisation is left to sustain the new behaviours entirely on its own. Early adoption, often bolstered by hypercare support and residual enthusiasm, gradually fades. Without deliberate reinforcement, people drift back to what they know. This is a well-understood pattern in behavioural science: new habits need repeated reinforcement to become permanent, and organisations rarely plan for this beyond the first few weeks. Recognition, coaching and correction fade at exactly the moment they matter most, and the “new way of working” quietly becomes optional. Closing this leak means planning reinforcement as deliberately as go-live itself – sustained leadership visibility, recognition of the behaviours you want to see, and a mechanism to spot the drift and course correct for months, not weeks, after the programme formally closes. The organisations that realise the greatest returns don’t celebrate go-live; they reinforce the change until the new way simply becomes “the way we work.”
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real change • real difference
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