Facilitate the Change: SHIFT Stage 4

The Problem This Stage Solves

Well-designed interventions fail when they are layered on top of existing organizational life rather than integrated into it. Facilitate is the stage where interventions move from design to deployment, and the core principle is integration over addition.

Integration, Not Addition

Every new initiative competes for attention, time, and cognitive load. When a change program adds new meetings, new reporting, new dashboards, and new training sessions on top of existing workloads, it creates opportunity barriers of its own. The intervention designed to solve a behavior change problem can itself become a barrier because it demands too much additional effort.

The facilitation principle: embed the intervention into systems, workflows, and routines that already exist. If you want managers to give weekly feedback, do not create a new feedback meeting. Build a five-minute feedback protocol into the existing weekly team meeting. If you want people to use the new reporting tool, do not add a separate reporting step. Change the default so the tool is what opens when they start their existing process.

Building the Support Infrastructure

Champions and early adopters: selected based on credibility and peer influence, not seniority. Trained not just on what to do but on how to demonstrate the behavior in real work contexts and how to support others who are struggling.

Learning collaboratives: structured groups that share practical implementation challenges, develop local solutions, and create social proof through visible peer success.

Environmental conditions: changing system defaults, adjusting workflow sequences, adding prompts at decision points, removing access to legacy systems. Often the highest-leverage interventions because they change the context rather than trying to change people directly.

Stakeholder Engagement During Facilitation

The Stakeholder Decision Matrix classifies seven stakeholder types and maps each to specific barriers, constraints, strategies, and conversation moves. When a stakeholder is not fulfilling their role, the escalation is not "more pressure" but "diagnose the barrier." The stakeholder's behavior is itself subject to COM-B analysis.

Facilitation design principle: the best predictor of sustained behavior change is whether the intervention survives the departure of the change team. If the new behavior depends on the change team's presence, the facilitation has not yet succeeded.