How do we sustain change after the initial rollout energy fades?
The energy fade is predictable and it has a behavioral explanation. During rollout, change has high salience: it is new, leaders are talking about it, there are events and deadlines. That salience keeps reflective motivation activated. People are thinking about the change. Three months later, the salience drops. Now the behavior has to compete with everything else in a person's day on its own merits.
Sustaining change requires shifting the behavior from reflective motivation (conscious intention) to automatic motivation (habit). Habits form through consistent repetition in a stable context with reinforcement. This means the intervention design has to plan for the post-rollout phase, not just the launch.
Three strategies that drive sustainability.
First, embed the behavior into existing routines rather than adding new ones. If you want managers to give feedback, build it into the weekly team meeting cadence that already exists. If you want people to use the new reporting tool, link it to a process they already do daily. Behaviors that ride on existing habits are far more durable than behaviors that require new habits.
Second, create systemic audit and feedback loops. Regular, low-effort visibility into whether the behavior is happening. Not surveillance, but signals. A dashboard that shows team adoption trends. A monthly five-minute retrospective on what is working. The "Systemic Audit and Feedback" strategy uses BCTs 2.2 (Feedback on behaviour) and 2.7 (Feedback on outcome) to keep the behavior visible without requiring heavy oversight.
Third, gradually transfer ownership to the teams themselves. The "Create a Learning Collaborative" strategy builds internal communities that sustain the practice peer-to-peer, independent of the central change team. When the change team steps back, the behavior survives because it is now maintained by social norms within teams, not by top-down programs.
