Why do our change programs keep failing despite strong executive support?

Executive support solves one problem: it signals that change is sanctioned. It does not solve the actual adoption problem, which is what happens between the announcement and the daily behavior.

Most change programs are built on an assumption behavioral scientists call the Information Deficit Model: if people understand why they need to change, they will change. So organizations invest heavily in communication, leadership visibility, and compelling narratives. These are not wrong, but they address only one piece of a three-part problem.

The COM-B model breaks behavior into three necessary conditions:

Capability (can they do it?), Opportunity (does the environment make it possible?), and Motivation (is it worth doing at the point of action?). Executive support primarily affects motivation, and only the reflective kind (beliefs and intentions). It does nothing for automatic motivation (habits, impulses, emotional responses), capability (skills, knowledge, practice), or opportunity (tools, defaults, workflows, social norms).

A global shared services organization had full C-suite sponsorship for a digital platform rollout. Communication was extensive. Training was deployed. Yet adoption stalled because the real barriers were capability-based (people did not have enough practice with the new system to use it under time pressure) and opportunity-based (the old system was still accessible and faster). Executive emails did not touch those barriers.

The shift required was diagnostic: identify the specific barriers at each organizational layer, match interventions to those barriers, and sequence the rollout so people built capability before they were expected to perform. That is the difference between change management as communication and change management as behavioral design.