Why do people agree to change and then not do it?

This is the most common and most misunderstood failure point in organizational change. Leaders hold town halls, get head-nods, run alignment workshops, and then nothing changes on the ground. The problem is not communication… the problem is that agreement and action are governed by different forces.

Agreement happens in a reflective state.

People sit in a meeting room, hear a logical case for change, and think: yes, that makes sense. They mean it, they really do….but action happens in a different context entirely. It happens at 2pm on a Tuesday when they are under deadline, when the old workflow is right there, when nobody is watching, and when the new process takes three extra steps they have not practiced.

At that moment, the strongest force wins. Behavioral science calls this the Plan vs. Impulse conflict. The Plan is the rational, agreed-upon intention. The Impulse is whatever feels easiest, safest, and most familiar at the moment of action. In most organizations, the Impulse has every advantage: muscle memory, social proof from peers still doing it the old way, and zero cognitive load.

The fix is not more communication or more executive sponsorship. It requires a behavioral diagnosis using a behavioural framework to understand what is actually competing with the desired behavior at the point of action. Is it a capability gap (they do not know how to do the new process quickly enough)? An opportunity barrier (the system defaults to the old workflow)? A motivation conflict (the new behavior feels riskier than the old one)?

Each of those root causes demands a different intervention. Training solves capability gaps. Redesigning defaults and environments solves opportunity barriers. Reframing risk and building social proof solves motivation conflicts. The organizations that get change adoption right are not better communicators. They are better diagnosticians.