By Ritvars Mētra, Founder of ReadinessCompassThe reinforcement plan has three items: a recognition scheme for early adopters, a monthly newsletter of success stories, and posters in the break room.
Meanwhile the new process takes eleven clicks where the old one took four, the report people actually need is not built yet, and the legacy screen still works. Reinforcement, in that environment, is asking people to choose the harder path out of loyalty.
Remove restraint before adding pressure
There is a useful asymmetry in Kurt Lewin’s force field analysis that most change practice inverts. Any situation is held in place by driving forces pushing toward change and restraining forces holding it back — and Lewin’s point was that reducing restraining forces is generally preferable to increasing driving forces, because adding pressure raises tension in the system while removing an obstacle does not.
Recognition schemes, communications and executive encouragement are all driving force. They are being applied against restraining forces nobody has enumerated. It is the part of Lewin that has held up best, and it is the part almost nobody uses.
The practical version is a question you can ask a team in ten minutes: what makes doing it the new way harder than doing it the old way? The answers are usually concrete, specific and removable.
| Restraining force | What removing it looks like |
|---|---|
| The old system still works | Read-only, or off. The single highest-impact intervention available |
| The report people need is not built | Build it. This is usually two days of work blocking a whole behaviour |
| The new path takes more clicks for a frequent task | A shortcut, a default, a pre-filled field |
| Nobody knows what to do with an exception | A named person and a documented route |
| Doing it properly makes you look slower | Change what is measured, for one quarter at least |
| The manager still accepts the old format | They stop accepting it |
The last two rows are the ones that cannot be delegated to a change team, which is precisely why they persist.
What actually reinforces
What managers visibly do. The strongest evidence in this area concerns observed behaviour rather than stated support. Homburg, Wieseke and Kühnl found in a multilevel analysis of technology adoption that when people observe their superiors using a system, their own willingness to adopt is strengthened, and that adoption by superiors and co-workers positively affects ongoing use. A manager who runs their weekly review from the new system reinforces it more in an hour than a quarter of communications.
What gets asked for. Reinforcement is mostly a question of which artefact a manager accepts. If a spreadsheet is still accepted, the spreadsheet survives. This is a decision, not a culture.
What is measured and reviewed. Whatever appears in the monthly review becomes the thing people attend to. That is a powerful mechanism and a dangerous one — a reinforcement metric will be optimised, so choose one that cannot be satisfied without the underlying behaviour, exactly as any criterion has to be.
Whether the work is genuinely better. If the new way is faster for the person doing it, reinforcement is nearly free. Much reinforcement effort is spent compensating for designs that made someone’s job worse in order to make reporting better — and no amount of recognition compensates for that indefinitely.
Why recognition schemes underperform
They are not useless, but they are frequently mismatched to the problem. A certificate rewards enthusiasm, and enthusiasm was rarely the constraint. The people who needed help were not insufficiently motivated; they were blocked by something specific.
Recognition also carries a risk worth naming. Celebrating early adopters can signal that adoption is optional and exceptional — something admirable rather than expected. Where use is genuinely discretionary, that framing works against you.
The version that does work is narrow and behavioural: publicly thanking the person who reported a problem, or who moved a deal backwards, or who said the new process does not handle a real case. That reinforces honesty, which is the behaviour most at risk and the one most useful to the organisation.
A reinforcement plan worth having
Four lines, and none of them is a communication:
- The list of restraining forces, gathered from teams, with an owner and a date against each.
- The date the alternative route closes.
- The three behaviours managers will be asked to perform, stated observably.
- The measure that will show whether the behaviour is happening, and who looks at it monthly for the first six months.
Most of that is unglamorous operational work rather than change management as it is usually staffed. It is also what makes the new way the easy way, which is the only reinforcement that survives the programme.
More on sustaining adoption in the Adoption Risk Hub, or read how to measure whether managers are actually reinforcing.