The two reasons that decide whether any change sticks

About eighteen months ago I stopped colouring my hair.

I'm still in the in-between stage. The part you’re warned about but don’t fully appreciate until you’re there, where it looks worse before it looks better. So why am I still doing it? Two reasons – and they're the same two that decide whether any change sticks.

Curiosity. I wanted to know what was underneath. What I'd actually look like on the other side. That pull kept me going when the mirror wasn't giving me much back.

Perseverance. Because the middle is genuinely unpleasant, and the middle is where most people give up and rebook the colour appointment.

I think about this a lot in our work.

Most organisations treat change as something to announce. New system, new policy, new way of working. Communicated, rolled out, ticked off. Change, however, isn't a communications problem; it's a learning problem.

And real change - change in behaviour - has a dip. The new way feels slower and clumsier than the old way, right up until it doesn't. That dip is where initiatives stall, and where training quietly fails.

If you measure completion, you miss it. Someone finishes the module and you call it done. But finishing isn't changing. The change happens later, in the messy middle, when the old habit is still easier and the new one hasn't paid off yet.

So that's what we design for. Not the launch. Not the completion screen. The middle.

In practice, that means a learner doesn't just watch the right call being made, they practise the decision, feel the consequence of getting it wrong, and get a nudge a month later, when the new habit is still fragile and the old one is still tempting. That's the part that decides whether anything changes.

My grey hair is a change on full display. Most workplace change isn't. But what gets people through is the same either way: a reason to keep going, and a glimpse of what's on the other side. Design for that, and the change sticks. Skip it, and you'll have excellent completion rates and nothing else.

Jen