EdGrimshaw.com

One of the biggest challenges when an organisation goes through a significant change is making the change stick. Ensuring that the initiative remains robust and in place once the conditions begin to move. The process of sustainability is often overlooked and the maintenance of change is treated as a given. 

Here are some reasons why changes are not sustained:-

1. The benefits of the change are insufficient to justify the change.
2. Badly designed initiatives and poor implementation
3. Lack of real buy in or a tick box approach to change
4. Projects implemented without a sustaining phase
5. No champions or people appointed to maintain the programme
6. Initiative City - Too many disparate changes that are disconnected
7. Changing Priorities
8. Lack of Supervision of the overall direction and connecting improvements.
9. Consultant led Initiatives
10. Treating Programmes and processes as projects
11. Imposed Programmes that do not resonate with operational staff.
12. Failure to just keep going plus resilience in face of adverse pressure.

So we could reverse some of these problems and issues. We could future pace as in NLP and go beyond the implementation stage of the programme, build a beyonding stage that includes SUSTAIN.

We could also build a sustain stage well beyond the project completion. Some companies choose to use an ongoing audit approach, checking the standards against which the delivered programme is being measured. This is common in areas such as health and safety and quality, where there are periodic audits carried out.

Also if there is involvement in the programme at all levels of the organisation then there is greater likelihood the change will remain in place.