Why do I struggle to make change stick? (Wayshaping theory)

2. The relational change model and Estuarine Mapping

What it is: Sometimes someone has every reason to change, understands why it matters, genuinely wants to, and it still doesn’t happen. When that’s the case, the problem is usually sitting in one of three relational domains:

• Personal: Everything about the individual themselves, their actual capacity right now (energy, health, stress), the habits and sense of identity quietly pulling them back toward the old way, and the immediate surroundings of the task itself (tools, step count, defaults).
• Interpersonal: What the people around them are signalling, often without saying it out loud. What their manager actually rewards, what peers do, and what’s quietly tolerated.
• Ecological: Their relationship with the wider physical and natural world around them. Light, weather, commute, home life, or a pet’s routine, all of these shape capacity to act without anyone noticing.

A useful way to think about it: someone can want to eat better and still fail, not from a lack of willpower, but because they’re exhausted and the kitchen takes more effort than the vending machine (personal), everyone around them orders takeaway (interpersonal), and they work from a windowless home office with no natural light, so their energy is gone by mid-afternoon (ecological). None of that is about character. All of it is fixable.

Why it matters for leading change: When supporting someone else, it’s tempting to stop at the first explanation that comes to mind, usually personal (“they need to want it more”). But the real blocker is very often sitting somewhere you haven’t checked. A manager who quietly signals that the old way is still fine will undo any amount of personal motivation. A commute, a lack of daylight, or a home life bleeding into the workday can quietly drain the exact capacity a manager’s pep talk is trying to top up.

Mapping the landscape: Estuarine Mapping (Dave Snowden)
Once you’ve surfaced the factors across the three domains, how do you decide where to intervene? Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co. developed Estuarine Mapping to solve this exact problem. Instead of trying to force a change by sheer willpower, you map the constraints shaping the situation onto a simple grid:

• Vertical Axis (Energy): How much energy/effort is required to shift this constraint?
• Horizontal Axis (Time): How long would it take to change?

To make the map actionable, you categorise your constraints into three types:

• Norms: What people care about, value, or feel motivated by (e.g., team psychological safety, career ambitions).
• Frames: The underlying habits, identities, and mindsets through which people make sense of things (e.g., “I’m not a technical person,” departmental silos).
• Structures: The physical, digital, and rule-based elements that enable or limit action (e.g., software tools, physical office layout, approval policies).

Plotting these constraints onto the grid reveals where your real leverage lies using two critical boundaries:

• The Counterfactual Line (Top-Right): Draws a border around things that require far too much time and energy to change right now (e.g., “overhauling company culture”). Trying to shift these head-on will burn out your team. Bracket them out and set them aside.
• The Volatile Line (Bottom-Left): Draws a border around things that shift so quickly and unpredictably that trying to anchor a habit to them won’t stick (e.g., “this week’s team mood”). They aren’t stable enough to be worth your effort.
• The Actionable Zone (The Sweet Spot): The area in between. These are constraints that require modest time and energy to alter, offering safe, realistic stepping stones to reshape the overall energy landscape.

These three places work in both directions. Most of the time you’ll use this to find out what’s blocking someone. But it’s also useful the other way round: before making a change yourself, ask how it might ripple outward across these domains. A change to your workload (personal) can shift team expectations (interpersonal) or bleed into family routines (ecological).

Things to try (explore these together in conversation, then map them on the grid):

Sit down with the person to walk through the domains open-endedly:

Personal:

• “What’s your actual energy and capacity like at the moment, separate from this one task?”
• “Is there anything going on, work or otherwise, taking more out of you than usual right now?”
• “Walk me through exactly what happens when you try to do this, step by step. Where does it get harder than it should?”

Interpersonal:

• “What do you think your manager actually cares about here, not what’s officially said, but what gets rewarded?”
• “If you did this and nobody around you did, how would that feel?”
• “Has anyone made this harder for you, even without meaning to?”

Ecological:

• “What’s your actual physical setup like when you’re trying to do this (daylight, noise, space)?”
• “Is there anything outside work, a commute, a routine at home, shaping how much you’ve got left for this?”

Running the Estuarine Map:

• Categorise your constraints: Group the factors you’ve surfaced into Norms (what matters/values), Frames (habits and identities), and Structures (physical tools, rules, and setups).
• Plot them on the grid: Place each factor on an Energy vs. Time to Change matrix together.
• Draw your boundaries: Draw the counterfactual line to rule out high-cost/high-time items (e.g., “changing organisational hierarchy”), and the volatile line to filter out unstable factors.
• Pick your stepping stones: Select 1–2 small, low-energy structural adjustments sitting in the actionable sweet spot (e.g., “pre-filling a checklist template” or “moving a daily meeting time”).

How to tell if it’s working: You and the person can point to a specific, actionable constraint on the map rather than relying on vague notions of “motivation”. Did fixing a small constraint in the actionable zone (a tool tweak, an explicit manager signal, a desk shift) produce movement without needing to push harder?

Things to watch out for: Don’t try to tackle factors beyond your counterfactual line, wasting energy on high-cost, high-time items creates frustration and erodes trust. Avoid turning the conversation into an interrogation; it’s a joint mapping exercise. Lastly, don’t let ecological factors become catch-all excuses, use them to find genuine, fixable constraints.

3. Wayfinding

What it is: Imagine two ways of getting somewhere unfamiliar. One is following a route planned in advance, head down, treating any wrong turn as a mistake. The other is reading the landscape as you go: noticing what’s changed, adjusting, finding your way rather than following a fixed line. Anthropologist Tim Ingold studied this second way and called it wayfinding, the difference being that navigation uses a map made in advance to get from A to B, while wayfinding builds the map as you go. Change works the same way. You rarely know the whole route in advance, and pretending you do just means the first surprise feels like failure.

Why it matters for leading change: Leaders often plan change the way you’d plan a flight: Fixed departure, fixed arrival, any deviation is a problem. But the people, workload, and priorities you planned around at the start won’t be the same three months later. If you hold everyone to the original plan anyway, people don’t push back; they just quietly stop mentioning when things have moved on, because raising it has already been treated as a failure.

Four specific ways “the plan doesn’t fit anymore” actually shows up: It’s easy to say the context has shifted, but it helps to know which of these you’re actually dealing with, since each calls for a slightly different response.

Don’t read “no visible progress” as proof nothing’s working; the effort-and-results row above is the specific reason why. Sometimes a long stretch of apparently flat effort is exactly what’s building toward a sudden shift.

Wayfinding in practice has three parts, not one:

Most plans lean heavily on the last one, map-using, and treat it as the whole job. The paper this is drawn from is explicit that map-using on its own tends to become rigid, and works well only when it stays connected to the ongoing, open mapping that should come before and alongside it.

Not everything needs wayfinding. Some parts of a plan are genuinely simple and well understood, and don’t benefit from being treated as constantly up for renegotiation. If part of a change effort is essentially “we know exactly how to do this, we just need to do it,” treat it that way, save the wayfinding mindset for the parts that are genuinely uncertain. If you want a fuller way of telling these apart, this sits close to the Cynefin framework, which this article draws on directly.

Things to try:

• Be clear about what you actually need to achieve, and treat the specific plan for getting there as something you expect to change.
• Rather than fixing your sights on one big distant goal, break the journey into smaller, achievable points along the way. Each one gives you a natural moment to check whether you’re still headed the right way, and a chance to notice things you couldn’t see from further back.
• Build in real mapping time, not just progress check-ins, moments where the actual question is “what’s changed, and does this still make sense,” asked before anyone reports on progress.
• When something has clearly shifted, work out the next step with the people involved rather than deciding alone.
• Notice, out loud, when someone flags that something isn’t working anymore. That’s exactly the behaviour you want more of, not less.
• Sort the plan into what’s genuinely settled and well understood, and what’s genuinely uncertain. Only the second group needs the full wayfinding treatment.

How to tell if it’s working: You’ll usually see this over several weeks, not in a single conversation. Are people mentioning that things have shifted earlier and more openly, rather than staying quiet and just working around the plan? Does adjusting course start to feel normal rather than like admitting something went wrong? Have you kept moving in a sensible overall direction even though the specific plan has changed more than once? If people have stopped mentioning that things have moved on, that’s not a sign everything’s fine, it’s usually a sign they’ve concluded there’s no point raising it.

Things to watch out for: This isn’t a licence to have no plan and no accountability. It’s about holding a clear sense of direction while staying open about the exact path, not abandoning direction altogether. Watch for “we’re staying flexible” quietly turning into an excuse to avoid ever committing to anything you could be held to. And watch the opposite mistake too, treating something genuinely settled and well understood as if it needs constant reinvention wastes just as much energy as clinging to a plan that’s clearly stopped fitting.

4. Self-scaffolding

What it is: Most attempts to build a new habit rely on repeating it and rewarding yourself until it sticks. The trouble is, that approach is unreliable on its own, motivation and rewards come and go. Self-scaffolding is a more durable skill: noticing what kind of support a new behaviour actually needs, building it, and adjusting it as things change. Researcher Mark Bickhard argued that this ability, and helping other people develop it, sits close to the core of all human development. If tool 5 (Scaffolds) is about what to build, this is about who builds it, and whether they can build the next one themselves once you’re not there to help.

Why it matters for leading change: As a leader, your highest-value move is often not building the support for someone yourself, but helping them notice when their current support has stopped working and rebuild it themselves. Teams that only ever receive ready-made supports from leadership never develop this skill, and struggle the moment no one is there to design the next one for them. It’s worth holding a realistic expectation of what this actually achieves too: a well-designed scaffold doesn’t guarantee an outcome, it shapes the odds. Someone can do everything right here and still have it not work, that’s not proof the skill is being applied badly, it’s the nature of shaping probability rather than forcing a result.

Things to try (coaching moves to draw on, in whatever combination fits the moment):

• When something someone relies on stops working, resist jumping in to fix it straight away. Ask them to describe exactly what broke and when, and sit with not knowing the answer yourself for a moment.
• Invite more than one possible explanation: was it too weak, aimed at the wrong thing, or just badly placed in their day? Don’t settle for the first idea offered.
• Ask them to suggest a change themselves before you offer yours, even if you could clearly fix it faster.
• Let a genuinely different idea run for a set trial period, even one you’d have designed differently. The trial is the point, this is a small, safe-to-fail probe, not a one-shot decision, and it’s worth trying more than one small variation rather than betting everything on the first idea. My article on pilots, probes, and experiments goes deeper into this way of testing ideas under uncertainty.
• Share a time one of your own supports failed and how you changed it, so this looks like something everyone does, not something only strugglers need.

How to tell if it’s working: This builds slowly, so look for it across several instances rather than expecting to see it after one conversation. Over time: does the person start bringing you a problem along with a suggested fix, rather than just the problem? Do they start mentioning their own adjustments without being asked (“I moved my notes to right after lunch because mornings weren’t working”)? Are you spending less time designing things for people and more time hearing about what they’ve already tried? None of this appears quickly, if you’re looking for it after a single conversation, it’s too soon to tell. And remember what “working” actually means here, a good self-designed scaffold makes success more likely, it doesn’t guarantee it, so judge the skill by whether someone is building and adjusting sensibly, not only by whether any single attempt paid off.

Things to watch out for: Don’t wait until something completely breaks down before revisiting it, small adjustments made early beat a crisis rebuild later. And don’t quietly keep doing this thinking for people, that trains them to bring you problems instead of solutions. Also notice which way you’re leaning: if you never step in even when someone is genuinely stuck, that’s not coaching, it just looks like withheld support. And if you can’t remember the last time someone brought you their own fix rather than just a complaint, you’re probably still doing too much of this for them. One more risk worth knowing: piling on too many self-designed intentions or supports at once doesn’t just risk some of them failing, it can make the whole effort feel overwhelming enough that a person rejects it altogether, including the parts that were actually working. Fewer, better-placed supports beat a long list every time.

4. Self-scaffolding

What it is: Most attempts to build a new habit rely on repeating it and rewarding yourself until it sticks. The trouble is, that approach is unreliable on its own, motivation and rewards come and go. Self-scaffolding is a more durable skill: noticing what kind of support a new behaviour actually needs, building it, and adjusting it as things change. Researcher Mark Bickhard argued that this ability, and helping other people develop it, sits close to the core of all human development. If tool 5 (Scaffolds) is about what to build, this is about who builds it, and whether they can build the next one themselves once you’re not there to help.

Why it matters for leading change: As a leader, your highest-value move is often not building the support for someone yourself, but helping them notice when their current support has stopped working and rebuild it themselves. Teams that only ever receive ready-made supports from leadership never develop this skill, and struggle the moment no one is there to design the next one for them. It’s worth holding a realistic expectation of what this actually achieves too: a well-designed scaffold doesn’t guarantee an outcome, it shapes the odds. Someone can do everything right here and still have it not work, that’s not proof the skill is being applied badly, it’s the nature of shaping probability rather than forcing a result.

The kind of scaffold changes depending on how deep the change actually is. Tool 1 draws a line between a passing moment, a recurring pattern, and something that’s become part of who someone is. The same line matters here, coaching someone to build a sticky-note reminder is a very different job from coaching someone to rebuild how they see themselves:

Most coaching conversations default to the top row, because it’s the easiest to act on. If the same problem keeps needing a fix, it’s worth checking whether it’s actually sitting in the bottom row instead.

This skill is worth coaching well beyond the one problem in front of you: Bickhard’s argument isn’t just that self-scaffolding helps with whatever habit is currently being built, it’s that the skill sits “at the core of essentially all domains” of development. In practice, that means someone who gets genuinely good at noticing a broken support and rebuilding it in one part of their work, their inbox, say, tends to get better at doing the same thing in completely unrelated areas too, their fitness, a difficult relationship, a different project entirely. That’s a real reason to invest coaching time here even when the specific problem in front of you feels small, the payoff isn’t confined to that one problem.

Things to try (coaching moves to draw on, in whatever combination fits the moment):

• When something someone relies on stops working, resist jumping in to fix it straight away. Ask them to describe exactly what broke and when, and sit with not knowing the answer yourself for a moment.
• Invite more than one possible explanation: was it too weak, aimed at the wrong thing, or just badly placed in their day? Don’t settle for the first idea offered.
• Check which row of the table above you’re actually in before choosing a fix. A recurring pattern treated like a one-off habit will keep needing the same fix on repeat.
• Ask them to suggest a change themselves before you offer yours, even if you could clearly fix it faster.
• Let a genuinely different idea run for a set trial period, even one you’d have designed differently. The trial is the point, this is a small, safe-to-fail probe, not a one-shot decision, and it’s worth trying more than one small variation rather than betting everything on the first idea. My article on pilots, probes, and experiments goes deeper into this way of testing ideas under uncertainty.
• Share a time one of your own supports failed and how you changed it, so this looks like something everyone does, not something only strugglers need.

How to tell if it’s working: This builds slowly, so look for it across several instances rather than expecting to see it after one conversation. Over time: does the person start bringing you a problem along with a suggested fix, rather than just the problem? Do they start mentioning their own adjustments without being asked (“I moved my notes to right after lunch because mornings weren’t working”)? Are you spending less time designing things for people and more time hearing about what they’ve already tried? A genuinely good sign is the skill showing up somewhere you didn’t coach it at all, if someone starts applying the same noticing-and-rebuilding habit to something entirely unrelated to the original problem, that’s the transfer Bickhard’s argument predicts, and it’s worth naming when you see it. None of this appears quickly, if you’re looking for it after a single conversation, it’s too soon to tell. And remember what “working” actually means here, a good self-designed scaffold makes success more likely, it doesn’t guarantee it, so judge the skill by whether someone is building and adjusting sensibly, not only by whether any single attempt paid off.

Things to watch out for: Don’t wait until something completely breaks down before revisiting it, small adjustments made early beat a crisis rebuild later. And don’t quietly keep doing this thinking for people, that trains them to bring you problems instead of solutions. Also notice which way you’re leaning: if you never step in even when someone is genuinely stuck, that’s not coaching, it just looks like withheld support. And if you can’t remember the last time someone brought you their own fix rather than just a complaint, you’re probably still doing too much of this for them. One more risk worth knowing: piling on too many self-designed intentions or supports at once doesn’t just risk some of them failing, it can make the whole effort feel overwhelming enough that a person rejects it altogether, including the parts that were actually working. Fewer, better-placed supports beat a long list every time.

6. Shocks

What it is: Sometimes patterns are very entrenched and scaffolding alone won’t move it. This is the tool for that situation. A shock is a sharper, less controllable disruption that pushes a system past the point where gentle support can shift it, an offsite with real stakes, a hard structural change, a genuinely disruptive conversation. Cultures have used this deliberately for a very long time: Greek tragedy was designed to produce catharsis, Zen Buddhism uses koans to jolt the mind out of familiar patterns, and modern psychedelic-assisted therapy uses a carefully managed disruptive experience to break rigid, long-standing habits of thought.

Why it matters for leading change: Some patterns are too entrenched for scaffolding alone, a team culture, a long-standing habit, an outdated process nobody questions anymore. A well-placed shock can dislodge that in a way incremental nudges never will, the same way tilling breaks up compacted soil that’s grown resistant to anything new taking root. But a shock with no support around it just produces disorientation or damage, not learning. That’s the single most common failure mode in organisational change: leaders reach for disruption and forget the support has to be there before, during, and after.

Not every shock is a big one. It’s easy to picture “shock” as only the rare, dramatic kind, a reorg, a crisis, a make-or-break conversation. The framework this tool comes from is explicit that shocks exist on a spectrum, and the small, frequent end is just as real and far easier to use safely:

The high-intensity kind is what most of the rest of this tool focuses on, because it’s the one with real risk attached. But if you only ever reach for that end of the table, you’re missing most of what this tool can do.

Try this: The framework this tool comes from actually plots real shocks this way, on intensity and frequency, specifically to build better intuition for when to use which kind. It’s worth doing the same for your own team: list three or four disruptions you could realistically use at each level, in your own context, before you need one. Deciding this in the abstract, when nothing’s on fire, produces much better judgement than reaching for whatever comes to mind under pressure.

Before you commit (this applies to the high-intensity end of the table above; low-intensity shocks can be tried far more freely):

• Confirm scaffolding alone has genuinely been tried, more than once, and hasn’t moved this specific pattern. Don’t reach for a shock as a first move, or because it feels more decisive than patient support.
• Set the “set”: before the disruption, be clear, with yourself and with the people involved, about the intention behind it. What’s changing, and why.
• Build the “setting”: have real support ready to activate the instant the disruption lands, and keep it in place afterwards. There should be no gap between the shock and the support that follows it. This is the single most important thing separating a shock that produces growth from one that just produces damage.
• Size it to the system’s actual capacity to absorb disruption right now (workload, recent history, morale), not to how urgent it feels to you in the moment.
• Plan the debrief before you deliver the shock, not after. Decide what you’ll ask, and when, so the sense-making doesn’t get lost in the aftermath.
• Remember a shock doesn’t always have to be one you create. A bad quarter, an unexpected departure, an external crisis, these can all function as a shock that’s already happened. The question then isn’t whether to trigger one, it’s whether you’re scaffolding the one you’ve already got, or letting it go to waste.

How to tell if it’s working: Judge this mainly in the debrief and the weeks after, not in the immediate reaction, a shock is a single, high-stakes move, not something you can quickly repeat and adjust. Look for the entrenched pattern genuinely interrupted, not just quieter in the moment but visibly different weeks later, rather than a slow drift back to the old pattern once attention moves elsewhere. A good sign in hindsight: people can point to the support that helped them through it, rather than describing it as something that just happened to them. Right after a disruption, people are often unusually open to new structure, so if a scaffold was going to land, this is when you’ll see it start to take.

Things to watch out for: The biggest danger is treating a shock as a complete change strategy on its own, it’s only ever half the mechanism, and without support around it, it reliably produces reversion or damage rather than growth. Overused, shocks stop working: a system that’s constantly disrupted never gets the chance to consolidate anything, and each new one lands on a more depleted, less resilient team than the last. Underused, avoiding a genuinely needed shock out of a desire to be gentle leaves an entrenched pattern completely untouched, no matter how much scaffolding you layer around it, because scaffolding can’t move something that isn’t fragile to begin with. Two clear signals: if the team’s baseline stress never returns to normal between disruptions, you’ve overused this. If you’ve tried two or three well-designed scaffolds on the same pattern and none of them have moved it at all, that’s usually the sign you actually need one.

7. Stigmergy (leaving trails for your future self)

What it is: Tool 4 was about who builds the support. This tool is about a specific, very cheap kind of support: Coordinating with your future self, or someone else’s, indirectly, through a trace left behind, rather than directly, through an instruction that has to be remembered and acted on in the moment. The term comes from how ants and termites coordinate: They leave chemical trails that guide colony members toward useful places, with no direct message ever passed between them. Humans do this constantly without noticing. Sorting groceries into the fridge when you get home isn’t really about the groceries; it’s leaving a trace that makes tomorrow’s cooking easier before you’ve even thought about tomorrow.

Why it matters for leading change: The person you’re supporting won’t have your meeting’s clarity or motivation available to them at 4pm on a Thursday, when the old habit is easiest. Reminding them assumes a resource, recall and willpower in the moment, that’s exactly what’s unreliable. There’s a stronger version of this point worth knowing too: an intention that only ever exists as a thought in someone’s head is a fragile thing. It only really starts to do work once it’s been placed somewhere in the world, written down, built into a form, told to another person, where it can act on you before you’ve even consciously decided anything. Changing what’s easiest to do doesn’t just help with memory, it’s what makes an intention real in the first place.

Three kinds of trace, not just one. It’s easy to think of this as purely a physical or digital fix, changing a form, a default, a template. The idea is broader than that:

Things to try:

• Pick one behaviour you’ve been reminding people about more than twice. That repetition is itself a useful signal that a trace, not another message, is worth trying.
• Map the actual moment the old behaviour happens (which screen, which meeting, which decision point). The trace only works if it sits exactly there.
• Choose which type of trace fits: change something in the environment, put a specific commitment into words with someone else present, or have people rehearse the new behaviour rather than just being told about it.
• If you’re unsure which will work, try a couple of small variants in different places rather than committing everything to one.
• Once a trace is in place, drop the corresponding reminder for a stretch and see what actually happens. Running both at once tells you nothing about whether the trace alone would hold.
• Check the moment again after a week or two. Environments drift, and a trace that worked can quietly stop pointing where you intended.

How to tell if it’s working: The clearest evidence comes from removing the reminder, not from adding the trace. If the behaviour keeps happening once the reminder is gone, the trace is doing the work. Also worth noticing over time: does the behaviour start happening without anyone mentioning it at all? If you temporarily removed the trace itself, would you expect the old behaviour to come back, and does testing that, even briefly, confirm it?

Things to watch out for: Don’t confuse this with adding more signals. A workspace covered in reminders creates noise, not signal, and one well-placed structural change beats five nudges. Don’t use environmental design to avoid a conversation that genuinely needs to happen; it’s for reducing friction on something already agreed, not for engineering consent. And keep some perspective: a trace shifts what’s likely, it doesn’t guarantee anything. People can and do act against even a very well-placed trace, so don’t treat this as a substitute for someone actually being on board. Overused, an environment gets so thoroughly engineered towards one “right” path that people lose the ability to exercise judgement when a real exception comes up, the trace becomes a rut. Underused, you keep sending reminders for a behaviour that’s already failed the same way three times, when the pattern itself is telling you a structural trace is needed instead.

This connects quite well to Dr B J. Fogg’s work on habit change.

8. Rhythms and flows (working with time, not against it)

What it is: Every team and every person already has rhythms running, some are calendar landmarks like a sprint start or Monday standup, but there are two other kinds most people never think to use. A new behaviour attached to a rhythm that’s already running inherits its momentum. A new behaviour started from nothing has to generate all its own momentum, and rarely does. Think of a sailor who doesn’t fight the sea, they read the wind and current and use them. Working with existing rhythms is the same idea applied to change.

Why it matters for leading change: New behaviour anchored to an arbitrary moment (“starting whenever people are ready”) has nothing to attach to and no natural reset point when it lapses. New behaviour anchored to an existing rhythm gets a recurring, built-in moment to recommit every time it slips. There’s a sharper version of this worth knowing too: identities and roles work the same way. A newly promoted manager, a team taking on a new way of working, even a personal habit you’re proud of, all of these need to be regularly “fed” by some recurring rhythm, a check-in, a ritual, a recognition moment, or they quietly atrophy, even if nobody ever decided to abandon them.

Three kinds of rhythm, not just one. Most people only ever reach for the first:

The first kind is easy to see and easy to use. The other two are usually ignored, and the biological one especially so, but a habit that fights someone’s actual energy pattern will lose to one that works with it, no matter how good the calendar timing is.

Try this: Audit before you attach – Before inventing a new threshold, spend ten minutes mapping what’s already there across all three types: what calendar moments already exist, what physical transitions people already move through in a normal day, and where the natural energy peaks and dips tend to fall. Most teams already have more usable rhythm than they realise, they just haven’t looked for it. The paper’s own advice here is to work with what’s already running before building something new from scratch.

Things to try (pick from this list rather than working through it in order):

• Attach the new behaviour to whichever threshold is closest in time and most relevant in content, and say so explicitly rather than letting it happen quietly.
• Ask, honestly, whether the rhythm you’re attaching to is one you can design around freely, or one you should respect instead. Someone’s actual energy levels aren’t up for negotiation the way a meeting schedule is.
• If you’re unsure which threshold will carry the behaviour, try it at one point and adjust based on what you notice. This isn’t a one-shot decision.
• When adoption lapses, treat the very next occurrence of that threshold as a legitimate reset point rather than waiting for a bigger symbolic moment, and say so out loud.
• Watch how many new behaviours are riding on the same threshold. If a second one seems to be crowding out the first, that’s worth noticing rather than pushing through.
• Remember a big symbolic threshold, a new quarter, a relaunch, a milestone, doesn’t just carry gentle momentum, it can work like tool 6’s shock: a real reset with disruptive power, not just a soft nudge. Use that deliberately when a bigger reset is genuinely what’s needed.

How to tell if it’s working: Watch across several cycles of the threshold, not just the first one. Does the behaviour start happening at the threshold without a separate announcement each time? When it lapses, does it self-correct at the next natural occurrence without you stepping in? Can you trace its adoption back to the specific threshold you attached it to, rather than a vague sense that “it eventually caught on”?

Things to watch out for: Don’t let “we’ll properly relaunch this next quarter” become the default response to a bad week, the delay itself is often what kills momentum. Don’t stack too many new behaviours onto a single threshold, each one has limited capacity to carry change, and overloading it shows up as the newest addition landing worse than the ones already there. Don’t try to override a genuinely biological rhythm through sheer willpower or scheduling, that’s a fight the rhythm usually wins. And don’t assume a new identity or way of working, once adopted, looks after itself, without some recurring rhythm to keep feeding it, even things people genuinely wanted tend to fade quietly.