What is the wayshaping framework? A new approach to behaviour change, explained for leaders and change managers

As an executive coach and leadership educator with a deep interest in change and complexity, I was keen to read Wayshaping: A Multiscale Framework for Behavior Change by James, Jamaluddin, et al. What I was not expecting was the length and depth. It runs to almost a hundred pages and reads practically like a book. What follows is my attempt to make sense of the key ideas for myself, section by section. This is far from perfect, and I was pretty overwhelmed with summarising this. It was not an easy read.

Section 1: Introduction

The paper opens with the scale of the problem. Roughly 40% of deaths worldwide are linked to health related behaviours, and studies on the intention-action gap, the space between what we mean to do and what we actually do, put the failure rate at around 50% for personal change efforts, and as low as 10% for something as simple as using a gym membership already paid for. Nudge theory and behavioural economics have done a lot of good work here, but the authors argue both still treat the individual as a single rational, or irrational, decision maker. What is missing is an account of the person making the change that is itself rooted in complexity. Their answer, wayshaping, draws on embodied cognitive science to reframe the individual as a multilevel, multiscale collective intelligence, not a single agent who simply needs better information or a sharper nudge.

Takeaways for leaders

• If a change initiative is stalling, the first question is rarely whether people know what to do. Knowledge based interventions are consistently among the weakest performers in the literature the authors cite. The better question is what is actually competing with the intention in the moment of action.
• Oversubscription is built into gym business models because providers already know intention rarely converts to action at scale. Assume the same gap in any programme rolled out to a team or organisation, and design for it rather than being surprised by it.
• Nudges and incentives are not wrong; they are simply working on one small part of a much bigger system.

Section 2: Who and what is changing? Embodied subjects

This is the paper’s theoretical spine. The authors build up a picture of the person as an embodied subject, drawing heavily on the philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs: someone whose experience is central to what matters to them, whose body is not just a vehicle for the mind but the ground of what they care about, and who is bound to others through embodiment before any explicit conversation happens. They introduce needful freedom, a phrase they borrow from the philosopher Hans Jonas via Fuchs: the idea that we are never fully free or fully determined; we act inside a set of constraints that both limit and enable us. Alongside this sits our drive for an optimal grip, our ongoing adjustment to achieve situational coherence, and co-optimal grip, where we continuously calibrate our actions to align with others through participatory sense-making.

From there the authors move from homeostasis, holding steady, to allostasis, anticipating and adjusting the steady state itself, and argue that habits, identities and narratives are really just this same regulatory logic showing up at higher levels. This is where the paper’s most useful reframe lands: the individual is not one thing, it is a self-collective, a nested set of habits, micro identities (their own example is eating lunch), meso identities (their own example is me at work) and macro identities (their own example is I’m a vegan, an enduring pattern that shows up across many different situations), all negotiating with each other much as cells negotiate to form tissues. Each of these is shaped by three types of constraint: norms (what matters), frames (habitual patterns of sense-making) and structures (the physical, bodily and symbolic furniture of a situation). All of this can be read across four levels, biological, psychological, social and existential, and three relational domains, personal, interpersonal and ecological, which together form what the authors call the Relational Change Model.

Takeaways for leaders

• When someone seems to be resisting a change, it is rarely one stubborn person. It is more often several sub-selves inside that person, a habit, an identity, a narrative, each with a legitimate stake, pulling in different directions. Coaching or performance conversations go further when they help someone name which part of them is which, rather than treating the whole person as a single resistant unit.
• Before designing an intervention, it is worth mapping norms (what does this person actually care about here), frames (what is habitual for them) and structures (what is physically and socially available to them) separately. Conflating these three is a common reason well-intentioned change programmes miss the mark.
• The personal, interpersonal and ecological domains are a useful diagnostic lens on their own. Is this change stuck at the level of the individual, the relationship, or the wider system it is embedded in? Different domains need different moves.

Section 3: Why is it hard to change? Coordination challenges

Having established the self-collective, the authors reframe the intention-action gap as three types of coordination challenges rather than a single failure of willpower.

Non-linearity covers four properties worth knowing by name: non-stationarity, where what worked before stops working because the context itself has shifted; non-ergodicity, where population level advice does not reliably transfer to any one individual; non-proportionality, where small inputs sometimes produce huge shifts and huge effort sometimes produces nothing, which is why sudden gains happen; and non-additivity, where combined interventions can produce effects that are qualitatively different, not just bigger, than the sum of their parts. This last point is one reason synergistic, multi-pronged interventions tend to be more resistant to relapse.

Alignment challenges concern the parts of the self-collective pulling against each other, either rigidly stuck, where one part dominates and feels automatic and hard to escape, or unable to stick, where competing parts leave nothing settled, and everything feels ambiguous and effortful. These tensions show up within a single level, such as craving sugar while also valuing a healthy diet, and between levels, where the authors identify four specific mechanisms. Indirectness means we rarely see how larger social structures are shaping our own state, so burnout gets misread as personal failure rather than a structural signal. Temporal lag means a shift at one level, say an existential insight, can take months to filter through and resettle at the psychological and social levels. Asynchrony describes different systems adapting on different clocks, as with grief moving slower than the social world around it. Asymmetry shows how social or existential pressure can override even survival-level signals, illustrated by the author’s own anecdote about suppressing a choking reflex rather than cause a scene at a social gathering. Trust is introduced here as the meta-regulator that determines whether these misalignments are tolerated long enough for realignment to happen, or whether they cause the whole effort to be abandoned.

Anticipation challenges concern how the future is brought into the present. Stigmergy is the idea that we coordinate with our future selves indirectly, through traces left in our environment, such as an unfinished letter, a book left open, or an app reminder. This reframes the intention-action gap as partly an intention-intention gap: a stated intention and the intentions actually encoded in the surrounding environment often do not match. Rhythms and flows is a reminder that some biological cycles, such as circadian rhythm, are relatively fixed, while others, such as habits and identities, are far more flexible, and sustainable change usually requires working with the fixed ones rather than against them.

Takeaways for leaders

• Expect non-linear results. If someone tries something for months with no visible change and then suddenly shifts, that is not proof the earlier effort was wasted. It is likely the pattern the paper describes as a sudden gain after a period of unseen maturation.
• Treat “what worked for our top performer” with real caution when scaling advice across a team. Non-ergodicity is the formal name for “results will vary”, and it is a strong argument against one-size-fits-all playbooks.
• When someone’s effort to change is not sticking, it is worth asking what is misaligned rather than assuming low motivation. The paper’s own example is a demanding work culture in which physiological needs for rest are quietly overridden by higher level social expectations, and the resulting exhaustion often gets misread as a personal failing rather than the structural issue it actually is.
• Trust is doing real work here, not as a soft value but as a mechanism. Sustaining people through the inevitable lag between effort and visible result requires actively building their trust that the delayed payoff is real, otherwise the lag gets read as evidence that nothing is working.
• Do not just message intentions, build them into the environment. A note in a meeting is nowhere near as effective as a genuinely restructured calendar, room or process. This is the practical heart of stigmergy.

Section 4: How do we change? Addressing the challenges

This is the applied section of the paper, and the one with the most direct tools.

Scaffolds and shocks are introduced as the two levers available to us. Scaffolds are supports that regulate stress without overwhelming the system, drawn from Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. They can be temporary or permanent, static or dynamic, from a table leg a toddler holds to a carer who continually adjusts their support. Shocks are more acute, pushing a system beyond its comfort zone in a way that can loosen entrenched patterns, much like tilling soil before planting. The authors are careful to note that shocks and scaffolds usually work together rather than separately: a big disruptive experience, such as a retreat, a crisis, or even a hard conversation, tends to land well only when it is held by strong scaffolding before and after.

For the non-linearity challenges, the authors recommend a wayfinding stance, drawing on the anthropologist Tim Ingold, which they distinguish sharply from navigation. Navigation assumes the map exists before travel begins. Wayfinding builds the map as it goes, reading the landscape continually rather than executing a fixed plan. Alongside this, they bring in the Cynefin framework, which sorts situations into five decision-making domains: clear, complicated, complex, chaotic and confused, though the paper focuses mainly on the first three. In the clear domain there is an established best practice to follow. In the complicated domain there are several effective methods rather than one right answer, and working out which fits requires analysis and expertise. In the complex domain, cause and effect can only be understood looking backwards, which is why the paper recommends small, low risk safe-to-fail probes there rather than a fixed plan. The paper sets the more disruptive chaotic domain aside for future work. This sits inside what the authors call an idionomic approach, meaning any general principle still has to be tested and adjusted against the specific person or situation in front of you.

For alignment challenges, the recommended move is negotiation between the competing parts of the self-collective, supported by a method called estuarine mapping, developed by Snowden and The Cynefin Co, where constraints in play are plotted against the energy and time it would take to shift them. This allows constraints too costly to touch for now, and those too unstable to be worth the effort, to be bracketed out, leaving focus on what is genuinely actionable.

For anticipation challenges, the authors introduce dynamic loading, using periods of spare time or energy to reduce the future cost of a wanted behaviour and raise the future cost of an unwanted one. This includes deliberately increasing the intentional load of an environment, through a meaningful object, a well-placed obstruction, or a recurring cue, and using transitions, thresholds and the start of a new day, week or year as natural reset points that make change easier to anchor.

Takeaways for leaders

• Willpower alone is a weak lever. The more useful questions are what scaffold needs building, such as a system, a check-in, or a physical change to the space, and whether a shock, a genuinely disruptive experience, well held, is what is actually needed to shift an entrenched pattern, rather than another incremental nudge.
• When facilitating group or organisational change, resist the urge to present a finished map. Wayfinding says build the map with people as you go, which is worth holding onto given how often change programmes are launched as if the destination and the route are already fully known.
• Cynefin gives a fast diagnostic. Is this a clear problem, where known best practice simply needs following, a complicated one, needing expert analysis, or a genuinely complex one, needing small, safe-to-fail experiments run in parallel because cause and effect will only be understood in hindsight? Most real organisational challenges are a mix of all three, and confusion happens when a complex problem is treated as though it were merely complicated.
• Estuarine mapping is directly usable in a coaching or team session. Getting constraints onto a grid of energy versus time to change focuses effort on what is genuinely movable rather than what is merely urgent or visible.
• Natural transition points, such as a new role, a new quarter, or a house move, are worth treating as leverage points for change rather than incidental timing.

Section 5: Implications and future directions

The authors widen the lens here. Drawing on the philosopher Michelle Maiese, they define autonomous agency as having a stable enough sense of identity to know what matters, while retaining the capacity to modulate one’s own habits when circumstances demand it, essentially the skill of wayshaping applied to oneself over time. They then push back on a narrower, more common use of the word resilience, one that simply means adapting smoothly to whatever demands are placed on a person. They argue this can quietly serve the status quo, with perpetually flexible people absorbing whatever the system asks of them, rather than genuinely being supported. True resilience, in their account, includes the capacity to reshape the demands themselves, not just absorb them.

The authors also stress that wayshaping, even when practised alone, is never purely individual. Any change made to one’s own habits ripples out through the people and environments one is embedded in, so individual work is really a small-scale version of collective and organisational change. The section closes by flagging where the framework is headed next, including formal modelling, links to active inference, and empirical testing of specific claims, such as whether shocks genuinely enable multiscale realignment, and whether behaviours that satisfy several needs at once are more likely to become lasting habits.

Takeaways for leaders

• Resilience programmes that only ask people to cope better with an unreasonable set of demands are worth questioning. This paper offers a clear, citable argument for why that is a partial and potentially exploitative reading of the concept, and for treating structural redesign as an equally valid resilience strategy alongside personal coping skills.
• Coaching or developing an individual does not stay contained to that person. A shift in one person’s habits changes what is available and expected for everyone around them, for better or worse, and it is worth naming that ripple explicitly rather than treating development as a private transaction.

Section 6: Conclusion

The authors bring it back to one sentence worth holding onto: habit change is best understood as a process of multiscale realignment, achieved by deliberately managing the flow of stress on the system through scaffolds and shocks, rather than as a single individual simply deciding to behave differently. This shaping is already happening all the time, mostly unconsciously. Wayshaping is really just the practice of doing it on purpose.

What this changes in how I coach leaders

I have sat across from plenty of leaders who describe themselves as stuck in language that sounds a lot like failure of character. They know what they should be doing, they cannot make it hold, and they conclude something is wrong with their discipline or their drive. What this paper gives me is a cleaner way to name what is actually going on. It is rarely one person failing to try hard enough. It is usually several parts of that person, a habit built for a different season of their career, an identity that still expects to be rewarded for being the hardest worker in the room, a newer intention that has not yet earned enough trust to override either. My job shifts slightly when I hold this. Instead of asking what is wrong with someone, I get to ask which part of them is currently winning, and what it thinks it is protecting them from.

The section on trust as a meta regulator is one I will keep coming back to. So much of coaching involves sitting with someone through the flat, uncertain middle of a change, the point where nothing visible has shifted yet and the temptation is to call it off. I used to treat that patience mostly as a mindset thing, something to encourage. Now I see it as something closer to infrastructure. If I can help a client build a real, evidenced trust that the delayed payoff is coming, rather than a hopeful one, they are far less likely to abandon the effort right before it would have paid off. That means naming the lag explicitly early on, rather than leaving it as a nasty surprise partway through.

And I will be a bit more careful with the word resilience. I have used it plenty over the years, usually meaning something like helping someone cope better with what is being asked of them. This paper has made me want to ask a second question alongside the first one. Alongside how do we help you carry this, I want to ask whether the demand itself deserves to be carried at all. Not every stuck pattern is the client’s to solve. Some of them belong to the system around them, and coaching that only ever strengthens someone’s capacity to absorb more can end up quietly propping up something that should have been changed instead.

What this changes in how I think about organisational change

Cynefin has been part of my toolkit for a long time, so none of this framework’s use of it was unfamiliar territory. What is new for me is seeing it sit inside a much richer account of the person doing the sensing. An organisation trying to work out whether it is facing a clear, complicated or complex problem is really just a self-collective at a larger scale, made up of teams and functions each with their own habits and identities, each with their own stake in what gets called complex versus what gets called someone simply not doing their job properly. That reframes a fair bit of the resistance I encounter in group work. It is not always politics or bad faith. It is often a structural misreading of which domain a problem actually sits in.

Estuarine mapping is the piece I am most keen to put back to work. I have been aware of it for a while through my work with Cynefin, but I have never actually used it with a client, it has stayed more of an idea I meant to get round to than a live part of my practice. Seeing it applied here to constraints inside a single self-collective, rather than an organisation, has sharpened my appetite to deepen that practice and properly play with it. Energy against time to change is a deceptively simple grid, and getting a group to physically place their constraints on it does something a verbal discussion rarely achieves. It stops the conversation drifting toward whatever is loudest or most recent, and it makes the genuinely cheap, quick wins visible again once they stop being buried under everything urgent.

The point that lands hardest for organisational work, though, is the one about ripple effects. I already knew that individual coaching inside an organisation never stays contained to the individual. This paper gives me sharper language for why. If a person really is a nested collective of habits and identities shaped by the structures around them, then changing one person’s habits is never a private transaction; it is a small disturbance sent out into every relationship and routine they are part of. That has practical consequences for how I scope engagements. If I am only ever contracted to work with the individual, I am quietly underselling what the work will actually touch, and probably the client or I are underpreparing the system for what is coming.

Five reflection questions for the reader

1. Think of a change you or someone you lead has struggled to sustain. Which part of the self-collective, a habit, an identity, a narrative, seems to be holding the old pattern in place, and what is that part actually trying to protect?
2. Where in your own work or life have you mistaken a complex problem for a merely complicated one, applying analysis and expertise where small, safe-to-fail experiments were really what was needed?
3. What does your environment, calendar, workspace, daily cues, currently signal about your intentions, and does it match what you say you intend?
4. Where have you been asked, or have you asked others, to simply be more resilient, when the more honest response might have been to change the demand itself?
5. If you mapped your current constraints on a grid of energy against time to change, what would land closest to the origin, genuinely low cost and quick to shift, that you have been overlooking?

Reference

James, M.M., Jamaluddin, M., Froese, T., Belhadi, A., Panagiotou, A. and Snowden, D. (2025) Wayshaping: a multiscale framework for behavior change. [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. Available at: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tp9wr_v4 (Accessed: 6 September 2026).