Most change initiatives fail at the same point: not in the strategy, not in the intent, but in the moment when people are asked to do something different on Tuesday morning than they did on Monday. Mindsets matter. Ecosystem buy-in matters. A “never let each other fail” team norm matters. But all of those are starting conditions, not the work itself. The work is shifting daily behavior, and most organizations make that harder than it needs to be.
A Real Example From an Oncology Leader
A recent engagement with a global healthcare leader, recognized as an innovator in oncology and producing some of the most progressive life-saving medicines on the market, illustrates the pattern. Everyone in the organization shared the goal of serving patients faster and more effectively. The R&D function had launched an initiative to embed better collaboration practices: asking sharper questions, prioritizing the most impactful work, and improving cross-team decision making.
Support for the initiative was real. People put in the effort. And yet when the team measured adoption, they found only small, limited uptake of the new ways of working, well short of what their plans required. This is the gap that defeats most transformations. The intent is there, the resources are there, the people want it to work, and the behaviors still do not move at the rate the strategy assumed.
Why Big Behavior Changes Stall
The diagnostic was straightforward. The new behaviors were defined at too high a level of abstraction. “Collaborate better” and “ask the right questions” describe outcomes, not actions. Asking people to embody an idea is different from asking them to do a specific thing, and most of the time the idea does not translate into Tuesday-morning behavior on its own.
When the desired change is amorphous, three things go wrong:
- People interpret the change differently, so adoption looks inconsistent.
- Managers cannot coach what they cannot see, so feedback loops break down.
- The first attempts fail in idiosyncratic ways, and people quietly revert to what they were doing before.
The cure is not more communication about the change. It is breaking the change into pieces small enough that they can actually be done, observed, and improved.
Thinly Sliced Practices
We call these pieces Thinly-Sliced Practices: specific, repeatable, coachable actions that are easy to implement and that drive significant behavior change and results. A thinly sliced practice is concrete enough that two different people doing it would do roughly the same thing, observable enough that a colleague could give meaningful feedback on it, and small enough that it can be inserted into an existing workflow without a full process redesign.
The shift from “be more collaborative” to a defined practice that takes ninety seconds at the start of a meeting is the difference between a slogan and a behavior change. The former is impossible to coach. The latter is impossible to misinterpret.
Co-Creation Beats Imposition
The other half of the answer is who designs the practices. Pre-made, rigorous solutions handed down from headquarters tend to land badly, especially when the recipients have day jobs and limited patience for someone else’s process. The alternative is to co-create the practices with the teams who will use them, run them as a pilot, gather feedback in different settings, and iterate for impact.
Co-creation does three things at once. It produces practices that fit the work because the people who do the work helped design them. It generates ownership, because people defend what they helped build. And it turns adoption from a compliance exercise into a continuous improvement loop, where the practice gets better the longer the team uses it. With the oncology client, this approach moved adoption from limited to embedded, and the new behaviors became part of how teams develop drugs rather than something layered on top.
What This Means for Leaders
Behavior change at scale is not a willpower problem. It is a design problem. If your transformation is stalling, the question to ask is not whether your people are bought in. The question is whether the changes you have asked for are concrete enough to be done.
Two practical tests:
- Could a new joiner replicate the new behavior on day one from the description you have written down? If not, slice it thinner.
- Could a peer give specific, useful feedback on the practice after observing it once? If not, the behavior is still too abstract to coach.
Co-create the practices with the teams who will live them. Make them small, repeatable, and visible. Then build the coaching and feedback loops that let the practices improve in real conditions. That is the unglamorous work that turns change initiatives into actual change.