Everyone loves the launch (or do they). The kickoff. The all-hands where someone unveils the new way of working and the room fills with cautious optimism or eye rolls and free pastries. Slides get shared. Champions get named. Timelines get pinned to walls.
Then three months pass. The slides gather dust. The champions go quiet or leave. The timelines slip. And someone in leadership asks the question nobody wants to answer: is any of this actually working?
Most organisations answer it badly. They look at KPIs, adoption metrics, training completion rates, tool usage dashboards, stories done. Numbers that tell you what people are doing but nothing about whether the change has actually landed or if anyone cares.
Change sticking isn't about compliance. It's about behaviour. It looks like a team that runs a retrospective not because it's on the calendar but because they genuinely want to improve. A leader who asks "what do you think?" and actually waits for the answer.
It looks boring. And that's exactly the point.
Stop asking "have people adopted the new way of working?" Start asking "would they go back to the old way if given the choice?"
If the answer is no, it's sticking. If the answer is yes, or nobody is sure, you've still got work to do. Not more training. Not more comms. More listening. More observation. More patience. More getting clever on how you get there.
The change doesn't stick because you rolled it out well. It sticks because people decided it was worth keeping without the fear of being sacked.