Elastic and Plastic Change

To understand why many change initiatives fail, consider what happens when you bend a business card with your fingers. If you bend it slightly, once you release pressure it springs back into its original shape. But if you bend it far enough, once you release pressure it remains bent.

The technical terms for these two conditions are elastic and plastic change. Change initiatives fail when they produce elastic change, and succeed when they produce plastic change.

To understand how to generate long-lasting change, let’s go back to the business card. If you hold it by its two ends, you can bend it quite a lot without causing permanent deformation. That’s because the pressure is distributed across the whole length of the card, so at no single point is it strong enough to break the paper fibers. But if you keep the center of the card in place with a finger, the curvature and pressure are concentrated in one spot. That local pressure is strong enough to cause the fibers to break. Diluted pressure creates far less permanent change than concentrated pressure.

The same principle applies to change initiatives. You can remind people of a desired change once a week and see no real shift after a year, or you can confront the same behavior multiple times a day and see change within a week.ShareCopy

Of course, words alone are not enough. Reminders that are not followed by action are quickly ignored. Each reminder must be paired with enforcement: either you do not leave until the desired behavior is practiced, or you require it to be practiced later that same day. In the latter case, you must check by the end of the day that it happened; if you don’t, your words lose credibility.

This may sound exaggerated, but it isn’t. Any cadence longer than daily enforcement dilutes pressure to the point that it produces only elastic change.