Remind

At this point the project is launched, the impacted personnel have been informed, educated, notified, and should be adjusting their behaviour as expected.

Were it only that simple.

Truth: Front-loading preparations, communications, and education does not eliminate the back-end work of continually reinforcing it. All the up-front work should make the back end easier and more effective because it is dominantly repeating rather than breaking new ground.

Reminding

Even though during Transition the dominant activities were communication-oriented, specifically to pull the trigger on impacted people’s behaviour change, it is this Remind step that becomes truly reinforcement-heavy.

Repeating

For better or worse, much of change management can be reduced to one syllable: nag. People are expected to change (they have to, really). But they rarely do so easily, smoothly, or without relapsing to previous habits. Think: teenagers. So change management is forced to take the role of mom: reminding and reminding until the new behaviour is in place or the kids have left home.

Reinforcing

What separates change management from parenting (at least in this circumstance) are that: (a) there are many more tools and avenues of persuasion available, and (b) the people in an organization that have to change are arguably more rational than your average teenager.

With that in mind, this step has two dominant, persuasion activities: coaching and communicating.