New behaviors take more than 6 weeks to "stick"

By RG Bill Seidman and I were working with IT people inside a large corporation. The told us upfront that IT had a bad reputation in the company and was held in poor regard by the business units. How to solve this? Background: the IT department’s policy was to implement the company’s proscribed changes and to be available for up to six weeks afterwards, to help. So what could be wrong with this model? We talked about the importance of sustaining new behaviors and how at 6-8 weeks, a person going through a change process will have a crisis in which the new neural pathways are not yet the only pathways, an inner struggle ensues, and -more often than not – they regress to the old habits. It’s for just this reason that IT groups must stick around to help people at the critical juncture. We need them more, not less, after the 6-week mark. Once people are over the hump, the IT people can move on.]]>