Why habits are the real key to organisational change

Much of what we do at work does not arise from rational decisions made from scratch each time. It arises from patterns learnt over time, which become progressively automatic. It is a process that cognitive psychology describes as a real 'circle of habit', and which in organisations often ends up taking root almost like a trait in their DNA.

Every habit arises from a relatively simple sequence. In the beginning, there is an experimental phase: a person tries out a response to a new situation. If that response produces a result perceived as useful or satisfying, the brain tends to retain it.

Over time, that response is no longer consciously chosen: it is recalled almost automatically. It is here that the process becomes circular. A stimulus activates a routine and the routine produces a gratification that reinforces the behaviour.

Journalist and scholar Charles Duhigg summarised this process by identifying four basic elements: the signal, which activates the behaviour; the routine, i.e. the habitual action; the gratification, which reinforces the mechanism; and finally the need, which makes that gratification meaningful.

Once established, this circuit becomes surprisingly resistant to change. Not because people do not want to change, but because the behaviour no longer goes through an intentional process.

And it is precisely here that many change management programmes encounter the greatest difficulties. When one wants to change widespread behaviour - the way one communicates, makes decisions, collaborates, the leadership style - the organisational instinct is often to try to eliminate the habit.

Actually, in most cases, it is much more effective to change the structure.

The principle is not to destroy the circle, but to reuse it. You keep the stimulus, retain the gratification and change the routine. In this way, an old and now ineffective habit can be transformed into an asset.

There is, however, one decisive element that is often underestimated: belief. For a new habit to really take hold, people must perceive that the change makes sense and produces value.

As John Kotter, one of the leading scholars of organisational change, reminds us, 'transformations fail not because of a lack of strategies, but because new behaviours do not become part of the culture'.

It is here that habits reveal their deepest dimension. They are not just individual behaviours: they are building blocks of organisational culture.

The way one communicates, the leadership style, the relationships between people, how one handles a mistake or shares a result: all this, over time, becomes habit.

And when a habit spreads, it produces something even more important: identity.

Creating a new habit in an organisation means in fact creating a shared behaviour. It is not just an operational solution: it is a moment in which a common way of working and interpreting one's role is reinforced.

Habits that change organisations

This is why we often speak of 'key habits': daily practices that, once changed, produce knock-on changes in the functioning of the organisation.

The task of counselling - and more generally of leadership - is then not simply to introduce new rules, but to be able to recognise these habits. Understanding which ones weaken the system and which ones deserve to be strengthened. Cultural change does not happen quickly, it takes shape through the progressive construction of new virtuous circles: sequences of actions that, repeated over time, become a natural part of the way of working. Strategies show a direction, leadership sets the course.

But it is everyday habits that determine where an organisation will really go.

*Senior Consultant at Newton Spa