What does it mean that sustaining systemic change?

Changes that are not reinforced by the system will revert — build sustainability in. Systemic change does not end at implementation. Every change faces a sustained gravitational pull toward the pre-change state — the inertia of old habits, the persistence of old mental models, the decay of change energy as organizational attention moves to new priorities. Sustaining change requires embedding the new patterns into the system itself — into the structures, incentives, processes, and cultural infrastructure — so that the system maintains the new state automatically rather than requiring continuous intervention.

Example: A technology company, Lattice, successfully implemented a cross-functional product development process — replacing functional silos with integrated product teams. For the first year, the new process worked beautifully: faster decisions, better products, higher team satisfaction. In the second year, the process began reverting. Functional leaders, who had lost authority in the reorganization, began holding separate functional meetings that recreated the silo dynamic. Engineers started identifying primarily with their engineering peers rather than their product teams. The performance review process — which had not been updated — still evaluated people based on functional expertise rather than product contribution. By month eighteen, the organization was operating a hybrid system that combined the worst features of both models: the coordination overhead of cross-functional teams plus the communication gaps of functional silos. The reversion occurred because the change was implemented structurally (new teams, new reporting lines) but not embedded systemically (the incentives, the identity mechanisms, the feedback loops, and the cultural reinforcement all still supported the old model). A sustainability redesign embedded the change: performance reviews were restructured around product outcomes, career development was redesigned to reward cross-functional breadth, functional communities of practice were created to maintain technical excellence without recreating silos, and quarterly retrospectives assessed cross-functional health.

Try this: For a change your organization has implemented, assess its sustainability using four tests: (1) Incentive alignment — are people rewarded for the new behavior or the old behavior? If the incentives still support the old behavior, the change will revert when attention shifts. (2) Process embedding — is the new behavior embedded in formal processes or dependent on informal commitment? If it depends on informal commitment, it will decay as personnel changes. (3) Feedback loop presence — is there a mechanism that detects reversion and triggers correction? Without a feedback loop, reversion is invisible until it is complete. (4) Cultural integration — has the change been incorporated into the organization's stories, rituals, and artifacts? If the culture still references the old way as 'how we do things,' the new way is temporary. For each test the change fails, design the sustainability mechanism that is missing.