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Drift Check — 30 60 90
📅 Put these three dates in the diary before go-live. Not after. After go-live, nobody books them, and drift happens in silence.
Day 30 — is it happening at all?
Day 30
Date: _______ Behaviour metric: ___% (vs baseline ___%)
Counter-measures moving? _______________
Three questions to five people who do the work:
- Are you doing it? Honestly.
- What makes it hard?
- What do you do instead when it doesn’t work?
What I’m hearing: _______________
Workarounds spotted: _______________
One thing to fix this week: _______________
Typical picture: adoption looks good — often better than target. Don’t celebrate. This is novelty plus supervision, and it will fall. Say so in the report, so that the fall doesn’t read as failure later.
⭐ The workaround question is the most valuable one. Workarounds at day 30 are honest design feedback and are still cheap to fix. By day 90 they’re established practice and cost ten times as much to unwind.
Day 60 — the real number appears
Day 60
Date: _______ Behaviour metric: ___% Change since day 30: ___
Is the old route still available anywhere? _______________
Are managers still asking about it? _______________
Is anyone senior still asking about it? _______________
Have champions gone quiet? _______________
What’s the excuse being used when it’s not done? _______________
If adoption has dropped, work down this list in order — the causes are almost always here:
| Check | If yes |
|---|---|
| Programme support withdrawn? | Nothing replaced it in the line — Embedding and Reinforcement |
| Old route still open? | Close it. Most common single cause. |
| Managers stopped asking? | Managers’ own attention has moved. Prompt them. |
| It fails under pressure? | Effort accumulation. The design isn’t good enough on the worst day. |
| A new initiative landed? | Saturation. Take it to the sponsor. |
| Recognition stopped? | Reward extinction. Move it into the BAU rhythm. |
⚠️ Day 60 is the intervention point. The drop is visible and the behaviour hasn’t yet been abandoned. Day 90 is too late for a cheap fix.
Day 90 — has it become normal?
Day 90
Date: _______ Behaviour metric: ___% Trend: ___
Outcome metric moving? _______________
The normalisation tests:
- Do people refer to the old way in the past tense? ☐
- Do new joiners learn only the new way? ☐
- Does it survive a busy week? ☐
- Do people teach each other without being asked? ☐
- Is it in objectives, onboarding and the standing agenda? ☐
- Would it continue if the change team vanished tomorrow? ☐
Boxes ticked: ___/6
| Score | Read |
|---|---|
| 5–6 | Embedded. Hand over formally and stop. |
| 3–4 | Partially embedded. Fix the unticked boxes — they’re specific and actionable. |
| 0–2 | Not embedded. It will revert. Decide honestly whether to re-invest or stop pretending. |
The honest conversation at day 90
If it hasn’t embedded, someone has to say so. It should be you, and it should be framed as a decision rather than a confession:
“Adoption is at 31% and flat. It’s not going to embed on its own. Realistically there are three options: re-invest for another eight weeks with
[specific asks]; reduce the scope to the part that has stuck and formally drop the rest; or stop and be clear that we’ve stopped. What I’d advise against is leaving it as-is — a half-adopted process is worse than either the old way or the new one, because now there are two truths.”
⭐ That last sentence is the one that gets a decision. Leaders will tolerate slow progress indefinitely; they will act on “we currently have two versions of the truth.”
Running drift checks as standard
Once you’ve done this three times you’ll want it as a habit. Suggested standing calendar for any change:
| Date | Check | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Go-live + 30 | Adoption + workarounds | |
| Go-live + 60 | Drift causes | |
| Go-live + 90 | Normalisation tests + Change Retrospective | |
| Go-live + 180 | Single metric check, 15 min |
The 180-day check takes fifteen minutes and catches the slow reversion that nobody else is looking for.
→ Habit Loop and Behavioural Drift · Embedding and Reinforcement · Change Retrospective
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