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Glossary
Plain-English definitions. Useful when a leader uses a term loosely, or when you need to be precise without sounding academic.
ADKAR — Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. A five-step model of individual change; most useful as a diagnostic for where one person is stuck. → ADKAR — Individual Change
APEASE — Acceptability, Practicality, Effectiveness, Affordability, Side-effects, Equity. The filter for choosing between candidate interventions. → COM-B and the Behaviour Change Wheel
Automaticity — the degree to which a behaviour happens without conscious decision. The end goal of embedding.
Behaviour — an observable action by a named person at a specified moment. If you can’t film it, it isn’t one. → Target Behaviour Definition
Bright spot — a place where the desired behaviour is already happening despite the same constraints. The cheapest source of solutions and the most credible evidence.
Change saturation — the point at which cumulative concurrent change exceeds a group’s absorptive capacity, degrading everything running.
COM-B — Capability, Opportunity, Motivation → Behaviour. The diagnostic backbone of this toolkit. → COM-B and the Behaviour Change Wheel
Counter-measure — a metric watched to catch the thing that might get worse while your headline metric improves.
Cue — the trigger that fires a habit. Time, place, preceding event, emotional state, other people.
Descriptive norm — what people actually do. Generally more powerful than injunctive norms for routine behaviours. → Social Norms and Influence
Diffusion — how an innovation spreads through a population over time, from innovators to laggards. → Diffusion of Innovations
Drift — the gradual reversion of a behaviour after attention withdraws. Typically visible from week six. → Habit Loop and Behavioural Drift
EAST — Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely. Four practical principles for intervention design. → EAST — Easy Attractive Social Timely
Effort accumulation — the way a small per-instance cost becomes intolerable under pressure. The most common cause of drift.
Environmental restructuring — changing the physical or social context rather than the person. Usually the cheapest and most durable intervention type.
Implementation intention — a written “when X happens, I will do Y” statement. Cheap, fast, and robustly effective.
Injunctive norm — what people believe others approve of, as opposed to what they do.
Intervention function — the nine broad categories of thing an intervention can do: Education, Persuasion, Incentivisation, Coercion, Training, Restriction, Environmental restructuring, Modelling, Enablement.
Lagging indicator — an outcome measure that moves late. Business benefit, cycle time, cost.
Leading indicator — a behaviour measure that moves early. The one most programmes don’t have. → Measurement Plan — Leading and Lagging
Neutral zone — Bridges’ term for the period after the old way has gone and before the new is fluent. Where performance dips and programmes get cancelled. → Bridges Transition Model
Nudge — a change to choice architecture that alters behaviour without forbidding options or significantly changing incentives. Real but modest effects.
Parallel running — operating old and new systems simultaneously. The most common single cause of stalled adoption. → Force Field Analysis
Restraining force — something holding the current state in place. Removing one is usually cheaper and more effective than adding pressure. → Force Field Analysis
Say–do gap — the distance between what leaders say and what they visibly do. The most damaging executive failure mode. → Executive Failure Modes
Sponsor — the senior person with the authority to remove organisational barriers and decide. Active, visible sponsorship is the largest single contributor to change success. → Sponsor Briefing Pack
Transition — the psychological process people go through, as distinct from the situational change. Change happens on a date; transition takes as long as it takes.
Terms worth pushing back on
“Buy-in” — an attitude, unmeasurable and slow to shift. Push the conversation to observable behaviour instead.
“Burning platform” — fear-based urgency. Produces short-term compliance, risk-aversion and information-hiding. Doesn’t sustain.
“Change fatigue” — often used to dismiss a legitimate capacity problem as an attitude. Usually it’s saturation, and saturation is a leadership decision.
“Culture change” — culture is an outcome, not a lever. Ask what behaviours would be different. → Target Behaviour Definition
“Resistance” — treats a symptom as a personality trait. Decode it instead. → Resistance Decoder
“They need to be more accountable” — almost always describes a system that makes the right behaviour costly, not a population that lacks character.
→ Myths and Traps in Change Management · Sources and Further Reading
← Back to the Behavioural Change Toolkit