Elastic and Plastic Change
Elastic and Plastic ChangeTo understand why many change initiatives fail, consider what happens when you bend a business card with your fingers. If you bend it slightly, once you release pressure it springs back into its original shape. But if you bend it far enough, once you release pressure it remains bent. The technical terms for these two conditions are elastic and plastic change. Change initiatives fail when they produce elastic change, and succeed when they produce plastic change. To understand how to generate long-lasting change, let’s go back to the business card. If you hold it by its two ends, you can bend it quite a lot without causing permanent deformation. That’s because the pressure is distributed across the whole length of the card, so at no single point is it strong enough to break the paper fibers. But if you keep the center of the card in place with a finger, the curvature and pressure are concentrated in one spot. That local pressure is strong enough to cause the fibers to break. Diluted pressure creates far less permanent change than concentrated pressure. The same principle applies to change initiatives. You can remind people of a desired change once a week and see no real shift after a year, or you can confront the same behavior multiple times a day and see change within a week. Of course, words alone are not enough. Reminders that are not followed by action are quickly ignored. Each reminder must be paired with enforcement: either you do not leave until the desired behavior is practiced, or you require it to be practiced later that same day. In the latter case, you must check by the end of the day that it happened; if you don’t, your words lose credibility. This may sound exaggerated, but it isn’t. Any cadence longer than daily enforcement dilutes pressure to the point that it produces only elastic change. (read or share this as a blog post) Change Initiatives AdvisoryI added a new page to my website to better explain how I help business leaders nail change initiatives, both during planning (scoping, choosing vendors, design, de-risking, etc) and implementation.
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Luca Dellanna
Everyone deserves better managers
Resistance is signal Allow me to use a personal anecdote to introduce a concept that’s highly relevant to business. In 2025, I finally leveled up my gym workouts, from a chore delivering moderate results to an enjoyable activity that delivers excellent results. What changed wasn’t the workout routine, but the stance I took toward resistance. For years, I treated emotional resistance as something to power through. And power through I did: I went to the gym, lifted weights, did “the inputs.”...
Police Shootings and Post-Mortems (read as a blog post) Last week, an officer shot a woman in Minnesota after she tried escaping with her car in a way that put him in danger. Most of the discussion I read on social media was around two topics: whether the car hit the agent or merely scraped him, and whether the agent was correct in reacting by shooting her. Not only do I dislike the framing that there's exactly one side at fault. But my broader opinion is that, unless you're close to the...
It's that time of the year when people review and plan for the upcoming year. Instead of the usual format ("what went right, what went wrong, etc.), here is a suggestion for a different kind of yearly reflection. Yes, it is still a good idea to reflect on the past year and plan the next one. But a better to-do list is the bottleneck only if you perfectly executed last year’s list. Otherwise, the real bottlenecks are what prevented execution in the first place: mental habits, lack of clarity,...