Don’t demand just willpower! This article draws on two Make Your Brain Work podcast episodes with Amy Brann and Dr Jessie Gulsin to explain why change snaps back to old habits. Learn how biology drives ‘resistance’, why environments beat motivation, and how L&D can use cues to make change stick.
Most organisational change programmes fail not because people are lazy or resistant, but because they are human. Despite good intentions, behaviour often snaps back to familiar patterns, leaving leaders frustrated and employees fatigued. Two Make Your Brain Work podcasts – Behaviour by Design: Redefining Your Actions and The Change Conundrum: Unpacking Why Transformation Is Tough – converge on a powerful insight: sustainable change is less about willpower and more about design.
The opportunity lies in shifting focus from motivation-heavy initiatives
Drawing on neuroscience and behavioural science, both episodes show why change feels hard and, crucially, how we can make it easier. For L&D professionals, the opportunity lies in shifting focus from motivation-heavy initiatives to environments, habits and identities that quietly support the right actions.
1. Stop blaming willpower – start designing behaviour
A core connection between the two topics is the myth of willpower. Behaviour by Design highlights how decision fatigue depletes the prefrontal cortex, making good choices harder as the day progresses. The Change Conundrum reinforces this by showing how deeply ingrained habits, stored in the basal ganglia, override conscious intentions.
In practice, this means asking people to “try harder” is unlikely to work for long. Instead, small redesigns to routines, cues and defaults can dramatically alter behaviour without increasing cognitive load.
Top tip: Encourage teams to automate and simplify. Fewer decisions, earlier in the day, protect mental energy for what really matters.
2. Reframe resistance as biology, not attitude
Resistance to change is often interpreted as stubbornness or negativity. Neuroscience tells a different story. Loss aversion activates the amygdala, making potential losses feel more threatening than equivalent gains feel rewarding. Uncertainty itself becomes the threat.
This explains why even positive change can provoke anxiety and slow uptake. People are not resisting the goal; they are protecting themselves from perceived loss.
Top tip: Reframe change in terms of gains, not sacrifices. Language matters: “gaining clarity” lands very differently from “losing time”.
3. Make the environment do the heavy lifting
Both podcasts emphasise the environment as one of the most powerful, and underused, behaviour shapers. Visible cues, friction, and defaults influence actions far more reliably than motivation alone. If an undesired behaviour is easy and a desired one is hard, behaviour will follow convenience every time.
The Change Conundrum extends this insight to organisational change, showing that environments must support new habits if neuroplasticity is to work in our favour.
Top tip: Run an “environmental audit”. Ask: What does this workspace, system or process make easy? What does it make hard? Adjust accordingly.
4. Close the gap between intention and action
A recurring frustration in change efforts is the intention–action gap. The prefrontal cortex is excellent at planning, but execution is driven by emotion and habit. This is why knowing what to do is rarely enough.
Behaviour by Design offers practical solutions: implementation intentions (“If X happens, then I will Y”), tiny first steps, and habit stacking all help bridge this gap by reducing emotional resistance.
Top tip: Help learners translate goals into specific “if–then” plans. Clarity reduces hesitation at the moment action is required.
5. Anchor change to identity, not just outcomes
Perhaps the most powerful link between the two topics is identity. The Change Conundrum highlights how self-concept, processed in the medial prefrontal cortex, strongly influences behaviour. When change feels inconsistent with “who I am”, it is likely to fail.
Behaviour by Design complements this by showing how reinforcing desired behaviours, even before results appear, helps reshape identity over time. Celebrating learning, effort and progress (not just success) strengthens this effect.
Top tip: Use identity-based language: “I am someone who prepares”, “We are a team that learns from experiments”. Behaviour follows belief.
Designing change that lasts
These insights challenge traditional change approaches that rely on communication campaigns and motivational appeals alone. If only 34% of organisational change initiatives succeed, the issue is not ambition, but design.
For L&D professionals, the implication is clear. Lasting transformation requires working with the brain, not against it: reducing friction, reshaping environments, reframing loss, and aligning behaviour with identity. When behaviour is designed well, change stops feeling like an uphill battle and starts becoming the default.
This article was taken in part from two episodes of the popular Make Your Brain Work Podcast
You can hear Amy Brann, an expert in applied neuroscience, and Dr Jessie Gulsin, a medical doctor, explore the questions that matter to people professionals, leaders, and managers
The episodes used in this article are:
Behaviour by Design: Redefining Your Actions and The Change Conundrum: Unpacking Why Transformation Is Tough
