Change Levers

Communication and training help people understand a change and learn the new way. They rarely keep the new way in place on their own. If pay, targets, procedures and the example set by managers still point to the old way, most people will follow those signals rather than the launch message.

Change levers are the mechanisms that shape those signals. The idea has several roots in the wider literature:

• Edgar Schein described how leaders embed culture through what they pay attention to and measure, how they allocate resources and rewards, and how they role-model, reinforced by structures, systems and physical space.
• Steven Kerr showed in 1975 how organizations often reward one behavior while hoping for another.
• Emily Lawson and Colin Price listed reinforcing mechanisms and role modeling among the conditions for changing mindsets in organizations.

Change levers are therefore the part of a change that works on the environment people act in, not only on what they know.

The public APMG syllabus names five types of leverage: emotional, procedural, structural, environmental and leadership. The course text defines them; the descriptions below are our own reading of those names, illustrated from the sources on this page, so learn the official definitions from the study guide.

Levers work in combination. A new procedure without matching targets, or a reward scheme that managers ignore, sends a mixed signal.

Change levers are most effective when they all point in the same direction as the change.

"Carrots, sticks and burning bridges" is a common shorthand for three ways of pulling levers, which the public APMG syllabus calls leverage strategies:

• Carrots reward the new way: recognition, incentives, easier work or better tools.
• Sticks attach consequences to staying with the old way: performance conversations, loss of privileges, escalation.
• Burning bridges remove the route back: the old system is switched off, the old form is withdrawn, the old process no longer has an owner.

A burning bridge is different from a "burning platform". The burning platform image, often credited to Daryl Conner, is about creating urgency at the start of a change. A burning bridge comes later and removes the option of going back.

The carrots, sticks and burning bridges metaphor is a memory aid for change levers, not a complete method.

Start by asking what currently holds the old behavior in place, then pick the levers that remove those supports.

At Larchfield Logistics, pickers still use paper lists three months after a handheld scanning app went live. The change team finds four supports for the old way:

1. Procedural: the shift bonus rewards pick speed, and paper feels faster. The bonus is changed to reward accurate, scanned picks.
2. Structural: the warehouse system still prints paper lists by default. The system is reconfigured so that printing becomes an exception that needs a supervisor's approval.
3. Leadership: some supervisors still carry clipboards. Site managers ask supervisors to run shift huddles from the app's dashboard.
4. Environmental: charging stations are at the far end of the building. They are moved next to the picking zones.

Only when usage is high and support is in place does the site stop printing paper lists altogether.

The sequence matters: enabling levers come first, reinforcing levers next, and change levers that remove the old way come last, once the new way works.

• Compliance without commitment. Sticks and burning bridges can produce the behavior while people still disagree with the change. In Kelman's terms this is compliance, which tends to fade when pressure is removed.
• Rewarding the wrong thing. As Kerr pointed out, an incentive tied to an easy-to-count measure can encourage gaming rather than the behavior the change needs.
• Removing the old way too early. A bridge burned before people are able to work the new way leads to workarounds, errors and lost trust.
• Mixed signals. A new rule that leaders ignore teaches people that the rule is optional.
• Ethics and transparency. Choice architecture shapes decisions without people noticing. Thaler and Sunstein propose a publicity test: do not use a nudge you would not be willing to defend in public.

Change levers are powerful precisely because they act on behavior directly, so they need the same care as any other design decision.

Most levers sit outside the change team's direct control.

• Sponsors own budgets, targets and decisions such as switching off an old system.
• Line leaders decide day-to-day consequences and model the new way in front of their teams.
• HR owns reward, recognition and performance frameworks.
• Process owners change procedures, systems and approval rules.

The change manager diagnoses which levers are needed, recommends them, and checks that they are aligned with each other and with the change. At Harbourside Council, for example, the change manager can show the sponsor that a new case-management process is undermined by a team target that still counts paper files.

Change levers are therefore a shared responsibility, and the change manager's job is to make sure the right people pull them at the right time.