When Change Looks Like It Has Landed: How To Spot Adoption Drift Early
- Andrew Pigott
- May 16
- 5 min read
The rollout went well. Training attendance was good. Log-ins are strong. Managers are reporting that the new system is being used. When the leadership team reviews the programme dashboard, the change appears to have landed.
And yet something is slightly off. Certain teams are still keeping their own spreadsheets for urgent referrals. A WhatsApp group has become the default for time-sensitive coordination. Some staff are entering case notes late, or minimally, because the official workflow slows down during live conversations with service users. The new process is mentioned in updates, visible on dashboards, and endorsed in meetings. The real work is quietly splitting between the official system and the workaround.
This is different from the early discomfort of learning a new way. Here, the change has been accepted in principle. But daily practice is starting to split. You can have a successful rollout and still be in the early stages of drift.
The gap between visible compliance and embedded practice
When leaders see this pattern, the first instinct is often a tracking problem: the metrics are not granular enough, the reporting is too generous, the managers are not following through closely enough. Fix the dashboard, tighten the review, remind people of the expectation.
These responses are not wrong, but they tend to treat the symptom rather than the cause. A log-in tells you someone entered the system. It does not tell you whether the system is carrying the work that matters. Dashboards can show activity while missing completeness, timeliness, quality of use, and whether the difficult parts of the job are still happening outside the official process.
The more useful question is not who is not complying. It is: what is the old way still making possible that the new way has not yet made easy?
What drift is telling you
Early adoption drift is often not best understood as outright refusal. It tends to begin as selective use: people engaging with the visible, lower-risk parts of the change while keeping older routes alive for the work that feels urgent, sensitive or relational. If those older routes stay hidden and ungoverned, they can quietly become the real operating model.
People keep old routines alive not only out of habit. They keep them alive when those routines still protect something the new way has not yet absorbed: speed when a referral is urgent, local judgement when a relationship is long-standing, confidence when a situation becomes difficult, trust when a volunteer or beneficiary would be put off by the formality of the official process.
This is ambivalence in practice. People may genuinely support the intent of the change while keeping the old route available for the moments that test them most. Parallel systems are often less a sign of defiance than a sign of unresolved fit.
Implementation science makes a useful distinction here. Carl May and colleagues, whose work on Normalisation Process Theory examines how new practices become routine, found that go-live is not the same as normalisation. What organisations often measure at launch is adoption in the easiest situations. What they miss is whether the change is taking hold in the situations that actually test it: the urgent cases, the sensitive conversations, the moments of pressure where people cannot afford to be slower or less certain than they were before.
A pattern from the third sector
A large national charity introduced a shared case management and volunteer coordination platform across its local service teams. The case was clear: safer handoffs, better safeguarding visibility, less duplicated work, and stronger evidence for funders. Training was thorough. Early usage data was positive.
Eight months in, a closer review found a more uneven picture. Some teams were using the platform consistently. Others had kept local trackers for urgent referrals. Volunteers in several areas were coordinating through WhatsApp because it was faster. Case notes were being entered late in situations where the official workflow felt too slow during direct service delivery.
When teams were asked about it, the pattern was consistent. The platform made sense in principle. But in the moments that felt most sensitive, urgent safeguarding situations, conversations with long-standing service users, complex volunteer arrangements built on personal relationships, the old route still felt more reliable. It was not refusal. It was unresolved fit between the new process and the parts of the work where people could not afford to be slower or less certain.
The risk was that leaders looked at the dashboard and thought the change had landed, while the real operating model was quietly fracturing. Local practice said not yet.
Four moves that help
Look for parallel systems, not just low usage
The side spreadsheet, the WhatsApp group, the local tracker that does not connect to the official system: these are diagnostic clues, not automatic evidence of bad behaviour. Trace two or three core work journeys, referral intake, safeguarding escalation, case closure, and ask where information is first captured, where it is re-entered, and what stays outside the official record. That map will tell you more about the state of adoption than any usage report.
Measure quality of use, not just frequency
Usage volume is not the same as embedded practice. Pair your regular metrics with a small monthly sample of actual cases. Look at timeliness, completeness, and whether the official record reflects what actually happened. The question is whether the new way is carrying the difficult work reliably enough to become routine, or whether people are using it for the straightforward situations and managing everything else through informal routes.
Ask what the old way still protects
The most useful question in any adoption review is often not "why are people not using it?" It is "what is the old way still making possible?" Ask teams directly, and treat the answers as information rather than a compliance test. Sort what you hear into patterns: is the issue speed, system fit, safeguarding confidence, workload, volunteer relationships, or something else? The answers will tell you what the new process still needs to become.
Create a route to surface and test local adaptations
Some local adaptations improve fit without undermining the change. Others quietly hollow it out. Healthy adaptation keeps the purpose of the change and improves local fit. Harmful drift keeps the label and quietly removes the substance. The difference matters, but leaders cannot judge it if they do not know the adaptations exist.
Create a light monthly space where teams can name one workaround or local adjustment, explain why it exists, and what risk it carries. Then make a decision: absorb it, redesign the process around it, or agree a clear timeline for stopping it. If honesty about adaptations never leads to practical change, people will stop bringing the real picture forward.
What helps adoption hold
Adoption does not strengthen because people are reminded of the expectation. It holds when the new way becomes trusted enough to carry the work that matters most, including the parts that are urgent, sensitive and relational.
By the time resistance is visible, the workaround may already have become the norm. The earlier signal is quieter: the old route still being used for the work that tests people most. That is where leaders need to look. Not to catch people out, but to understand what the change has not yet made possible.
At Common Path Connection, we help leaders look beneath surface adoption data to the routines, parallel systems and quiet frictions that decide whether change actually sticks.
Our Change & Adoption work helps organisations spot drift early, understand what the old way still protects, and adjust the new way until it can carry the real work in practice.
If the rollout looks positive but something feels off, our Change Adoption Sprint is designed for exactly that moment.
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