Post by Brian Ellis

"We tried that. We did it five years ago. Nothing ever changes around here." Every leader who has pushed for real change has heard some version of that line. For years I treated it as an attitude problem to coach out of people. Then Peter Sage showed me this was a physics problem and it hit. Every organization (and person) sits inside a gravitational field. 👉Habits. 👉Traditions. 👉Incentives. 👉Relationships. 🟰the old stories people tell about who we are. The more mass an organization/person carries, the stronger the pull back toward how things have always been. 🚩A twenty year veteran has more behavioral mass than a new hire. 🚩A department that has run the same way for 15 years has enormous pull. That pull is the natural weight of a system that's been running a long time. Here's the part that took me too long to learn... A rocket doesn't escape Earth by pointing up and hoping. It has to reach escape velocity. The pull never stops. The rocket wins because enough thrust gets applied long enough to break orbit. 🚀 Most change efforts buy lift and mistake it for escape... Keynotes, retreats, training... The organization rises for awhile, then settles back into orbit around its old identity. I see it as Organizational Escape Velocity, and my argument is there are five engines get you out: 🔷Identity 🔷Repetition 🔷Critical mass 🔷Structural alignment 🔷Sustained energy Miss one and gravity wins. If there's not enough energy applied to reach orbit, old incentives will keep rewarding old behavior. I watched it happen more than once in my previous career. The answer was always the same. We never built enough thrust to escape who we'd always been. Think about the last change that stalled in your organization. How much of your energy went into the launch, and how much into sustaining thrust past the halfway point? 📌 I help organizations and people through identity challenges. Let's connect! #TacticalStoic #OrganizationalCulture #executiveleadership #Changemanagement