How to Make Change Last When Everything is Changing

Every bold leader strives to drive meaningful change. They set ambitious goals to improve literacy, extend life expectancy, increase employment, and enhance air quality. But generating real, lasting impact doesn’t happen overnight. It emerges from enduring improvement in the way work gets done, which is especially hard during this era of rapid change.

Take education, for example: A single great lesson won’t dramatically improve student achievement, but when better learning experiences are reinforced consistently, they accumulate into meaningful gains for learners. The same is true across sectors: Progress requires persistence.

Yet, making change happen is only half the battle. The real challenge? Making it stick so that it moves the needle on outcomes. Only around 30% of change efforts succeed; most fail because they lose focus and momentum before results materialize. 

This raises a critical question: What does it take to make change last?
Over the past few months, we’ve discussed this question with state leaders, education agencies, local nonprofits, and education experts across the U.S. Two challenges surfaced repeatedly: first, sustaining commitment to change when results aren’t immediate; and second, maintaining focus amid ongoing policy uncertainty and rapid technological shifts—especially with the rise of AI—which further amplifies the first challenge. It is tricky to make change last when everything is changing. 

Many leaders described a dynamic that is often referred to as the “implementation dip”: a predictable drop in confidence when teams begin navigating the learning curve of a new initiative. People are investing energy to do things differently, but aren't seeing immediate results; they start questioning whether they're on the right path. In some sectors like e-commerce, quick feedback—say from an optimized landing page—can reinforce new efforts in real time. But in K–12 education, meaningful progress often takes months to materialize, making the “dip” feel even deeper.

Drawing from our work with partners in more than a dozen states over the last 10 years, we’ve identified seven strategies that help ensure meaningful improvements don’t just take hold—they survive the implementation dip, and generate impact for the communities and students they serve.

‍1. Build a Movement, Not a Mandate

System-wide change built on a single champion is fragile. Cultivate a broad coalition by engaging allies, encouraging them to promote the effort publicly, and creating shared ownership of success. When the Louisiana Department of Education implemented major reforms to strengthen early childhood education and improve K-12 learning, they prioritized effective stakeholder communication to generate awareness of the changes and provide support for teachers. These efforts led to strong buy-in among teachers, which the state credits as a contributing factor in the initiatives' continued success. The reforms have been sustained for more than a decade and have contributed to meaningful gains in student achievement.

• Create a thoughtful communications plan that clearly articulates the “why” and “how” of your change efforts.
• Map key stakeholders and prioritize your team’s systematic engagement with them.
• Help other organizations understand how your change serves their agenda; encourage them to share your success.

2. Communicate What’s Working
It’s difficult to sustain commitment to a new effort when outcomes aren’t immediately visible. But stepping away too soon can cut off the chance to achieve impact. To keep momentum during those early “uphill” days, it helps to spotlight early wins and share anecdotes of progress—small signals that the work is starting to take hold and you are on the right path.

Carey Wright, former state superintendent of education in Mississippi, utilized the power of communication to help lead the state through an education transformation. In a 2023 interview, Wright shared how she shifted the narrative around education, adopting a proactive communications approach focused on "shining the lights" to draw attention to effective things happening in the state.

• Highlight the “bright spots” where results are already visible.
• Take leaders on field visits to see impact firsthand.
• Share testimonials and data that demonstrate momentum.
• Publicly recognize early adopters who are driving success.

3. Keep Your “Why” Relevant 

Leadership transitions and shifting priorities are stress tests for any change initiative. To ensure staying power, proactively reframe your narrative to align with emerging agendas—retelling the story through the lens of current leadership priorities. In conversations with a state team navigating a leadership transition, they shared that the most impactful step they took was reframing their change story to highlight how the effort would support the incoming state education chief. This shift helped ensure their work remained relevant and resilient through the transition.

• Leverage leadership transitions as opportunities to demonstrate how your efforts serve the broader incoming agenda.
• Especially during transitions, be proactive about adapting the narrative for why your change effort is important now. Tell the story in terms of the evolving priorities. 
• Refresh your narrative for change to connect to broader trends and policy shifts that reinforce the need for continuity.

4. Make the Desired Choice Convenient

Strategically design processes and incentives—whether through streamlined requirements, recognition, professional growth, or structural factors like funding, grant requirements, and definitions of quality—to facilitate, fast-track, reinforce, and reward behaviors that support your change effort. 

• Identify which choices will contribute to your change effort, and make those choices more convenient or automatic. 
• Create default opt-ins, fast-track administrative processes, make the desired choice visible, and embed change into required processes.

5. Keep Tracking Data and Adapting Accordingly

Even after meeting your goals, ongoing monitoring and data collection is crucial to prevent backsliding. As the old saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. By treating monitoring as an essential discipline, organizations can identify risks early and take proactive action to sustain results. In Chicago Public Schools, the To&Through Project provides district high schools with data, research, and continuing education to help improve college enrollment and graduation rates. The data is also publicly available online, enabling community members and other stakeholders to track progress and stay informed. By continually measuring student performance (and pairing data with research and professional learning), students are achieving better outcomes. One high school that uses the data to drive decision-making experienced a 20% boost in college enrollment in just two years.

• Keep key metrics visible and up-to-date, even after you meet your goals; embed them into leadership discussions and reports.
• Implement feedback loops where frontline staff can surface challenges in real time. Use data to course-correct before small issues escalate into significant backslides.

6. Future-Proof Your Team with Ongoing Training

Turnover happens, knowledge fades, and priorities shift. To maintain change, make continuous training and onboarding routine. Document and share best practices to ensure new team members understand what needs to be done to sustain performance. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath, for example, has prioritized building capacity at the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to support long-term systemic improvement. Under his leadership, TEA has focused on leadership development, data-driven decision-making, and district-level support, ensuring that school systems have the expertise and resources needed to sustain reforms. 

• Identify key knowledge and behaviors your team needs in order to keep the change alive—instill these in new joiners from day one. 
• Hold regular trainings in which staff can reflect on essential knowledge and behaviors, learn from each other’s experiences, and reinforce commitment to the change. 
• Make training sustainable—high cost or team travel makes it less likely to continue. Consider having staff from strategic areas facilitate one or two trainings per year—they will become experts and champions for change.

7. Lock in Long-Term Funding

Without sustainable funding, even the most promising initiatives stall. In the face of reduced federal spending and local budget cuts, states and school districts must get creative to protect important programs. As the Council of Chief State School Officers points out, many states have confronted funding cliffs in recent years and have been resourceful in establishing sustainable funds. Utah, for example, “appropriated additional state funding to sustain literacy coaching and supports” for its science of reading work that was previously funded by federal pandemic relief dollars (ESSER). 

• Map all funding sources available, take inventory of the ones you are currently leveraging, and explore how you can diversify funding sources.
• Prompt your team to develop a sharp sense of which investments are yielding the best return or are particularly strategic. Developing a good notion of prioritization will serve well when navigating funding cliffs and other budget shifts.
• Integrate key activities into core budgets rather than treating them as add-ons.
• Explore long-term funding mechanisms, such as endowments or multi-year grants.

Intentionally Building Sustainable Systems Helps Results Materialize—and Compound Over Time
Lasting change that delivers real results doesn’t happen by accident—it takes deliberate, consistent action to build momentum, push through implementation dips, and sustain performance over time. That’s why leaders must be intentional from the start: embedding improvements into the core of their systems, measuring results over time, and relentlessly reinforcing commitment to change.

At Delivery Associates, we partner with leaders and organizations to build sustainability into their systems, helping to understand their system’s strengths and recognize areas for improvement, establish routines to monitor progress and make decisions, conduct sustainability capacity assessments, engage in building capacity for long-term sustainability, and foster conditions that help deliver meaningful results for the people they serve.

‍

Photo by CDC on Unsplash