Why Restructures Snap Back: The Rubber Band Effect and How to Make Change Hold
Why structural change drifts back to its old shape, and the multi-level work that makes it stick.
A new structure is announced. Reporting lines are redrawn, roles are redefined, a new operating model is launched with energy and good intentions. Six months later, much of the organisation is working in almost exactly the way it did before.
Anyone who has led or lived through a restructure will recognise the pattern. It matters more than ever right now. Many UK organisations, particularly across the public and regulated sectors, are entering a period of significant structural redesign: new ownership and delivery models for essential services, more decision-making devolved to regions, and new structures for care. The structural part of that change will be the easy part.
The Rubber Band Effect
Dr Robert Gass, co-founder of the Rockwood Leadership Institute, describes why change so often fails to hold. Individuals, teams and organisations are systems, and systems tend to return to their original shape. Push hard on one part, and you see what looks like change. Relax the effort, and the other connected parts pull the system back, like a stretched rubber band.
A restructure is a push on one part of the system: the structure. If the beliefs, habits and relationships of the people inside that structure have not moved, they will gradually bend the new structure back towards the old way of working.
“Restructures rarely fail on the day they launch. They fail six months later, quietly, as the old habits reassert themselves inside the new boxes.”
Capturing Hearts and Minds is the only way to enable long-term structural change. Photo Curated Lifestyle Unsplash
Hearts and Minds, Behaviour, Structure
Gass's Wheel of Change describes three dimensions that all need attention for change to hold:
Hearts and minds - what goes on inside people: beliefs, motivations, emotions and how they make sense of what is happening.
Behaviour - the choices people make about how to act, what to say and what to leave unsaid.
Structure - the external world people work within: reporting lines, processes, systems and rules.
Most change efforts favour one dimension. Restructures focus on structure. Culture programmes focus on hearts and minds. Training focuses on behaviour. Each is necessary, and none is sufficient alone. Change the structure without shifting how people think and behave, and the structure bends. Shift thinking without changing structures that reward the old behaviour, and people return to what the system actually rewards.
Why Restructures Create Their Own Resistance
Recent longitudinal research on burnout, boredom and engagement found that role conflict, being pulled between competing demands or unclear expectations, reliably predicted the poorest profiles of wellbeing and engagement. A restructure is, almost by definition, a period of role conflict. Old responsibilities have not fully ended. New ones are not fully clear. Loyalties are split between old teams and new.
This is why people often appear to resist a new structure when what they are actually doing is coping with ambiguity in the most rational way available: falling back on the routines and relationships they know work.
Coaching the System, Not Just the Person
Kaj Hellbom, the first president of the Finnish Coaching Federation, describes how coaching has evolved from individual coaching, to group and team coaching, to organisational coaching. His reasoning will be familiar to anyone who has watched good individual development disappear into an unchanged organisation: it is of little use developing individuals if nothing changes in the system around them.
This is the logic behind working at multiple levels at once:
Individual - building the resilience and capability of the leaders who have to carry the change.
Team - building the trust and psychological safety for teams to work through what the new structure actually means for them.
Organisational - making sure the structures, processes and senior behaviours reinforce the new way of working rather than quietly rewarding the old one.
What This Looked Like at Cooplands
When I designed the leadership programme for Cooplands Bakery following its acquisition by EG Group, the 30 Area and Regional Managers were navigating changing structures, new reporting lines and a very different kind of accountability. Developing them in isolation would have risked exactly this rubber band effect.
Alongside their programme, I designed and delivered a parallel programme for the six Directors who line-managed them. The aim was to make sure those Directors understood what their people were learning, could reinforce it in daily practice, and could remove blockages rather than becoming them.
The data shows why it mattered. Early in the programme, fewer than half of delegates had spoken to their line manager before a module. By the final module, nine out of twelve had. The Directors' own confidence in supporting their people rose from 3.7 to 4.7 out of 5. The system around the delegates had moved, not just the delegates themselves. The full case study is at theresiliencecoach.co.uk/case-study/cooplands.
Five Questions Before the Next Restructure
Signs a Change Is Snapping Back
The rubber band effect rarely announces itself. It shows up in small signals that are easy to dismiss individually:
• Decisions quietly routed through old reporting lines because "that's who really knows".
• New meetings running alongside old ones that were meant to be replaced.
• Teams describing themselves using the names of structures that no longer exist.
• Workarounds becoming the normal way of getting things done.
• Line managers saying "I'm just passing on what I've been told."
Each signal is information about which part of the Wheel of Change has not moved. Read early, they are easy to address. Ignored, they become the new culture.
The First 90 Days After the Announcement
The period immediately after a structural change is announced decides much of whether it holds. A simple way to structure it is to work through Gass's three dimensions in turn, while keeping all three in view:
Days 1 to 30: hearts and minds. Listen more than you broadcast. Give people space to name what they are losing as well as what they might gain. Be honest about what is still undecided.
Days 31 to 60: behaviour. Agree explicitly what working in the new structure looks like day to day, team by team. Identify the old habits most likely to creep back, and make the new behaviours easier than the old ones.
Days 61 to 90: structure. Review what the structure is actually doing in practice. Fix the processes, decision rights and handovers that are causing friction before people work around them permanently.
This is not a rigid sequence. It is a reminder that the structural announcement is the start of the change, not the end of it.
Where in the new structure will role conflict be highest, and what support will people in those roles have?
Which current behaviours does the new structure need to stop, and what will make stopping them easier than continuing?
What are senior leaders going to do differently, visibly, in the first 90 days?
Are line managers being equipped to lead their teams through the change, or only briefed on it?
How will we know in six months whether the change has held, or snapped back?
Structural change is often necessary. It simply is not the whole job. The organisations that make change hold are the ones that invest as much in the people inside the boxes as they do in drawing the boxes.
For L&D Professionals
Budget for the people side of structural change at the same time as the structural design, not after it. Line managers are the point where new structures either hold or snap back, so equipping them to coach and support their teams, rather than simply cascade messages, is one of the most direct ways L&D can protect the return on a restructure.
Ready to have a conversation?
Understand how ready your organisation is to make the next change hold.
Resilient Organisations Diagnostic:
theresiliencecoach.co.uk/resilient-organisations-diagnostic
Read the Cooplands case study:
theresiliencecoach.co.uk/case-study/cooplands
Book an introductory call:
zcal.co/russellharvey/intro-call
russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk | theresiliencecoach.co.uk