Bill is the owner of Precision Plastics, a large plastic manufacturing business.

After implementing a change project, Precision Plastic's output increased by 30% very, very, quickly.

Three weeks later, the employees and stakeholders started to notice they were experiencing some negative effects, e.g. staff were complaining about the admin burden and how it was slowing them down.

As a result, some of the employees of Precision Plastics decided they should stop following the newly implemented processes, and others followed their lead. Output rapidly declined.

A month went by and the stakeholders at Precision Plastics realised they actually had an improvement in those three weeks when all the employees were using the new process, but they can’t quite put their finger on what mattered…

An investigation revealed that the business had become accustomed to the increased productivity, it had become their new ‘normal’, they had forgotten the operational chaos they were experiencing before they implemented the project, and so had allowed individuals to revert to their old behaviours. The negative effects on overall output magnified from there.

(Names have been altered to protect identities)