During Embed, you will encourage and support the business to make sure the change is sustainable and has become ‘business as usual’. Your stakeholders should be feeling entirely comfortable with the change at this point and confident in their new skills, knowledge and behaviour. They should feel that your support and involvement is increasingly unnecessary.

Your involvement in this stage should be minimal and light touch and will involve implementing your exit strategy from the change. You will be supporting activities such as the development of standard operating procedures and agreeing mechanisms for ongoing improvement and review, such as change initiation forums. Final evaluations and reviews will take place during this stage – and don’t forget a big celebration of success. You will need to make sure everyone is aware of the final date of your involvement and who will take on relevant responsibilities from that date. Remember to spend time reviewing your own work and ask for feedback on your input from your stakeholders.

The risk of not implementing these ongoing processes and agreeing responsibilities are that the change may not become sustainable or that people stop refining and improving the change. In addition, if you don’t agree an end date for your involvement, you will find that people continue to refer issues to you.