A few years back, I rolled out a new reporting process for my team. Simple change, everyone agreed it made sense, and in the kickoff meeting people were nodding along. Three weeks later, exactly two people were following it. The rest had quietly gone back to their old spreadsheets.
My first instinct was to blame commitment. Maybe the team didn’t take it seriously enough. Maybe I needed to send a stronger reminder, or put someone’s name against it in the next review. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize the problem wasn’t commitment at all. It was the design of the ask.
That’s when I came across BJ Fogg’s work on behaviour, and it reframed the whole thing for me. Fogg spent decades at Stanford studying why people do (or don’t do) things, and he distilled it into a formula simple enough to fit on a sticky note:
B = MAT
Behaviour happens when Motivation, Ability, and Trigger show up at the same moment. Drop any one of the three, and the behaviour doesn’t happen, no matter how good your intentions are.
Motivation is how much someone wants to do the thing. Ability is how easy or hard it actually is to do. Trigger is the prompt that says “do it now.” Most of us, when something isn’t working, reach straight for motivation. More enthusiasm, more incentive, more urgency in the email. But motivation is also the least reliable of the three. It goes up and down with your mood, your energy, your workload that particular week. Ability and trigger are far more stable, and far easier to actually design for.
Going back to my reporting process: motivation was fine, nobody was against it. The trigger was weak (a one-time announcement, easy to forget by Friday). But the real killer was ability. The new format asked people to pull data from three different systems by hand. It was a fifteen-minute task disguised as a two-minute one. No amount of reminding was going to fix that.
Where leaders usually get this backwards
When a new habit, process, or behaviour doesn’t stick on a team, the default read is almost always a motivation problem. “They don’t care enough.” “They need to want this more.” So the response is more pep talks, more OKRs, more urgency. Occasionally that works. Mostly it just adds noise, because you’re turning up the one dial that was never broken.
Fogg’s own line on this, from Tiny Habits, is worth sitting with: motivation is your desire to do the behaviour, ability is your capacity to do it, and the trigger is what cues you to do it right then. The more motivated someone is, the more likely they are to act, sure, but that’s exactly why relying on motivation alone is fragile. You’re betting the outcome on the one variable that swings the most.
The fix that actually holds is almost always on the ability side. Make the behaviour smaller. Remove a step. Put the trigger inside something that already happens every day, instead of hoping people remember on their own. For my reporting mess, the real fix wasn’t a stronger reminder, it was building a one-click export so the fifteen-minute task became a ninety-second one. Attendance to the process went from two people to the whole team within a week, with no new incentive and no new speech.
What this looks like in practice
If you’re trying to get a team to adopt something new, whether it’s a process, a tool, a habit like writing better handoff notes, run it through the three questions in order:
Do they actually want to do this? If not, that’s a real conversation to have, and no formula fixes a lack of buy-in.
Can they do it easily, right now, with what they already have? This is where most initiatives quietly die. We design the “ideal” version of a process and forget that ideal and easy are rarely the same thing.
Is there a clear, well-placed cue that tells them when to do it? Not a policy document nobody reopens. Something sitting inside the flow of work they’re already in.
I’ve started using this as a filter before launching anything new with my team now. Not “will people want this,” but “even if they want this, can they actually do it in under a minute, and will something remind them at the right moment.” Most of the time, the honest answer to the second question is no, and that’s the actual work.
Good intentions were never the scarce resource. Design was.
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