Posted on: 13/05/2026

Thought Leadership

Habituation helps us manage the familiar, but at work it can quietly stop teams from questioning routines that no longer serve them. In this article, Steve Jackson explores how Continuous Improvement can help councils create space for small, practical changes led by the people closest to the work. By reducing friction, encouraging experimentation and building ownership, CI offers a low-risk route to stronger engagement, better services and more confident teams.

By Steve Jackson MCIPD, HR Associate at West Midlands Employers

Habituation is psychological state where we become desensitised to normal stimuli. This is a useful and advantageous state as it stops us being shocked or stunned every time something normal happens such as the sound of a car passing by. Effectively we ignore normal routines At work habituation allows us to focus on the unusual and accept the routine.

This brings structure, predictability and stability but quietly stops people from asking ‘why’. Routines become so familiar because they worked well for years but we stop noticing when they no longer serve us. All of this can silently erode employee engagement and productivity.

Routines are followed without thought, meetings are held out of habit, decisions are made based on tradition; what worked years ago rather than relevance. It becomes easy for employees to disengage not because they don’t care, but because habituation allows us to run significant parts of the day on autopilot coupled with the cultural ‘we have always done it this way’ is a powerful and persistent combination. We unintentionally create teams of routine-endurers rather than problem-solvers, not through lack of care, but because habituation allows much of the working day to run on autopilot.

However, we all know Councils are under significant pressure and need to transform to manage with less resources and greater demand. Traditionally, transformation meant increasing the workload of teams especially at the operational level. Crucially these changes are imposed from above and the inevitable conversations about resistance to change start.

One proven solution which has been around for decades which bypasses top down changes and resistance is Continuous Improvement (CI,) a practical method that strengthens engagement by focusing on small, low-risk changes rather than imposed top-down shifts. This technique is heavily used in some sectors but barely touched in others. One of the key characteristics of the sectors that have used CI is adversity, they had to change and were faced with significant resource limitations but kept on using it when the environment changed for better as they realised that engaged employees are more productive, efficient and better problem solvers.

CI focuses on sometimes deceptively small, incremental changes that compound into meaningful transformation.. It empowers teams to ask what’s getting in our way? What tiny change would make this easier and then allow for the development of a practical solution?

To be clear, CI is not about wild budget busting ideas, it is about identifying and removing small blockages by careful analysis and experimentation. CI works best when it involves doing less non value added work more often.

To improve your operations the ideal would be to find and hire world class experts in your processes however luckily you already employ them. Operational teams instinctively know exactly where inefficiencies are. They live with the duplication, delays and friction but habituation and busyness means they are rarely given the space and time to thoughtfully make improvements.

The problem does not lie with managers, indeed habituation affects managers and they are often too busy firefighting problems to improve services; ironically, we applaud and promote those who are good at firefighting (the arsonist/firefighter) rather than removing the source of the fires. Clearly managers, rather like their teams, want to do a good job. CI gives them the space to transform the services with less effort and stress. Teams that are not constantly firefighting ensures there is less firefighting for the managers.

Improvements come from those doing the work, not from managers or project teams. This bottom up approach creates ownership and trust. When teams see their ideas implemented, resistance is reduced as change is employee led. Instead of fearing disruption, employees experience progress which they helped design. Change becomes something they do, not something done to them.

CI uses a clear framework and simple procedure which is based on the scientific method and as with all science, they will be a lot of failures, these can be just as useful as each experiment teaches us something new and each experiment is low risk and easily rolled back.

Celebrating the experiments is crucial not only for encouraging more experiments as such is clear confirmation of high levels of employee engagement but also evidences that habituation is no longer the dominant feature of the teams.

Habituation is the silent saboteur of engagement and innovation. Continuous Improvement is the low-risk solution with reduced resistance, high engagement which turns routines into questions and questions into progress. When resources are tight and demand increasing, CI offers a practical, proven and teams powered route to better services and stronger engagement. If small experiments could remove the biggest barriers in your service, what would you test first?

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