Maddie Storey has spent her career at the crossroads of business and human behaviour. A consultant, strategist, and facilitator, she brings together expertise in behavioural neuroscience, mental health, and business leadership to help organisations transform their cultures, develop stronger leaders, and build genuinely safe, high-performing workplaces.
One of the most persistent challenges in organisational change is the gap between knowing and doing. Organisations understand what needs to change. They design better systems, clearer structures, and improved processes. Yet in practice, little shifts in a sustained way. Momentum fades, fatigue builds, and explanations often default to a behavioural gap: a lack of accountability, capability, or alignment.
But this explanation is incomplete.
The knowing–doing gap is not only behavioural; behaviour is the outcome. It is also a gap in attention, perception, and interpretation — the processes that shape how people make sense of what is happening and, in turn, how they act.
Systems persist not simply because of how they are designed, but because people continually reconstruct familiar patterns in how they notice, interpret, and respond to what is happening around them — especially under pressure.
In that sense, a system is not something we simply design and implement. It is something we enact, moment by moment.
Systems Are Lived, Not External
A system does not exist outside of the people within it. It is created through interactions, decisions, language, and assumptions that are constantly updated through lived experience. Rather than fixed structures, systems are patterns that are continuously reproduced through everyday work. This has an important implication: change does not occur through structural redesign alone. It occurs when the way the system is experienced and therefore enacted begins to shift.
Why Structural Change Is Not Enough
This helps explain why many change efforts stall.
Organisations often focus on visible interventions — policies, frameworks, training, or process redesign. These are necessary, but they operate at the surface level of the system.
What they often miss is how those structures are actually experienced in practice: how attention narrows under pressure, how assumptions about credibility form, and how social dynamics quietly determine whose voice carries weight.
These forces shape interpretation in real time. And interpretation shapes action. Without engaging this layer, structural change can exist on paper while lived experience remains largely unchanged.
When Inclusion Exists Structurally But Not Experientially
This gap becomes especially visible in inclusion efforts.
For example, many organisations have formal commitments to gender equity or neurodiversity inclusion. Policies are in place, frameworks are developed, and leadership statements are clear. Structurally, the system has changed.
Yet the lived experience can remain different.
In a leadership meeting, a woman may share an idea that receives little immediate response. Minutes later, the same idea is repeated by another colleague and gains traction. No policy has been broken, and no explicit bias or harm may be intended. Yet a pattern is reinforced: whose voice is heard and validated in real time.
Similarly, a neurodivergent employee may communicate in a direct or highly structured way that does not align with implicit norms of “professional tone.” In the absence of shared understanding, this may be misinterpreted as rigidity or lack of collaboration, leading to their contribution being discounted.
In both cases, the mechanism is not structural exclusion. It is interpretive filtering. Under cognitive load, people rely more heavily on familiar cues of authority, trust, and credibility. Attention narrows. Established norms become shortcuts for interpretation. As a result, systems default to what is already familiar even when formal structures have changed.
The Missing Layer: Moment-to-Moment Enactment
Traditional systems thinking often maps structures, processes, and feedback loops. But systems are ultimately sustained through micro-moments — how people notice, interpret, and respond in real time.
Change, therefore, requires more than new structures. It requires a shift in how people are engaging with what is already there.
This includes the ability to:
- recognise assumptions as they arise
- notice how interpretation is shaping reaction
- regulate emotions and responses under pressure
- interrupt habitual patterns of engagement
These are not abstract capabilities. They are practical skills that determine whether new ways of working can take hold in lived experience.
Why Individual Awareness Is Still Not Enough
However, individual awareness alone does not shift systems at scale.
Behaviour is shaped by a broader set of conditions:
- access to resources and time
- habits formed through repetition
- social reinforcement and feedback loops
- behavioural capability and skill
- organisational norms and expectations
Most of these are environmental rather than purely individual.
This challenges a common assumption in change work: that behaviour changes primarily through awareness or motivation. In reality, awareness is insufficient if the environment continues to reward existing patterns more strongly than new ones.
People do not simply act differently because they understand differently. They act differently when the conditions make new behaviours possible, supported, and reinforced.
Inner and Outer Shifts Must Work Together
This leads to a central principle of systems change:
Lasting transformation requires both an inner and an outer shift.
Most change efforts over-index on one side. Either we redesign systems and expect people to adapt, or we build awareness and expect behaviour to follow.
In practice, neither holds on its own.
The inner shift builds the capacity to notice, interpret, and respond differently in real time. It changes how the system is experienced from within.
The outer shift reshapes the structural and social conditions that reinforce behaviour. It changes what is expected, supported, and sustained over time. Without the inner shift, people continue to reproduce familiar patterns within new systems. Without the outer shift, new behaviours struggle to stabilise or spread.
One without the other is incomplete.
Systems Change as Lived Experience
From this perspective, systems change is not primarily about design or intention. It is about experience.
The most important question is not only: What should change?
But: What is actually happening, moment to moment — and how is it being interpreted, reinforced, and repeated?
Systems do not change when they are redesigned. They change when people begin to see differently, relate differently, and act differently moment by moment within them.
References
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Venkatraman, V., & Wittenbraker, J. (2020). Disrupting dual systems: a dynamic decision-making framework for human behavior. Fox School of Business Research Paper Forthcoming.
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