Failure Mode / 05
Adoption was confused with access
Signal
Success is measured by licenses, attendance or initial usage.
Root cause
Deployment was treated as transformation.
Consequence
Behavior and business value do not change meaningfully.
Redesign principle
Design adoption as enablement, support, behavior, measurement and feedback.
Why this happens
Access is a deployment event; adoption is a change in sustained behavior. Without a reason to change, a supported path into the new workflow and evidence that the behavior creates value, people return to familiar workarounds.
Diagnostic question
What observable behavior should be different after adoption, and what evidence would show that it has stayed different?