People Don't Adopt Solutions Because They Work: Why History Determines What Sticks
Lesson 6 of 25 from podcast conversations with leaders who leave the world better than they found it
Koye Oyeyinka writes fiction to understand people. Not to solve their problems—to understand what drives them.
"I kept wondering why some organizations would just not do what seems like the right thing for them to do," he told me. "Then you start realizing there's all this history that wasn't your history."
Koye's talking about implementation economics—the study of why brilliant solutions fail in practice. But what he's really describing is something every consultant, every funder, every change agent has encountered:
People don't adopt solutions just because they work. They adopt them because they make sense in their world.
And "their world" includes all the history you don't see.
The Invisible Weight of Institutional Memory
I've been part of enough strategic planning processes to recognize the pattern. External consultants come in, assess the situation, recommend changes. The recommendations are good. Evidence-based. Exactly what the organization needs.
Six months later, nothing's changed.
Leadership says the staff are resistant to change. Staff say leadership isn't really committed. The consultants are baffled because the solution was right there—why didn't they just implement it?
Here's what everyone's missing: that organization has a history that predates your involvement.
Maybe five years ago, they partnered with an NGO that promised support and then pulled out suddenly, leaving them holding obligations they couldn't meet.
Maybe three years ago, they launched a new program that leadership was excited about but staff thought was a distraction, and it failed exactly the way staff predicted it would.
Maybe last year, they brought in consultants who made recommendations, got everyone excited, and then nothing happened because there was no follow-through on implementation support.
That history lives in the organization's body. It shapes how people respond to new ideas, new partners, new solutions. Even brilliant ones.
Especially brilliant ones.
Why Best Practices Don't Transplant
The nonprofit sector loves "best practices." If an approach worked somewhere else, surely we can bring it here and replicate the results.
Except it almost never works that way.
The youth development model that succeeded in Oakland doesn't automatically work in Cleveland. The workforce development approach that scaled in Kenya hits unexpected barriers in Tanzania. The partnership structure that strengthened one coalition creates friction in another.
It's not because the practices are bad. It's because context matters more than we want to admit.
Every organization has its own specific history of:
Partnerships that worked and partnerships that failed
Initiatives that succeeded and initiatives that fell apart
Promises that were kept and promises that were broken
Changes that improved things and changes that made things worse
That history creates an organizational memory that shapes how people interpret new proposals.
When you suggest a partnership, they're not just evaluating your specific suggestion. They're filtering it through every partnership experience they've had.
When you propose a pilot, they're not just assessing feasibility. They're remembering the last three pilots that consumed resources and then quietly disappeared.
When you promise support, they're not just hearing your words. They're remembering everyone else who promised support and then moved on.
The Question Nobody Asks
Here's what I've learned to do when working with organizations on strategic change:
Ask about the failures nobody talks about.
Not the public failures with board reports and lessons learned documents. The quiet failures that just...stopped being discussed. The initiatives that didn't formally end, they just faded away. The partnerships that cooled without ever acknowledging they'd failed.
Those failures are shaping current behavior in ways that are invisible unless you ask directly.
Try this in your next leadership team meeting:
"What's an initiative we tried in the past five years that failed, and why do you think it failed?"
Then notice what happens.
Some people will immediately name something. Others will hesitate—not because they can't think of anything, but because talking about failure feels risky.
The failures people are willing to name publicly are usually the safe ones. The ones with external explanations. "We lost funding." "The partner organization closed." "The political environment changed."
But the failures nobody wants to discuss? Those are the ones still shaping behavior.
"We tried that approach and leadership wasn't really committed."
"We launched that program but we didn't have the capacity to sustain it."
"We brought in consultants who made recommendations we couldn't actually implement."
That unspoken history is why your brilliant new solution isn't landing.
What Understanding History Changes
When you understand an organization's history, you start to see why resistance to change often isn't about the merit of your idea. It's about pattern recognition.
They've been here before. They've seen this before. And it didn't go well.
This changes how you introduce change.
Instead of leading with the solution, you start by acknowledging history:
"I know this organization has tried external partnerships before and some didn't work out. Can you tell me what happened and what you learned?"
Instead of dismissing resistance as irrationality, you recognize it as data:
"I'm noticing hesitation about this approach. What does this remind you of from past experience?"
Instead of pushing harder when people push back, you create space to explore the disconnect:
"This solution makes sense to me based on what I've seen work elsewhere. But you all have history here that I don't have. What am I missing?"
That acknowledgment does something important: it validates that people's skepticism is based on real experience, not just obstruction.
And that validation often creates the opening for something new to happen.
Why Implementation Is Strategy
Koye's insight about fiction applies to organizational change: understanding precedes solving.
You can't strategically implement change without understanding the system you're trying to change. And that system includes not just current structures and processes, but historical patterns and experiences.
The best strategic plan in the world fails if it doesn't account for implementation reality. And implementation reality is always shaped by history.
This is why external consultants often struggle. They see the organization as it is now, recommend changes based on best practice and technical analysis, and then are surprised when implementation stalls.
They're missing the history.
They don't know about the failed initiative three years ago that looked similar to what they're proposing. They don't know about the partnership that went sideways and created lasting distrust. They don't know about the promises that weren't kept.
Strategic change requires understanding not just where an organization needs to go, but why they're where they are.
And "why they're where they are" is almost always a story about history.
From Brilliant Solutions To Sustainable Change
If you're trying to implement change in an organization—whether you're a consultant, a leader, a funder, or a change agent—here's what matters:
Stop assuming resistance is irrational.
People resist for reasons that make sense given their experience. Your job is to understand those reasons, not dismiss them.
Ask about history before proposing solutions.
What's been tried before? What worked? What failed? What did people learn?
Make space for institutional trauma.
Sometimes organizations need to process past failures before they can move forward. That processing is part of the work, not a distraction from it.
Acknowledge uncertainty.
You don't know how your solution will land in this specific context. Be honest about that. Invite people to help you understand what you're missing.
People don't adopt solutions because they work in theory.
They adopt solutions because those solutions make sense in their specific context, given their specific history, with their specific constraints.
Implementation beats innovation when you understand the past.
This is lesson 6 in a 25-part series exploring insights from podcast conversations with leaders who leave the world better than they found it.
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