Change and adoption
Domain 08 of the eight in the NBOP standard. This page explains what the domain is and how it fails. It does not say how much the domain is worth, because that has not been decided yet and will not be decided here.
Its number in the published standard, which is an order rather than a ranking.
The standard is at version 0.9. The weight of this domain is not set.
Domains you need personal accountability in to be eligible. This is one of the eight.
The standard an assessment is built from, readable in full, permanently.
What the standard says
Getting other people to actually work differently. The domain where most operational initiatives fail, and the one most often omitted from operations training entirely.
That is the whole of the published entry. Everything below expands it and is not itself the standard. Where the two ever disagree, the standard is the document that governs.
What this domain is
Change and adoption is whether a decision becomes a different reality. Everything the other seven domains produce is a change that somebody else has to make. This domain is whether they make it, and it is the point at which most operational work is actually decided.
The standard names it as the domain most often left out of operations training entirely, which is worth stating plainly rather than softening. A syllabus that covers process, measurement, cadence, capacity, roles, money and tools and stops there has covered everything except whether any of it happened.
What it looks like when it is working
- Changes reach the people who have to make them, with the reason, before the date.
- Somebody checks whether the new way is being used by looking at the work, not by asking whether people feel positive about it.
- Adoption is measured on the work product rather than on training completion.
- There is a route for the person doing the work to say the new way is worse, and evidence that the route has been used and has changed something.
How it fails
The defining failure is the initiative that was announced, trained, never adopted, and recorded as delivered. Every visible step completed. The deck was presented, the sessions ran, attendance was high, the rollout closed on schedule.
The second is measuring adoption with compliance artefacts, which measure whether people can be made to tick a box rather than whether they changed what they do when no one is watching.
Why competent operators miss it
Because nobody went and looked. Every proxy available was completed and every proxy was about the delivery of the change rather than about the state of the work afterwards. Checking properly means going to the work weeks later, when the project has closed and the team has moved on, and finding out that the thing you were credited for did not happen. There is no incentive anywhere in a normal organisation to go and find that out.
What accountability here actually means
Eligibility for NBOP-CP asks for personal accountability in at least four of the eight domains. Personal is the operative word. Having worked somewhere that did this well is not accountability, and neither is having been consulted. The test is whether the decision was yours to make and yours to answer for.
For this domain, that looks like at least one of the following.
- You ran a change that stuck, and you know it stuck because you checked the work rather than the training log.
- Or you ran one that did not, and you know why, and the why is not that people resisted it.
- You have reversed a change on evidence from the people doing the work.
What NBOP does not claim about this domain yet
Not how much it is worth. The weight of each domain is being set by a job task analysis of practising operators, rating tasks on criticality and on frequency, and the weights are derived from those paired ratings rather than from editorial preference. Until that closes, the standard states equal provisional weighting and says so on its face.
Not what an assessment will ask about it. The examination blueprint follows the analysis. Publishing an item count now would mean inventing one and quietly changing it later.
Not that this description is finished. Version 0.9 is a draft and is expected to change materially before ratification. If you hold operational responsibility and think this domain is described wrongly, that is the input worth having.
The eight domains
Each governs a different part of how an operation is run. They are numbered for reference, not for importance.
Set the weight of this domain
The weighting is decided by operators rating the work, not by NBOP deciding what matters.
The analysis is open now. It takes about twenty minutes, because every task is rated twice, and the results are published in aggregate including the findings that contradict the current draft. If you have held operational responsibility, your rating counts toward the weight this domain ends up carrying.