Asymmetric Management Practice Stickiness
RCTClinical Trial
Organizations implementing multi-practice management interventions lack empirical guidance on which individual operational routines persist over long time horizons versus which routines quickly decay.
Picture this
Think of house chores where putting a physical label on a storage bin stays forever because it requires a one-time setup, whereas writing a daily task log on a whiteboard gets abandoned quickly because it demands constant daily effort.
What the evidence says
14 out of 38 practices had a 0% drop rate once adopted (e.g., preventive machine maintenance, defect-wise recording, yarn aging monitoring), whereas visual displays and daily monitoring meetings suffered high drop rates (up to 100% dropped for displayed written procedures and 64% for daily updated visual aids).
- Who was studied
- 38 individual management practices tracked across 28 plants in 17 Indian textile manufacturing firms over 9 years (2008–2017).
- How
- Longitudinal panel tracking classifying 38 management practices by adoption and subsequent drop rates between 2011 and 2017.
What to do
Prioritize implementing structural, low-maintenance routines (such as physical labeling and systematic maintenance schedules) over labor-intensive daily visual record updating.
From the source
"Of our 38 practices, once adopted, 14 are not dropped by a single plant, and a further 8 are dropped by at most one-quarter of adopters... Particularly noticeable among these sticky practices are that those which were adopted by 10 or more plants and then never dropped."
Do-Management-Interventions-Lasts_Bloom-et-al_June2018.pdf