Design change that fits a real week, not your best one

Simon Breakspear
1 September 2026

A while back I volunteered to bring two salads to a big family gathering. I own an Ottolenghi cookbook, so I aimed high. Three hours, two extra trips to the shops and one hunt for black sesame seeds later, the salads were spectacular. I have never made them since.

As September gets underway, those salads keep coming back to me. Because a lot of the change we design for our teams is an Ottolenghi recipe. What our teams can fit into a real week is closer to Jamie Oliver.

The Idea: The changes that stick aren’t the impressive ones. They’re the ones simple enough for busy people to repeat. Design around the essential ingredients.

30-Second Version

• We tend to design change around the ideal version of a practice: the one we’d run ourselves, on our best day.
• Our staff implement it in the middle of real weeks. So the design question isn’t “what does the gold-standard version look like?” It’s “what could our people sustain, even in their toughest week of term?”
• Simplifying isn’t lowering the standard. Every practice has a few elements that carry its impact. Protect those, cut the effort around them.
• A useful version done twenty times beats an impressive version done twice. This week’s move: find the essential ingredients in one initiative.

The Full Read

Yotam Ottolenghi is one of the world’s most celebrated chefs. His cookbooks (Jerusalem, Plenty) are famous for their intricacy: unusual ingredients, layered techniques, flavours that come together in ways you’d never expect. The results are remarkable, and almost nobody cooks them on a Tuesday night.

Jamie Oliver made a different bet. He built his career around the average busy person and whatever was stopping them from cooking. 30-Minute Meals attacked the time barrier. Then 5 Ingredients went after something deeper: the shopping list itself. Less ornate, far less impressive on the plate. And he taught a generation to cook, because his recipes got repeated.

Now think about the last change you asked your staff to take on. A formative assessment routine, a collaboration protocol, a new approach to feedback. Chances are you started from the full recipe: the version you’d read about, seen demonstrated, or would run yourself. Then you handed it to people who were already stretched, and wondered why it didn’t take hold.

The problem usually isn’t commitment. It’s that the recipe assumes conditions your people don’t have. James Clear makes this point about personal habits. Most of us pick them by asking what we could do on our best days. The trick, he says, is to ask, “What can I stick to even on my worst days?” The same is true of change design. What version of this practice could our people sustain, even in their toughest week of term?

That question changes what you build. A short protocol that fits inside an existing meeting gets used every fortnight: twenty or so repetitions across a year, each one a little smoother than the last, until nobody thinks of it as an initiative any more. A beautifully designed process that needs its own ninety-minute slot happens twice in March. Then the term swallows it. Twenty reps against two.

Two honest cautions. Simplifying is not the same as stripping out the ingredients that make the practice work. Every practice has a few essential elements that carry its impact, and a lot of surrounding effort that doesn’t. The design work is telling those apart: protect the essentials, cut the effort around them. And some improvements really do need the full recipe. If they matter enough, resource them properly, with the time and support the Ottolenghi version demands. The failure mode isn’t complexity. It’s defaulting to complexity out of enthusiasm and hoping goodwill covers the gap.

Choose your complex changes deliberately and sparingly. For everything else, find the few ingredients that carry the flavour and cut the rest.

Small step → Pick one initiative your staff are carrying right now and put a single question to your leadership team: “What’s the version of this our people could sustain, even in their toughest week of term?”