Most of your change programme will be forgotten. Two moments won’t.

There’s a strange economics to most change programmes. We pour something like ninety per cent of the effort into the “middle”…the stakeholder mapping, the comms cadence, the training rollout, the governance forums that fill a calendar. All of it necessary. Most of it, over time, quietly forgotten.

Ask a colleague to describe a transformation they lived through a few years ago and watch what survives. They won’t reconstruct the timeline or weigh the wins against the losses. They’ll tend to give you two things: the moment it felt like everything was coming apart, and how the whole thing ended. That’s the snapshot. The careful work in between has mostly collapsed in memory.

Behavioural science has a name for this. The “Peak End Rule” comes from Daniel Kahneman’s work, and it holds that we generally remember an experience by its emotional high water mark and by how it finished, rather than by the average of everything that happened. Think of a holiday you loved (you can probably recall two vivid moments and the trip home, but not the length of it). Your people are doing exactly that with every programme you have ever run.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. If two moments are going to be written into organisational memory whether you plan them or not…are you designing them, or leaving them to chance?

The negative peak tends to be the one leaders underestimate. It is rarely a dramatic failure. More often it’s a quiet moment of disrespect: the town hall where the executive spoke for forty minutes and took no questions, the restructure email that landed at 4:55 on a Friday. Those moments lodge, and they travel through the informal networks faster than any official update.

The ending is worse, because it’s almost completely ignored. Go-live tends to get treated as the finish line when it’s closer to the halfway point of the human side of the change. The project team disbands, the steering committee stops meeting, and three months on the organisation has quietly drifted back to its old habits because nobody designed the new ones to last.

Designing the peak and the end well doesn’t mean staging artificial moments, and a “fake peak” is worse than none (people can smell that from a long way off). It means asking the question most plans never ask: what do we want people to remember about this?

If you want a thinking partner to pressure-test where your peak and ending actually sit, that’s the kind of question Pragma was built for, and the FAQ explains how it works.

For the full breakdown, including the Kahneman research and what intentional endings look like in practice, read the original article.