Change does not take time, and when it occurs, it happens all at once.
The scale and scope of a problem, and the amount of time it has persisted, are irrelevant to what is required to resolve it.
Indeed, problems don’t come in sizes; there are no big problems and small problems, only lesser and greater consequences.
Any significant change can be achieved instantly and painlessly if it can be achieved at all.
The desired change can always be found to be already immanent in the existing situation and needs merely to be released by pinpointing a tiny intervention into the system.
Such an intervention rarely involves more than a subtle, innocuous, single communication, often delivered to a single individual, or at most, to a few individuals.
The result is then an all-or-none flip from the existing state to the desired state all at once, across the board, with nothing in between.
The most startling thing of all, however, is that the analysis to pinpoint the minimalist intervention that will release the desired change typically takes three to five people, working face-to-face, about four hours.
We have found all of these principles to hold universally, and so far, in all our experience to date, we have found no exceptions. A minimalist intervention can always be found that will predictably create transformations in days or weeks that had been judged by all the experts to take months or years.
Even changing the corporate culture of an organization can take not years, but weeks, or even days, by designing a minimalist intervention.