As Jeff Magson sees it, an unseen killer of financial plans lurks beneath the surface of every client relationship: behavioral inertia.

Inertia is the tendency of an object to remain at rest, or to continue in motion, unless acted upon by an external force. Behavioral inertia expresses itself in planning as a reluctance to enact a plan, to change plans or to respond to a changing environment, says Magson, executive vice president and client experience officer at Dallas-based 1st Global. Once beliefs form, they tend to crystalize and endure, and humans often struggle to revise their assumptions.

“It’s in every client interaction,” says Magson. “Clients aren’t necessarily doing what the advisor would have them do.”

Behavioral inertia impacts financial planning at multiple levels: in saving and spending habits, in implementing and changing investing strategies and in seeking and executing financial advice. The historically low participation rates within 401(k) plans can be, in part, attributed to inertia, he says.

Other advisors agree that setting clients in motion is an important task in the planning process.

As more advisors give up discretion over client assets, more attention must be given to managing and modifying client behaviors, says Ron Lottridge, principal at Aurora, Colo.-based Catalyst Retirement Advisors.

“You can’t force people to do things, so inertia is always going to be difficult,” says Lottridge. “We have many clients who engage with us purely for planning and advice. Often times they’re asking for us to do project work and they’re not ongoing clients. Some come back on an annual basis. Others just want to delegate everything. We try to figure out how we can serve everyone in a way that suits their preferences.”

Clients who retain discretion over their accounts are often as untaught and uninformed as those who delegate, putting them at risk for inertia’s pitfalls, notes Lottridge.

Investors tend to be strongly biased towards the status quo, according to behavioral economics, because of loss aversion. Nobel-laureate behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that individuals feel less regret from the negative consequences of inaction than they do for bad outcomes that result from new actions.

Investor inertia could also be responsible for many of history’s financial “bubbles” from the Dutch tulip craze of 1636 to the mortgage-backed bonanza of the 2000s. As the value of an investment increases, investors want to purchase more since their assumptions have been confirmed. Then, if the value of that investment decreases, many of the same investors are unable to reverse course and sell.

“Left alone, almost everybody gravitates towards investments that have higher recent returns, but statistically that’s the opposite of what a good investor should be doing,” says Lottridge.

Once a client has made an investment decision based on a recommendation, it’s very difficult to convince them to change strategies, says Lottridge, especially if the recommendation allocates to asset classes or geographies less familiar to the investor.

“It becomes an emotional conversation with an allocation, because these clients have had good reason to be biased towards large-cap U.S. equities since 2009,” says Lottridge. “Home country bias is real. People shy away from international investments, but most people need to have international positions.”

To deal with those emotions, advisors need to understand their clients on a deep and intimate level to know where more education, attention and guidance might be necessary to combat inertia, he says.

Magson begins creating a behavioral profile of his clients during the onboarding process, gathering information over the course of two meetings before discussing how a household’s financial plan might be implemented.

“We have a discovery meeting, a data-gathering meeting and an implementation meeting,” says Magson. “When there’s friction, it usually starts at the implementation meeting, because that’s where we’re instructing them on what they need to do.”

Magson’s process begins by determining a clients’ values and principles, then exploring their financial goals. By focusing the discussion on meeting a client’s goals, and not on the solutions that will be used, Magson’s clients typically implement his advice, though he does not have discretion over their accounts.

Goals, even lofty ones, should be divided into simple achievements that clients can achieve gradually via small steps, says Lottridge.

“Often, if someone has never done any planning before, advisors will find a long laundry list of things that need to be done,” he says. “Trying to address everything all at once can overwhelm the client, cause them to pull back, which damages the relationship. Parse it for them, find them items that they can do immediately, set the stage for them and help them understand that planning is about progress, not perfection.”

If a client is able to make regular measures of progress, they’re more likely to stick with a plan, says Lottridge.

An advisor should always seek discretion over a client’s account, says Chris White, a Boston-based wealth management advisor and investment strategist and author of “Working with the Emotional Investor.”

“If the client refuses to do that, then the advisor needs to propose an investment program for their approval and request that they act on it within a specific timeframe so it doesn’t sit on some client’s desk and gather dust,” says White. With full discretion, advisors can create structural solutions to client inertia.

Structural solutions to client inertia that set default courses of action already exist. Automatic enrollment and automatic escalation have become commonplace features of retirement plans. Several states have also recently explored enacting voluntary or mandatory retirement savings programs for residents who cannot access a workplace plan. Many investment products, applications and services automate rebalancing.

Structural solutions take advantage of participant’s status quo bias—once a decision is made for then, they’re highly unlikely to opt out. Advisors can take advantage of these tendencies by automating clients’ plans.

A robo-advisor can both exacerbate and alleviate client inertia, Lottridge says. While roboadvisors do successfully segment emotional decision making from investment allocations, they do not provide users with sufficient behavioral backstops.

“On the robo-advisor side of the world, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when the markets are really bad,” says Lottridge. “It’s good that people have options that allow them to start investing early and regularly, but human behavior has so much impact on the return you see from the market, I’m not sure that robos are going to be capable of managing that.”

In recent years, many firms have created hybrid robo-advisors that are backed by an advisor, a firm or call centers of financial planners to help keep clients invested during volatile markets and progressing towards their financial goals.

Human advisors, on the other hand, can follow up regularly with clients to make sure they’re taking appropriate action.

“Most advisors have a great tool for spurring their clients to take action: quarterly and annual meetings,” says White. “[Counselors] should have built enough of a bridge between the client and themselves to automate saving, escalate saving, invest and build wealth. Otherwise you’re in a wasting situation. Technology makes most of this possible, but it can’t really create that relationship.”

As more individuals interact with their finances via passive and/or technologically driven means, they may also become alienated from their financial lives.

According to Lottridge, most clients currently seeking professional financial advice have already realized that they’re alienated from their finances and realize that they need to engage. Technology may delay that epiphany for younger generations.

“I think millennials could potentially have more problems with inertia,” says Lottridge. “That’s one of the fascinating things about technology-driven advice: You have to wonder how much accountability is out there.”

Some non-discretionary clients will never actually follow through on an advisor’s recommendations, says Lottridge. Catalyst has recognized a trend of affluent investors seeking out financial advice for validation.

While most advisors want to help their clients no matter what, holding on to clients who refuse to take advice harms all parties. At a certain point, Lottridge believes, advisors should let stubborn clients move on.

Magson, on the other hand, says that advisors have a responsibility to keep trying to help non-compliant clients.

“In health care, it is incumbent on the patient to act,” Magson says. “The doctor says stop smoking, it’s the patient’s decision to make. But if they don’t stop smoking, the doctor doesn’t stop treating them. If they can’t take the advice, then the doctor tries something else: the patch, gum, cutting down slowly. Advice is heading in the same direction.”