Change Management Success or Failure – what exactly are we to believe?

The time between Christmas and New Year is always a bit boring and probably not the best time to upload an article if you want to gain some traction but I thought to myself hey I haven't written one for a while (actually 9-months) so here it is.

As always it's as a result of something. This time it was an article that came into my feed which quoted the infamous 70% failure rate and got me to thinking about one of my 2021 "crusades" on LinkedIn about that very subject. Yes I know it has been debunked many times by a multitude of people and organisations but it has also been supported by others (well some).

I also wanted to try and pull together an amount of information in one place because when a post crops up quoting the 70% I can then refer people to a single source rather than the different posts and articles that have been written on the subject over time. I probably won't cover everything but at least it will encompass most aspects ... I hope so anyway!

Having not seen mention of the 70% for some while I thought my "crusade" had started to pay off (wishful thinking) but alas it didn’t … well it did in a way as this was the only reference I had seen to the figure in a while. Regardless I thought I would revisit the subject that I first wrote about in 2014 called "70% of Change Initiatives fail - Really" so let’s start with that shall we. The article contains links to other articles (referred to below) of the same ilk from:

• Jen Frahm of Conversations of Change called “70% of change projects fail: Bollocks!"
• Heather Stagl of Enclaria LLC called “It’s Time to Abolish the 70% Change Failure Rate Statistic”

Coming a bit more up-to-date

• David Wilkinson of the Oxford Review recently released a video as a result of some extensive research done on the subject

From this are the following three most quoted sources for the 70% failure rate:

• 1996 – Kotter – from his book "Leading Change - why transformation efforts fail" his actual words were "A few of these corporate change efforts have been successful". A few have been utter failures. Most fall somewhere in between, With a distinct tilt toward the lower end of the scale". There was no supporting evidence (see also below).
• 1993 – Hammer & Champney – from their book "Re-engineering the Organisation" it says "Sadly we must report that despite the success stories described in previous chapters, many companies that begin re-engineering don't succeed at it. Our unscientific estimate is that as many as 50% to 70%" of the organisations that undertake re-engineering efforts do not achieve the dramatic results that are intended". There was no supporting evidence for their quoted percentages.
• 2000 – Nohria & Beer – from an HBR Article called "Cracking the Code of Change - 2000 they say "The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail". There was no supporting evidence for this statement in the article.

The 70% enters into common use via:

• 2008 – Bain & Company White Paper – contains no reliable references or evidence
• 2009 – McKinsey Paper called "The irrational side of Change Management" they quote "In 1996 John Kotter published Leading Change. Considered by many to be the seminal work in the field of Change Management. Kotters research revealed that only 30% of change programmes succeed." What he actually said is quoted above. Despite this McKinsey quoted a year earlier they surveyed 3,199 executives around the world and found, as Kotter did, that only one transformation in three succeeds. But this is what the study actually says:

In summary “Not only is there no evidence that 70% of change programmes fail but what little evidence there is suggest that the failure rate is more like 6%”.

I think, but I stand to be corrected, that the McKinsey surveys, as with many others, are not based on hard empirical evidence with statistical validity but instead are based on anecdotal and subjective input from those they ask the questions of.

I have yet to see a “success/failure” study that has real data to back it up. If you know of any send them my way please?

Then in 2011 Mark Hughes of the University of Brighton published some research called “Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?” which stated “A 70 per cent failure rate is frequently attributed to organizational change initiatives, raising questions about the origins and supporting evidence for this very specific statistic. This paper critically reviews five separate published instances identifying a 70 percent organizational change failure rate. In conclusion, whilst the existence of a popular narrative of 70 percent organizational change failure is acknowledged, there is no valid and reliable empirical evidence to support such a narrative.”

Conversely the Project Management Institute’s Pulse of the Profession provides an interesting “Interactive Tool” … if you click on “Project Outcomes” this gives you the following information … “In the past 12-months, what percentage of projects at your organisation:

• Met original goals and Business Intent?
• Completed on Budget?
• Completed on Time?
• Experienced Scope Creep?
• Were deemed Failures?

NOTE: Data is by both Region and industry

Interestingly the “Met original goals and Business Intent?” across all Regions and Industries all came in at around 70% … mind you I have no idea how they measured or collected the data! That's tackled below.

There’s also an article written by Robert Bogue called "Why the 70% failure rate of change projects is probably right" in December 2020 based on research that says many large scale projects fail at a similar rate with the tight criteria of on time, on budget, and on value.

All this begs the question how the @#$% do you measure success and failure?

Here’s my take.

Going back to my 2014 article, for those that haven’t read it, I say the following about measuring success/failure:

There is of course the traditional way. That is you measure success/failure against your original Business Case in which there should be clear and detailed Business Benefits which can be truly measured

The problem with this is that change initiatives have a habit of not going to plan and veering off in all kinds of different directions dependent on various factors that cause them to do this such as:

• Business operations may be unstable
• Forward plans are no longer realistic
• External circumstances changing

So you’re effectively trying to measure against an initial set of Business Benefits that no longer relate to the way a change initiative has developed.

Regarding the Business Benefits profile this should be managed and controlled as rigorously as costs and there will need to be a process of reassessing and adjusting benefits as necessary during the initiative’s lifecycle. Regular reviews should be conducted and led by Key Stakeholders from the Business or Operational Areas and facilitated by the Change Manager.

So in effect your change initiatives objectives will need to be re-focused along with identified Business Benefits on a regular basis based on changing circumstances. This will facilitate a much better focus and will consequently provide a different view of success and failure.

Also just to widen the debate and look at why perhaps people, when asked if they think their projects were a success or failure, focus on the latter because our brains are wired to focus on the negative! Negative events have a greater impact on our brains than positive ones. Psychologists refer to this as "negative bias" which is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events.

Rick Hanson has a great quote from his book "Buddha's Brain" … "your brain is like velcro for negative experiences and teflon for positive ones" … what a great quote

As well as that quote I found another interesting piece of information about change failure which goes …

Change failure is a broad term for failure of strategies, programs, projects and initiatives. Generally speaking, a change has failed if it is perceived to have failed by key stakeholders. A program of change that is late and overbudget may still be perceived as a success if it generates significant business results.

So effectively you can still have success even if you have failed to meet all of the criteria you set out to.

One thing I have noticed of late is that the narrative around failure has started to become a bit “softer” for example people are saying things like:

• Didn’t meet the intended objectives
• Didn’t fully realise benefits
• Didn’t achieve the desired outcomes
• Didn’t achieve the projected return on investment

The words intended, fully, desired and projected are key in these narratives as they allude to a certain level of success ... what do you think?

Finally there is clear association between the success or failure of a change initiative and the success or failure of Change Management and of course Project Management

In my experience the key issue with regard to this, which again I have written about before in an article called "Change Management - better late than never!" is that more often than not Change Management is an afterthought when things like Business Case, Project Charter, Project Initiation Document, Project Plan, Project Schedule, Project RAID Log and Project Budget Tracker have all been agreed and signed off. By then it’s sometimes too late for Change Management to make an impact or valued contribution and it becomes a matter of “firefighting”. Change Management should be an up-front resource but it is hard to convince some organisations that this is what is needed.

So there you have it, hopefully I have pulled all the different views (but I’m sure there are more) together into a single article and, of course, I will leave it entirely up to the reader about what they think … 70% (or whatever other figure people come up with)… true or false. While we still only have anecdotal and subjective views and no hard data or empirical evidence maybe we will never know.

And just for your information if you want to view some of my old posts on the subject just click on the links below:

• 70% FAILURE - STOP PRESS
• SERIOUS SUNDAY POST … sorry yes it’s about that 70% failure rate again
• Another “Silly but Somewhat Serious Sunday” post

Also her are links to a few videos on my Highway of Change YouTube channel (UAsk IAnswer) which goes into a bit more detail about measuring success:

Video 30 answers three questions:

• “How could you determine if CM is a success”
• “How does one measure quantitatively the progress or success of CM in a project?”
• “Can you please expand on the success factors for CM, and how the indicators can be measured?”

Video 01 answers the questions “How do you best capture/demonstrate/report on the value/effectiveness of OCM efforts applied on any given initiative?”

Video 29 answers the question “How do you Measure and Track Adoption”

My final say on the matter is that it's really quite simple to measure success or failure for single initiatives as these, as previously quoted, should be in the Business Case as Business Benefits or alternatively as KPI's/CSF" (whatever you want to call them), but to try and aggregate those individual measures into an all embracing, x-industry/x-country XX% were successful/failed would be nigh on impossible.

Maybe we should be looking at a high-level and generic set of success measures that could be published and included in Business Cases so if anyone wanted to they could use these to aggregate up to establish better comparable metrics. Could this is something our astute professional bodies should consider because this has a direct impact on our profession. Alas I think even doing that would be a nigh-on impossible exercise give all of the different views on the subject.

Thank for reading. Please react, comment, share if you feel like it.