This just in: 4 out of every 3 transformation projects fail...it must be the people!

I may have gotten the math wrong on the header, but close enough. We’ve all heard it plenty of times, and from reputable sources: â€œ70% of transformation projects fail!” Usually touting poorly executed organizational change management (i.e. people related aspects of culture, behaviors, etc.) as the primary culprit...but before we jump on that bandwagon, let’s unpack this a bit. First we'd have to take a look at the word “failure”, which sounds catastrophic, but this isn't always exactly the case. I believe what we're really trying to say by failure is that the program falls short of delivering all of the intended benefits that were outlined in the initial business case. Wouldn't it therefore be more accurate to state: “70 of all transformation projects have poorly calculated business cases!”? Perhaps, but that probably won't work politically because we sold it on that basis, invested lots of time, effort and money to drive the work and promised our stakeholders we'd deliver…so clearly something else must have gone wrong along the way? We know that the technology we chose and the processes we're adopting are 'world class', real 'best practices'...so it must be the people!

Another study I recently came across, not surprisingly using the same 70% number, lists the failure criteria as a program’s inability to “produce planned deliverables, within budget and on time.” ...but, where does the business value come in? After all, this is the reason to take on a transformation effort in the first place, right? I guess we should assume that the carefully “planned deliverables” would get us to the realization of benefits. In this case, the headline should possibly be “70% of transformation projects poorly scope their deliverables”? ...but the project management community has been at it a while, and are generally good at this stuff. That can't be it...it must be the people.

Now, I’m not saying the 70% number is wrong. After all, it’s usually just the average taken from some self-assessment survey answered by program and change managers as well as business leaders, so it's as good a number as any. Truth be told, would it make such a big difference if the number was 50% or 80%? Probably not....and I'm definitely not saying that we shouldn’t continue to focus on change management. Quite the contrary, I’ve been an organisational change management professional for over 20 years now, and do believe it is the key to unlocking the potential of large change and transformation efforts. I also agree that poor execution of the people side of a transformation is one of the primary reasons why the value isn't captured. Ultimately it's about acceleration to adoption, and this is all about behaviors and workforce adaptation.

So, what I’m advocating for is that it isn’t as easy as saying there are winners and losers. This would lead us down the path that simply focusing on a handful of key things will get you hanging out with the 30% crowd, fail to do them and you're doomed along with the other 70%. Transformations are incredibly complex change efforts…if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be transformative. Transformation adoption takes time and what we're after ,through carefully applied organisational change work, is the adoption of the new ways of working that ultimately shift the mindsets and behaviors necessary to realizing the intended benefits.

Let's take a common example. Imagine an organisation intending to transform its sales efforts embarks on a program including processes, technology and ways of working. They would typically use the technology platform to spearhead the initiative, let's say a world-class system like SalesForce.com. The company puts together a business case, gets sign off, gets the project team together, defines the deliverables and puts in the relevant KPIs in place to carefully measure progress. After a long implementation journey, the software is installed, sellers have their shiny tablets and access to all kinds of data,.... but the sales revenues don't live up to the business case projections. Transformation gets a failure stamp and is thrown onto the 70% pile while the leadership teams look for some other way to increase seller effectiveness and competitiveness. The software works, and people were using it, so what's the issue? For starters, system usage (your sellers logged in and did what they were asked to do) is not adoption, it's compliance at best. True adoption, in this case, would look like sellers leveraging the data analytics and social connectivity capabilities from the tools to have higher quality conversations with their sales managers and customers. It would mean managers are able to better align sales planning efforts to demand and execs could be more agile in responding to ever-changing market shifts...but here's the kicker; mindset and behavioral changes take time and are rarely taken into account in ROI projections. By this point in our story, the project team has moved on to other things, and the people and change focus on shifting behaviors have set their eyes on the next big thing.

What can we do about it?

For starters, ensure that the strategic change management considerations are included alongside early business case and program management efforts. Think about the realistic context of shifting the culture within the system you are dealing, and hopefully, familiar with. Whether that's your organisation, regional team, function, etc. What is their ability to adopt the new ways of working and adapt to the shifting environment? Is the organisation resilient enough to internalize the changes or will it cause additional strain on employees? Will this require some simple communications, broader capability building or an eventual replacement of the current teams?

Additionally, we need to consider and embed the appropriate adoption metrics along with all the other financial and action-oriented program KPIs. This includes, rendering specific how and who would measure these mindset and behavioral shifts. The work would include engaging with users to help quantify the qualitative aspects of the changes their adapting to, often through simple interventions like interviews, focus groups and surveys. While the capabilities for this type of work often residing in HR or Org Development functions, it is vitally important to involve line leaders, who are closer to the point of impact and can help interpret results.

Finally we face the daunting task of change sustainability. We did our planning, drove our people interventions around leadership, learning and communications, measured the adoption and now need to stay with it until we realise the business value and the "new ways" become the "new norm." They often need additional nudges along the way to stay the course, and often require additional change efforts as new processes and surrounding infrastructures change. Patience and perseverance play a role here as sustainable behavioral, and ultimate cultural shifts, take time to embed and "slowing down to go faster" doesn't quite resonate with the current pace of business. If we can agree that change is the new norm, then sustained support to ongoing changes is a consideration we need to take seriously.

Ultimately, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge the success of a transformation. Only time, reflection and longer term business outcomes can be the judge of how well these efforts fared. In the meantime, don’t forget to focus on the people, they’ll be the deciding factor, not the problem to overcome.