Corporate transformations fail much more often than they succeed. The failure rate is around 70% and this figure has not improved in decades. Since the 1980s, human beings digitized the global economy, mapped the human genome, and built cars that can drive themselves. But over the same period, we did not become meaningfully better at helping groups of people do things differently.
We all suffer the consequences. Shareholders lose capital. Customers are stuck with services that could be better and cheaper. And employees bear a heavy cost of wasted time, energy, and belief. Every failed change program leaves scar tissue in an organization, reducing its appetite and capacity for future adaptation.
So why are failed change programs so common?
We have spent our careers studying this question. We have led large-scale transformations across industries and continents. More recently, we have surveyed six thousand executives and employees across fifteen countries, interviewed more than fifty executives and behavioral scientists, and sifted through fifty years of evidence from the behavioral sciences.
What we’ve found is this: change doesn’t fail because people resist. It fails because leaders misunderstand how people really change. When organizations struggle with change, they usually do so not because leaders have a poor strategy or insufficient opportunities to win new business, but because they don’t focus enough on how people are likely to behave, feel, and think throughout the process.
