The number that became a premise
Some claims acquire authority through repetition. The assertion that roughly 70 percent of organizational change initiatives fail is one of them. It appears precise, familiar and urgent. If most transformations are destined to fall short, then organizations presumably need a better way to lead them. The story is persuasive. But before it becomes the justification for a leadership program, a new methodology or another transformation office, it deserves examination.
Mark Hughes did precisely that in his 2011 paper, “Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?” Reviewing five published instances of the claim, he found no valid and reliable empirical support for the purported universal failure rate. His objection was not that organizational change is easy or that failures are imaginary. It was that a number had hardened into conventional wisdom without the evidentiary foundation needed to carry that weight [1].
This distinction matters. If we cannot consistently say what constitutes an initiative, what counts as failure, who judges it, and at what point the judgment is made, a universal percentage tells us less than we think. An initiative can meet its installation milestone and miss its business purpose. It can encounter resistance early and deliver lasting benefit later. It can satisfy its sponsor while creating costs for customers or frontline teams. The label “success” conceals these choices unless we make them explicit.
Then came a new center of gravity
Well before Hughes published his critique, John Kotter helped establish an influential leadership-centered vocabulary for transformation. His 1995 Harvard Business Review article identified recurring mistakes in large-scale change: inadequate urgency, weak coalitions, unclear vision, poor communication, obstacles left in place, insufficient short-term wins, premature declarations of victory and failure to embed change in the organization. The 1996 book Leading Change made that framing enduring and accessible [2].
The appeal is understandable. Organizations are not machines in which leaders alter a process, issue a memo and receive a predictable response. Shared direction, visible sponsorship, trust, authority and attention matter. A change initiative with a polished project schedule and fragmented leadership is vulnerable from the start. Kotter brought those issues to the center of executive discussion.
Yet an important question remains. When organizations substituted “leading change” for “managing change” in their language and programs, did the resulting work become more effective? Or did the profession, at times, begin to treat a change in emphasis as evidence of improvement?
We should be careful about what can be inferred. There was no single, universal handoff from management to leadership. The two traditions overlap, differ across organizations, and have continued in parallel. The unsupported 70 percent figure did not create Kotter’s 1995 article, and historical proximity alone cannot establish that it caused the profession’s language to change. The real issue is less tidy and more important: are organizations evaluating these approaches against actual outcomes?
The uncomfortable sequel
Hughes returned to the subject in “Leading Changes: Why Transformation Explanations Fail,” first published online in 2015 and appearing in the 2016 issue of Leadership. He critically examined the continuing relevance of Kotter’s Leading Change, concluding that it remained a landmark while arguing that its enduring dominance could constrain how people understood and practiced change [3]. This was not a simple dismissal of leadership. It was a challenge to the assumption that an influential framework remains sufficient because it is influential.
A later scholarly review by Jeroen Stouten, Denise Rousseau and David De Cremer makes the broader problem harder to ignore. Published in Academy of Management Annals in 2018, it contrasted practitioner models with the research literature and found a field still lacking an easily
accessible consensus on fundamental processes and principles. Many popular approaches, the authors noted, rested more on expert judgment than systematically assembled evidence. Their review sought to integrate what research supports, contests and has yet to test [4].
Put together, these studies do not prove that change leadership fails, that change management succeeds or that one celebrated model is useless. They establish a more disciplined standard: popularity, elegant sequences and compelling stories cannot substitute for evidence about the conditions under which a method works.
The false choice between leadership and management
There is a temptation to cast the two terms as opponents. “Management” becomes schedules, controls and bureaucracy. “Leadership” becomes vision, inspiration and momentum. This is rhetorically convenient and operationally unhelpful.
Consider a company integrating an acquisition. Its leaders can clearly describe the strategic rationale. Employees may understand the announcement and the desired future state. Yet unresolved decision rights between the acquired business and the parent company can halt approvals. Incompatible customer processes may increase handoffs. Systems that cannot exchange essential data may force employees into workarounds. Revenue can leak while everyone remains enthusiastic about the vision.
Alternatively, the integration office may have a meticulous plan, tracked milestones and governance meetings, while senior leaders quietly disagree about which business model should prevail. Each function can complete its assigned tasks and the organization can still move in conflicting directions. Neither better inspiration nor better reporting solves that problem alone.
Direction without operational translation is aspiration. Operational control without aligned direction is motion. Durable improvement requires both, along with enough curiosity to locate the actual constraints between them.
What would real progress look like?
Organizations often report the health of a change initiative through measures they can collect easily: training completion, communications delivered, milestones met, workshops held and sentiment scores. Some are useful leading indicators. None automatically demonstrates that the organization is realizing the intended business benefit.
A more useful assessment begins before implementation, with a precise outcome. What should customers, employees and the business experience differently? What metric would show that difference? What baseline are we starting from? Who owns the result after the project team departs? And which costs or tradeoffs must be included?
For a service operation, improvement might mean reduced resolution time without increasing rework. For an acquisition, it might mean retained customers, an integrated decision structure and preserved service quality. For a digital program, it might mean lower end-to-end cycle time or fewer
manual interventions, not simply a system go-live. The appropriate measures vary with the context. That is a strength, not a failure of rigor.
Then we need to distinguish implementation from adoption, and adoption from impact. A process can be launched but not used. It can be used and still create additional work. It can deliver an initial gain that disappears when an executive sponsor moves on. Measuring these stages separately exposes where intervention is actually needed.
Find the constraint, not merely the symptom
An organization rarely experiences its problems in neat categories. Delayed decisions appear as poor stakeholder engagement. Conflicting priorities appear as resistance. Missing process ownership appears as communication failure. Teams may be asked to improve morale while a contradictory approval structure continues to produce frustration.
The first responsibility is therefore diagnosis. Are leaders aligned on what success means, not just on the slogan? Do the people responsible for results have the authority and information they need? Does the operating model reinforce the new direction? Are incentives, capacity and systems compatible with the promised change?
Sometimes the most productive intervention is not another communications campaign or leadership workshop. It is a clear decision about ownership, a repaired handoff, a capacity adjustment or removal of a conflicting performance measure. These interventions rarely photograph well, but they can change what the organization is capable of doing.
Leadership should create the conditions for execution
Good leadership is indispensable. It is also too important to be treated as a substitute for the structures through which work gets done. Leaders must clarify the purpose of a change, agree on what matters, confront tradeoffs, make decisions and reinforce the priorities they establish. Management systems must translate that direction into coordinated work, visible measures, capable teams and reliable follow-through.
The goal is not to declare one side the winner. It is to build a coherent organization. An executive sponsor should be able to move from the intended outcome to the daily decisions, workflows and measures that will produce it, and back again. If that chain breaks, neither an inspirational speech nor an elaborate dashboard can repair it by itself.
A better question than “Did the change succeed?”
Instead of asking whether an initiative belonged to the successful 30 percent or failed 70 percent, ask: Did we define a meaningful outcome? Did we create the organizational conditions required to deliver it? Did the work measurably improve? Did the benefit hold? What did we learn about why?
Those questions are more demanding than a headline statistic. They require leaders to revisit assumptions and examine the gap between what was announced and what changed. They also
invite a more constructive conversation about leadership and management: not which vocabulary deserves prestige, but what combination of judgment, alignment and disciplined execution works in this organization.
The profession has spent decades refining the language of transformation. The next step is to be equally rigorous about its results.
References
[1] Hughes, M. (2011). “Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?” Journal of Change Management, 11(4), 451–464. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697017.2011.630506
[2] Kotter, J. P. (1995). “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.” Harvard Business Review, March–April 1995. Publisher republication and original-date confirmation: https://hbr.org/2007/01/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail
[3] Hughes, M. (2016 issue; first online 2015). “Leading Changes: Why Transformation Explanations Fail.” Leadership, 12(4), 449–469. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715015571393
[4] Stouten, J., Rousseau, D. M., & De Cremer, D. (2018). “Successful Organizational Change: Integrating the Management Practice and Scholarly Literatures.” Academy of Management Annals, 12(2), 752–788. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2016.0095