In 2011 an organisational change researcher at the University of Brighton went looking for the study behind the claim that 70 percent of change programmes fail. There is no study behind it.
The figure has been in circulation for more than thirty years. It sits in consulting decks, on the opening slide of change management training, in the introductions of academic papers and in the marketing copy of firms that sell transformation support. It is precise enough to sound like a measurement and round enough to remember.
Five citation trails, and no study at the end of any
Mark Hughes published the search in the Journal of Change Management under a title that leaves little doubt about the finding: Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail? The method was simple. He took five separate published instances of the claim, followed each back to whatever it cited, and assessed the evidence at the end of the chain.
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.
All five trails ended the same way. Either the source stated the figure without evidence, or it cited another source that stated the figure without evidence. None of the five chains contained a dataset, a sample, a definition of failure or a method.
The 1993 origin was called an unscientific estimate by its own authors
The earliest version most often pointed to is in Michael Hammer and James Champy's Reengineering the Corporation, published in 1993. They wrote that somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of reengineering efforts did not achieve the results intended, and they called it an unscientific estimate.
That was careful and honest. It was also the last careful step in the chain. The range narrowed to its upper bound. The qualification fell away. The subject widened from business process reengineering to organisational change in general. By the time the figure reached the slide decks it had become a measured failure rate for an activity its originators had not been describing.
A second commonly cited origin is John Kotter's 1995 Harvard Business Review article on why transformation efforts fail, which drew on his observation of more than a hundred companies over the preceding decade. Watching a hundred companies is a real basis for an argument about what goes wrong. It is not a sampling frame and it does not yield a percentage, and Kotter's article does not present one in the way the citation trail implies.
The definitional problem is worse than the sourcing problem
Suppose a study existed. We put to the claim the three questions any failure rate would have to answer, and no version of it answers any of them.
What is a change programme? A merger, a new CRM rollout, a restructure of one department and a rebrand are all organisational change. They have nothing in common in duration, cost, reversibility or how anyone would know whether they worked.
What counts as failure? Abandoned before completion, delivered late, delivered on time with no measurable benefit, delivered with benefits that decayed within a year. Those are four different outcomes and the claim does not tell them apart. Most programmes deliver some of what was intended and not the rest, so a binary success rate is the wrong shape of measurement entirely.
Measured when? A reorganisation judged at six months and the same reorganisation judged at three years will not get the same verdict. No version of the claim names a horizon.
A statistic that cannot survive those three questions is not a weak statistic. It is a rhetorical device wearing a number.
The figure persists because it sells the service
The claim is most useful to the people who repeat it most.
A high failure rate is the premise of the change management industry. If most change succeeds, methodology and tooling are optional. If most change fails, they are urgent. The figure arrives in the first minute of a sales conversation because it turns a discretionary purchase into risk mitigation. It arrives in the introductions of academic papers because a striking number establishes that the topic matters.
The scholarly literature has not behaved much better. Stouten, Rousseau and De Cremer opened their 2018 review in the Academy of Management Annals by noting that organisational research lacks an easily accessible consensus on basic change management. It is a polite description of a field whose best known number has no source.
Nobody knows the rate, because nobody has defined the terms
The absence of a real failure rate does not make change easy, and the correction should not swing into a claim that most change works. Nobody knows the rate. Nobody has defined the terms well enough to measure it.
What can be said is narrower, and more useful:
- Specific, well-defined categories of change have been measured. Post-merger performance, IT project delivery and restructuring outcomes each have their own literature with their own definitions, and those numbers can be cited where they fit the case.
- The practitioner models used to manage change stand on very different evidential bases, and the differences are large. That comparison is in which change management model has evidence behind it.
- Where an intervention has been tested, the effects on leaders themselves are measurable and reasonably well established. What leadership training changes rests on 335 samples, against an estimate its own authors disclaimed.
When a supplier opens with the 70 percent figure, two questions settle it: which study, and what did that study count as failure. The answer to the first is that there isn't one. There has not been one for thirty years.
Common questions
Is it true that 70 percent of change initiatives fail? There is no evidence for it. A 2011 peer-reviewed review in the Journal of Change Management traced five published instances of the claim and found no valid and reliable empirical evidence behind any of them.
Where did the 70 percent figure originate? The earliest version usually pointed to is Hammer and Champy's 1993 book on reengineering, which gave a range of 50 to 70 percent for reengineering efforts that did not achieve intended results and described it as an unscientific estimate.
Did John Kotter say 70 percent of change fails? Kotter's 1995 Harvard Business Review article discussed why transformation efforts fail, based on observing more than a hundred companies over ten years. That is qualitative observation rather than a sampling study, and it does not produce a failure rate.
Has anyone measured the real failure rate of organisational change? Not for organisational change as a whole, because the term covers activities with nothing measurable in common. Narrower categories such as IT project delivery or post-merger performance do have measured outcomes.
Why do consultancies still use the figure? Because a high failure rate is the commercial premise for change management services. If most change succeeded without help, the methodology would be optional.
What should I say when someone quotes it to me? Ask which study it comes from, and what that study counted as a failure. Neither question has an answer, and asking them is faster than arguing about the number.
Does this mean change management is unnecessary? No. It means the case for it has to be made from evidence about specific practices rather than from an unsourced aggregate failure rate. Several individual practices do have supporting evidence; the headline statistic does not.
Sources
- Hughes, M. (2011), Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?, Journal of Change Management 11(4), 451-464
- University of Brighton research repository record for the paper, including the full abstract
- Stouten, Rousseau & De Cremer (2018), Successful Organizational Change: Integrating the Management Practice and Scholarly Literatures, Academy of Management Annals 12(2), 752-788
