In fact, according to research by McKinsey & Company, about 70% of all changes in all organizations fail. Contributed by Ron Leeman on January 21, 2015 in Organization, Change, & HR So now to tackle another much debated change subject–that so-called 70% failure rate. You don’t have to be in or near the field of change management long before you hear a daunting statistic: 70% of change initiatives fail. 70% of Change Management Initiatives Fail–REALLY? We’ve all heard the statistic 70% of all organizational change projects fail. Change projects fail at a terrifyingly high rate – in fact, the frequently quoted figure is 70%. 1. Regardless of industry or size of your organization, the most difficult part of work process improvement isn’t figuring out what to do. After almost two decades of intense change from corporate reorganizations, new software systems, and quality-improvement projects, the failure rate remains at 70%. It’s mentioned in passing as a fact in most change management books and articles nowadays. Research by McKinsey and Company suggests that 70% of complex, large-scale change programs fail. Based on the numbers from the McKinsey study, it would be tempting to conclude that since only 30-38% of change initiatives are “completely/mostly successful,” then 62-70% must be failures. A 2009 McKinsey study suggests that only around 10% of change programmes are considered to be complete failures. This figure was first reported by Hammer and Champy in 1993 and, unfortunately, recent research confirms the staggering statistic hasn’t changed by much.

Making a change program succeed does not come easy, up to 70% fail… 30% 70% Examples of change programs We have spent more than a decade to evaluate why 70 percent of change programs fail: Organization Design changes Mergers New product launch Lean transformation New IT-system roll-out … Given that change programme outcomes is unlikely ever to be a binary matter of success or failure, the McKinsey work suggests that the remainder probably fall around 30-40% completely or largely successful, 30% to be somewhat successful and the rest more unsuccessful … 70% of Change Management Initiatives Fail--REALLY? As an executive, you know the cost when a major project fails.