70% of Transformations Fail. The Reason Isn't the Technology.

I sat down for a conversation recently and put hard numbers to something I have watched play out across nineteen years and more than 15,000 leaders. Start with the figure that should stop every executive cold. More than 70% of organizational transformations fail to deliver what they set out to do, and that number has barely moved in decades. The instinct is to blame the technology, the strategy, or the market. But the research keeps pointing somewhere less comfortable. As Harvard Business Review Press put it in a new book on the science of change, transformations fail not because of flawed strategy, but because leaders misunderstand how people actually move through change.

Here is the pattern I see again and again. When revenue tightens and the board applies pressure, the first things cut are training, development, and the human support that carries people through the very change being asked of them. Then we act surprised when only about a quarter of employees believe their leadership is even equipped to guide them through it. An organization is nothing more than people working toward a shared mission. Cut the support for the people and you have already chosen the failure outcome. You just have not watched it land yet.

And the pressure is only building. A decade ago, the average company planned around two major transformations a year. Now it is closer to ten, and AI is about to push that number higher still. The organizations that win the next decade will not be the ones with the best tools, because everyone will have the tools. They will be the ones that know how to help human beings move through constant change without losing themselves in it. That is the work I teach, and it is what we dug into in the full conversation. Because human potential is not the soft part of the strategy. It is your greatest competitive advantage.

Sources: Harvard Business Review Press, How Change Really Works (2026). Gartner Workforce Change Survey. Change Synergy, 2022, on employee belief in leadership readiness.

In the Age of AI, Your Humanity Is the Whole Strategy

Ask people quietly what AI means for them and you will hear the same worry underneath the excitement. Am I still necessary?

It is worth looking at what the data actually says. The World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, nearly 40% of the skills we use on the job will change, with roughly 92 million roles displaced and 170 million created. But here is the part that gets buried in the headlines.

The skills rising fastest alongside AI are not the technical ones. They are the human ones. Creative thinking. Resilience. Leadership. Curiosity. Empathy.

We keep getting this backwards. Under pressure, the instinct is to make people more like the machines that are coming for their tasks. Faster, leaner, more interchangeable. But you cannot beat a machine at being a machine. The advantage runs the other direction. The judgment to make a hard call, the creativity to see what is not yet there, the trust that makes a team move as one. None of that can be automated, and none of it can be copied by a competitor. Human potential is not a soft nicety. It is your greatest competitive advantage.

The organizations that thrive through this shift will not be the ones that automate their humanity away. They will be the ones that invest in it on purpose, right when the pressure is to cut. AI is not the end of the human era at work. Handled well, it is the permission slip to finally put people at the center, where they belonged all along. The question is not whether your people can keep up with the technology. It is whether you will help them become more fully themselves while it arrives.

Sources: World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025.

Your People Aren't Disengaged. They're Dimmed.

Walk into almost any organization right now and you can feel it before anyone says a word. The quiet. The carefulness. People doing the work without being in it. We have a tidy word for this.

We call it disengagement, as though it were a personal failing. It is not. According to Gallup, global employee engagement fell to just 20% last year, the lowest level since 2020, and disengagement drained an estimated 10 trillion dollars from the world economy. Those are not lazy people. They are capable people who have been asked to absorb too much, for too long, with too little say.

Look underneath the numbers and the story gets clearer. Gartner found that in 2016, 74% of employees were willing to support organizational change. By 2022 that had collapsed to 43%, even as the average person was hit with ten major changes in a single year, up from two. We did not lose their willingness because they stopped caring. We lost it because change kept being done to them instead of with them. Exhaustion is not apathy. It is information.

I have spent nineteen years inside organizational change, and I have watched a room full of depleted people sit up straighter the moment someone finally names what they have been carrying.

That is the work. Not another initiative, not another platform, but helping people reconnect to why the work mattered in the first place and reclaim the agency that constant change quietly takes. Your people are not broken. They are dimmed. And dimmed is something you can do something about.

Sources: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026. Gartner Workforce Change Survey, as reported by Harvard Business Review.