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.