Why Change Management So Often Fails

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In 1983, McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published a paper in the journal Human Resource Management that described an “adoption penalty” for firms that didn’t adapt to changes in the marketplace quickly enough. His ideas became McKinsey’s first change management model that it sold to clients.

So it is notable, to say the least, that in 2015, more than 35 years later, McKinsey found that only 26% of organizational transformations succeed. It’s not hard to see why. While traditional change management models offer sensible frameworks for fairly obvious changes, truly transformational efforts almost always encounter fierce resistance.

That’s an important distinction that leads to a significant difference. As I found when researching my book, Cascades, successful transformations identify resistance from the start and effectively plan to overcome opposition. Clearly, today, when change is so often a matter of survival, traditional change management models are no longer enough.

Preparing For Resistance

The change management industry was developed to solve a particular and discrete problem. While there were clear and coherent models for other critical business functions, such as marketing and finance, there was a relative dearth of models to help drive change. Phillips’ model and those that…