# Nine percent: what transformation budgets say about change management > Monitor Deloitte's 2025 study finds change management and communications get 9 percent of transformation budgets, and a third of leaders would raise it in hindsight. The wider evidence says more about how to spend that money than how much. The Langford Institute, October 4, 2026. Practice and Methods; Analysis, Transformation Desk. 4 min read. Web page: https://www.thelangfordinstitute.org/articles/nine-percent-transformation-budgets/ Change management and communications received an average of 9 percent of transformation budgets in Monitor Deloitte's *2025 Chief Transformation Officer Study*, the smallest of six spending areas, against 26 percent for technology. In hindsight, 33 percent of the transformation leaders Deloitte surveyed for the 2025 study said they would increase the change share. More of them, 42 percent in the same study, would raise investment in talent, the other area Deloitte places at the bottom of the budget. Deloitte's 2025 report is not fully consistent on technology, which appears as 26 percent in one chart and 28 percent in another, but change management and communications is 9 percent in both. Who answered matters. Monitor Deloitte's 2025 study surveyed 200 transformation executives across industries and geographies. Of those 2025 respondents, more than 90 percent had overseen three or more transformations and more than 80 percent led programs that met all their targets, so the sample skews toward experienced and successful leaders. The budget shares are their own reports of 2024 averages. Deloitte sells transformation consulting. Set against where executives say transformations run into trouble, 9 percent looks small. The evidence on what change money buys is thinner than that comparison suggests, and it says more about how to spend the money than about how much. ## Where the trouble sits BCG's 2024 survey of 1,000 senior executives found that about 70 percent of the challenges companies face in implementing AI stem from people and process issues, 20 percent from technology and 10 percent from algorithms. The comparison with Deloitte's 2025 figure is loose. BCG's figure covers AI programs only, and people and process is a wider category than change management and communications. BCG's 2024 release does name change management among the people and process capabilities that distinguish AI leaders. BCG also presents its split as a rule for allocating resources that AI leaders follow, and calls it a long-held belief. It is best read as a BCG heuristic backed by survey data, not an independent measurement. The direction is still plain. BCG's executives place most of the difficulty in AI programs with people and process, and Deloitte's 2025 respondents gave the two budget lines most directly about people the lowest allocations. McKinsey's data on lost value point the same way. In McKinsey's 2021 survey of 1,034 people who had taken part in a transformation, fewer than a third rated it successful at improving and sustaining performance. Respondents to McKinsey's 2021 survey placed nearly a quarter of lost value at target setting and 55 percent during and after implementation, including 20 percent after it. In the same 2021 survey, successful transformations captured on average only 67 percent of their potential financial benefit, against 37 percent for the rest, by respondents' own estimates. Implementation and the months after it are where change management does much of its work. On these estimates, they are also where more than half the lost value leaks. > A leader who met every target with a small change line has some reason to doubt that a bigger one was needed. The most direct evidence on method is older. IBM's 2008 *Making Change Work* study of 1,532 practitioners found 52 percent project success where formal change management procedures were always followed, against 36 percent where people improvised. Success in IBM's 2008 study meant fully meeting time, budget and quality objectives, a strict test. ## The strongest case against The strongest counter-evidence comes from Deloitte's own sample. The leaders behind the 9 percent average were, by their own account, mostly successful: more than 80 percent of Deloitte's 2025 respondents led programs that met all targets. Most did not say they would raise the change budget. A leader who met every target with a small change line has some reason to doubt that a bigger one was needed. Budgets are also growing. Deloitte's 2025 study reports increases of up to 2.5 times in transformation budgets over two years, so a steady share can still mean more money. The evidence for more spending has limits of its own. Every study cited here is self-reported, and the links they draw between practice and results are correlational. All four come from firms that sell consulting. IBM's figures are from 2008, and they complicate the idea that more is better: in that 2008 study, the two groups between always following formal procedures and improvising reported 39 and 38 percent success, barely above the 36 percent for improvisers. If that pattern holds, partial use of a method buys little, and a larger budget spent on inconsistent practice would buy little too. Finally, Deloitte's 9 percent is a budget category as its 2025 respondents reported it. It cannot show how much change work is paid for under other headings, such as training funded from a technology line. ## What to do on Monday None of these studies identifies the right share. The practical response is to establish your own. - **Find your number.** Calculate the share of each transformation budget explicitly allocated to change management and communications. Compare it with Deloitte's 2025 average of 9 percent with care: that figure describes a sample of mostly successful leaders and is not a target. - **Ask the hindsight question early.** Deloitte's leaders answered after the fact. Ask your transformation leads now which line they would raise, while the money can still move. - **Fund the later stages.** McKinsey's 2021 respondents placed 55 percent of lost value during and after implementation. Hold part of the change budget for the months after go-live rather than spending it all on launch. - **Buy consistency before volume.** If your organization has a change method, check whether every program applies it. In IBM's 2008 data, the clear gain appeared where formal procedures were always followed. - **Track adoption against spend.** Record what each program's change budget paid for and what adoption followed, so the next allocation rests on your own evidence. ## Sources - Boston Consulting Group. "AI Adoption in 2024: 74% of Companies Struggle to Achieve and Scale Value." Press release for *Where's the Value in AI?*, October 24, 2024. https://www.bcg.com/press/24october2024-ai-adoption-in-2024-74-of-companies-struggle-to-achieve-and-scale-value - Jørgensen, Hans Henrik, Lawrence Owen, and Andreas Neus. *Making Change Work*. IBM Global Business Services, October 2008. https://www.ibm.com/downloads/documents/us-en/10c31775c7540179 - McKinsey & Company. "Losing from Day One: Why Even Successful Transformations Fall Short." McKinsey Global Survey results, December 7, 2021 (fielded May-June 2021). Collected in "The Science Behind Successful Organizational Transformations." https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organization/our-insights/successful-transformations - Monitor Deloitte. *2025 Chief Transformation Officer Study: Six Things to Know About Transformations Today*. Deloitte Consulting LLP, 2025. https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/assets-zone3/us/en/docs/services/consulting/2025/us-2025-chief-transformation-officer-survey.pdf --- Cite as: The Langford Institute, "Nine percent: what transformation budgets say about change management," October 4, 2026, https://www.thelangfordinstitute.org/articles/nine-percent-transformation-budgets/ Editorial standards: https://www.thelangfordinstitute.org/standards/