Where the 70 percent change failure rate came from, and what to measure instead

For three decades, management books, Harvard Business Review, and consulting research have repeated that 70 percent of change programs fail, as a premise rather than a finding. The figure can justify a change budget or excuse a disappointing result before it arrives.

The Research Desk traced the figure back through its sources and set it against the survey evidence. It does not hold up. The research around it is more useful.

An estimate becomes a rule

The earliest widely cited source is Reengineering the Corporation (1993), in which Michael Hammer and James Champy offered what they called an unscientific estimate: as many as 50 to 70 percent of organizations that undertake reengineering fall short of the dramatic results they set out to achieve.

Each qualification matters: the estimate concerned reengineering, not change in general; it described falling short of dramatic gains, not failure; and it was an upper bound, unscientific by its authors' own account.

Two years later, in The Reengineering Revolution, Hammer and his co-author Steven Stanton wrote that the observation had been widely misread and turned from a description into a rule. Reengineering, they argued, has no inherent rate of success or failure; results depend on the quality, intensity, and intelligence of the effort.

The correction did not stop the drift. In a 1996 book, Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley reported Hammer and Champy as conceding that 70 percent of reengineering efforts fail to achieve any results. Falling short of dramatic results had become a failure to produce any. A 1998 book by Ronald Purser and Steven Cabana attributed a flat 70 percent failure rate for change efforts generally to a survey by Fortune magazine. Within five years, an upper bound for one method had become a failure rate for all change.

Assertions without a dataset

Two Harvard Business Review articles are often cited as sources of the figure. Only one contains it.

John Kotter's "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" (March-April 1995) gives no overall rate. Of the more than 100 companies he had watched, Kotter reported, a few change efforts were very successful, a few failed outright, and most fell in between, tilting toward the weaker end.

The other, Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria's "Cracking the Code of Change" (May-June 2000), is among the most widely cited sources of the flat figure. The authors wrote: "The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail." They gave no source, sample, or definition of failure.

Kotter put his own number on failure in 2008, 13 years after his article. In A Sense of Urgency, he estimated from years of study that more than 70 percent of needed change is never launched, never completed, or finishes late and over budget with its original aims unmet. That is an expert's estimate with a broad definition of failure, not a measured rate.

Consulting research then cited Kotter. A 2009 McKinsey article credited his research with finding that only 30 percent of change programs succeed, and a footnote in McKinsey's 2021 transformation survey quotes his 70 percent estimate. Each citation added authority without adding evidence.

In 2011, in the peer-reviewed Journal of Change Management, Mark Hughes of the University of Brighton examined five published instances of the figure. He accepted that a popular narrative of 70 percent failure exists but found no valid and reliable empirical evidence for it. He did not claim that most change succeeds. A 2015 review by Carlos Cândido and Sérgio Santos found that most estimates behind claims that 50 to 90 percent of strategic initiatives fail rest on evidence that is outdated, fragmentary, fragile, or absent.

Traced to its sources, the 70 percent figure is a chain of estimates, restatements, and assertions, not a measurement.

What the surveys measured

None of the large surveys reviewed here found that 70 percent of programs failed outright. Most set a demanding bar for success and group everything below it together.

Traced to its sources, the 70 percent figure is a chain of estimates, restatements, and assertions, not a measurement.

In McKinsey's July 2008 survey of 3,199 executives, about a third reported success, defined as a true step change in performance. Reading the other two-thirds as failures misstates the result: in the survey's unweighted response counts, about one respondent in 20 called the transformation not successful at all, and most called it somewhat successful. In McKinsey's 2015 survey, 26 percent of respondents said their transformation had been very or completely successful at both improving performance and sustaining the gains, rising to 79 percent among completed transformations that took all 24 actions the survey tracked. Its 2021 survey found fewer than a third successful on the same test.

IBM's 2008 Making Change Work study of 1,532 practitioners used a project manager's test: 41 percent of projects fully met their time, budget, and quality objectives, 44 percent missed at least one, and 15 percent missed all of them or were stopped. Boston Consulting Group's 2020 study of digital transformations found 30 percent met or exceeded their target value with sustainable change, 44 percent created some value but missed their targets, and 26 percent delivered less than half of it. BCG's own summary put the share falling short of objectives at 70 percent, a figure easily misread as a failure rate.

Bain & Company reported in April 2024 that only about 12 percent of business transformations achieve their original ambition. Missing an ambitious target is not failing, and a measure built on original ambition can penalize the clear, high aspirations that McKinsey's 2008 survey associated most strongly with success.

Three cautions apply. The research is self-reported, usually by people judging programs they took part in; definitions of success differ, so rates cannot be compared or averaged; and most of it comes from firms that sell transformation or change services. Even so, in the three studies here that publish a full breakdown, the largest group is the same: programs that partly succeeded.

What leaders should measure instead

The useful question is not how often change fails in general but what a given program is delivering, against what definition, and for how long. The research suggests four measures.

A definition of success agreed before launch. The studies above use at least five different tests, from time, budget, and quality to original ambition. In McKinsey's 2008 survey, nearly a quarter of respondents said their target had not been well defined, and nearly half said they would set clearer targets if they started again, the most common answer. McKinsey's 2021 respondents placed nearly a quarter of lost value at target setting.

The share of potential value captured. In McKinsey's 2021 survey, respondents at successful transformations estimated that they had captured 67 percent of the maximum financial benefit available, against 37 percent elsewhere. By their own estimates, even the successes left a third of the value behind.

Results after the program closes. The same respondents placed a fifth of lost value after implementation. A program measured only at go-live will miss it.

The conditions associated with results, read as signals rather than proof. In IBM's study, practitioners who always followed formal change management procedures reported a 52 percent project success rate, against 36 percent for those who improvised. In Prosci's benchmarking, 88 percent of practitioners who rated their change management excellent met or exceeded objectives, against 13 percent who rated it poor, and active, visible sponsorship ranked as the top contributor to success. McKinsey's 2015 survey tied success most closely to communication, active leadership, employee empowerment, and continuous improvement; Bain's research, to how well a company secures and develops the talent a transformation needs. These are correlations, often from respondents rating both inputs and outcomes. They are leading indicators, not guarantees.

The 70 percent figure is simple, alarming, and easy to repeat. Its replacement is less quotable: a definition of success set in advance, a measure of value captured, a check on whether gains last, and a few conditions to watch. That is harder to fit on a slide. It is also something a leader can manage.