I bet you have heard that 70% of transformation projects fail. I have used that number myself, more than once, to open a deck and make the case for why this time needs to be handled differently.
Nobody agrees on what it actually means, though. Mark Hughes traced the claim back through the five most commonly cited sources behind it in 2011 and found the same thing every time: an unsourced estimate, cited as though it were a finding, then cited again as though the first citation had been the research. Nobody along the way ever actually measured it.
A Number Nobody Checked, Repeated by Everyone Who Should Have
So maybe it is not 70%. But not that many transformations actually succeed, and everyone who has run one already knows that, number or no number. The more careful research splits the picture further than success or failure. A good share fully succeeds. A larger share create some value but miss their targets. That middle group is where the real story lives, and I do not think it is a coincidence how many of them have the same thing in common.
Head Says Yes, Heart Says Absolutely Not
My grandmother used to say your head and your heart need to be aligned, or nothing you do will actually hold. I think about that a lot with organisations, because the same thing is true of them. The head is the strategy, the deck, the new operating model on the slide. The heart is what actually happens in a meeting when someone disagrees, or a decision needs to get made fast, or the old habit is easier than the new one.
I have watched a transformation sponsor stand on a stage more than once, and speak with real conviction about a new way of working. More ownership at every level. Faster decisions made closer to the work. Less command, more trust. Then I watched the same person, in the rooms that were not on a stage, override decisions made without them, ask to be looped into things the new model explicitly said should not require their sign-off, and loudly punish the one person who had taken the new autonomy at face value.
Everyone Has a Spreadsheet On You, and It Is Not the One From HR
It does not take a moment that dramatic. A small sidestep in an ordinary meeting is enough. People are watching for exactly this, and especially the leaders already known not to meet the standards of the new operating model get watched more closely than anyone, their change evaluated and monitored in real time by the same people they are supposed to be leading. And there is no use pretending there is not at least one leader like that in every organisation past a certain size. Everyone recognises both patterns immediately, the old habit and the one being asked for now, because they have been living inside the old one long enough to know it instantly when it reappears.
Willingness Was Never the Missing Ingredient
The most common explanation for why change fails is resistance. People do not want this. People are comfortable. People are afraid.
What if the employees were never the major obstacle to the change that was wanted? Some people are afraid of change. Some are excited by it. Some want everything to stay exactly as it is, and some are constantly craving the next change before this one has settled. None of that is what sinks a transformation. Opposition is good. Nobody’s plan is perfect, and every objection is a chance to find out what you missed.
What actually sinks it is simpler, and less comfortable to say out loud. It is easy to ask other people to change. It gets uncomfortable fast when the ask lands on you too, your habits, your decisions, the control you assumed was just yours by default. Most transformation plans never mention that part. Mostly because the people writing them are usually the ones who would have to give up the most, and somehow nobody ever put that on the agenda.
Congratulations, You Are Now the Pilot Programme
Most transformation plans give the leader a role that looks like sponsor, decision-maker, the person who opens the town hall. I think that role is almost beside the point.
The real job is being the first test case. Not announcing the change, living inside it first, in the same ordinary meetings, under the same pressure, before anyone else is asked to bet their own behaviour on it. This is not a heroic extra a leader can choose to take on if they feel like it. It is simply what the job includes the moment it includes leading people through a change. The title comes with the requirement attached, whether anyone likes that part of it or not.
An organisation is not actually watching for whether a leader believes in the change. It is watching for whether the leader can be seen attempting it, under pressure, and what happens to them when they get it wrong.
Body Positive, Body Negative, Same Difference
There is a moment in Devil Wears Prada 2 that captures this almost perfectly. Miranda, trying to speak the new corporate language around body inclusivity in fashion, reaches for “body positive,” and what comes out instead is “body negative.” Her old instincts simply overrode the new script.
It is a funny scene because it is instantly recognisable. But it also shows exactly what the job is, and it is not to avoid the mistake. She did not pretend to have already arrived. The slip showed the room immediately how much of the old operating system was still running underneath the new vocabulary. Nobody actually expects a leader to have already finished becoming the new version of themselves. What they are testing for is whether the leader treats their own part of the change as required, not optional.
That is the actual demonstration a transformation needs. Not a finished leader modelling a finished behaviour. Someone who has simply accepted that changing is part of the role now, the same way showing up on time or making a decision is part of the role, and behaves accordingly. A leader who treats the transformation as other people’s work, announcing it from a stage and then quietly keeping their own habits off limits, has just not done their job.
You Were the Pilot the Whole Time
My guess is that the organisations where this actually works are the ones where the leader dared to show their own change journey out loud, mistakes and all, not just the people beneath them. Everyone else gets the middle group, real willingness met by a leader who never had to change, a plan that asked the workforce to go first while leaving leadership conveniently out of scope.
That is not the story on the slide. It is a slower, less flattering one, mostly because the client for that version of the story would have to be the person standing at the front of the room.
