Change Doesn’t Fail at the Destination. It Stalls in the Queue.

A statistic that lets leaders off the hook

Almost every conversation about organisational change eventually arrives at the same number: 70 per cent of change programmes fail. It appears in books, board papers and consulting decks with the authority of settled fact.

It is not settled fact.

In a 2011 paper in the Journal of Change Management, Mark Hughes traced five prominent published sources for the claim. He found that none rested on valid and reliable empirical evidence. The figure had been repeated rather than measured.

The number survives because it is convenient. If failure is the natural rate of change, a stalled programme needs no explanation beyond human nature: people resist because that is what people do. The fault sits with the recipients of change, not with its design.

That framing is worth abandoning. Change is not easy, but the familiar explanation points leaders towards the wrong culprit. When a transformation loses momentum after the strategy has been approved, the more useful question is rarely Why are people resisting?

The better question is: What else are we asking them to carry?

Change has become a volume problem

Research reported by Gartner illustrates the load. In 2022, the average employee experienced ten planned enterprise changes — restructures, culture programmes, replacements of core systems and similar interventions. In 2016, the figure was two.

The raw number is not the whole story. Gartner’s later research emphasises that the personal disruption caused by a change can matter more than the number of initiatives alone. A programme that alters someone’s manager, team, responsibilities or everyday workflow can consume far more capacity than a change that remains largely outside the work.

But both findings lead to the same conclusion: leaders usually assess initiatives one at a time, while employees experience the portfolio.

A finance transformation, CRM rollout, AI programme, restructuring and new performance system may each have a persuasive business case. To the manager receiving all five, they form one accumulated demand on the same finite stock of attention, energy and credibility.

Heike Bruch and Jochen Menges described the organisational mechanism as the acceleration trap. Their research identified three patterns: overloading, where demands exceed capacity; multiloading, where too many different activities blur priorities; and perpetual loading, where exceptional effort becomes the permanent operating mode.

In that condition, people begin to protect themselves. They defer lower-priority work, ration discretionary effort and wait to see which initiative leadership will still care about next quarter.

Seen from the top, that behaviour looks exactly like resistance.

Resistance is information, not insubordination

Change fatigue and genuine opposition can produce similar symptoms: slipping milestones, minimal compliance, scepticism in the town hall. They require different responses.

Fatigue requires capacity. A disagreement about the destination may require debate, evidence or a decision. A credibility problem requires leadership to repair what previous programmes broke. Treating all three as an attitude problem usually produces more communication, more pressure and another initiative — deepening the very problem the organisation is trying to solve.

Jeffrey Ford, Laurie Ford and Angelo D’Amelio challenged the one-sided idea that resistance lives only in the people receiving change. Change agents can produce it through broken agreements, insufficient legitimacy, ignored local knowledge and benefits that were oversold. Handled well, resistance becomes a resource because it exposes where the programme and the organisation do not fit.

An objection that begins “we have been here before” is information about leadership’s credibility account. “We do not have the time” is information about capacity. “This will not work for the customer” may be the first evidence that a global design collides with operational reality.

None of those statements is automatically correct. But each deserves diagnosis before persuasion.

The task is not to remove every objection. It is to identify which objections reveal a flaw the formal programme cannot see.

Where the load lands

Change load does not distribute evenly. It concentrates where strategy is translated into daily work: in the middle of the organisation.

Quy Huy’s research has long challenged the image of middle managers as defenders of the status quo. During radical change, they do two demanding things at once: they make abstract strategy operational while helping colleagues process the uncertainty that strategy creates.

Consider a middle manager carrying four initiatives from four executives, each labelled top priority. That manager is not frozen. They are triaging. They are making — informally and without authority — the portfolio decisions that senior leadership declined to make.

The formal organisation also tells only part of the story. Reporting lines show who can approve a decision. They do not show whom people trust, who connects functions or whose interpretation gives a change legitimacy. Informal experts and boundary spanners often determine whether a new practice travels beyond the programme team.

This is why an apparently aligned executive team can still produce fragmented adoption. The plan has travelled through the hierarchy but not through the networks where people decide whether it is credible, workable and worth the risk.

Trust determines whether the signal travels

Transformation creates uncertainty precisely when leaders need accurate information most. It also creates conditions in which accurate information becomes harder to obtain.

Employees wonder whether raising a problem will mark them as negative. Managers hesitate to tell sponsors that milestones are unrealistic. Local teams learn how to satisfy formal reporting requirements while quietly preserving workarounds needed to keep the operation running.

The dashboard remains green. Reality diverges.

Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety is useful here because it is often misunderstood. Psychological safety is not a promise that work will feel comfortable, nor does it remove accountability. Its operational value is that people can report errors, question assumptions and surface bad news before the cost of silence becomes larger.

For change leaders, voice is therefore not a cultural extra. It is an early-warning system. A programme cannot learn from the organisation if the organisation has learned that inconvenient information is unwelcome.

The missing discipline is subtraction

If the binding constraint is capacity, the most powerful lever is to free some. Yet removal is precisely the move people struggle to see.

In a 2021 paper in Nature, Gabrielle Adams, Benjamin Converse, Andrew Hales and Leidy Klotz reported a series of experiments in which people seeking to improve an object, idea or situation systematically defaulted to adding something. They overlooked subtractive solutions, even when taking something away produced the better result.

Organisations amplify the bias. Launching a new initiative is visible, sponsorable and easy to narrate. Retiring a report, meeting, approval layer or programme has no natural owner. The cost of each addition appears in its business case; the combined cost of the portfolio belongs to nobody.

Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao describe the result in The Friction Project as “addition sickness”: rules, tools, meetings and procedures accumulate until doing the right thing becomes unnecessarily difficult. Their argument is not that all friction is bad. Useful friction can prevent reckless decisions. The leadership task is to make the right things easier and the wrong things harder.

That distinction matters for transformation. The answer is not a performative bonfire of process. It is deliberate subtraction: removing work that no longer earns the attention it consumes, and preserving safeguards whose value exceeds their cost.

What this changes for leaders

Vision and purpose still matter; subtraction does not replace them. The common failure is not the absence of a destination. It is a destination for which no room has been made.

None of this makes change comfortable. It does make it honest. It aligns what the organisation says matters with what it actually asks people to do on Monday morning.

Four lenses on the capacity problem

Few leadership teams disagree about where their transformation is meant to go. The harder conversation concerns capacity, sequence and what to give up. Different audiences need different ways into that problem.

Organisational energy

Heike Bruch

How over-acceleration drains organisational energy — and how leaders restore focus without lowering ambition. ↗

Friction & addition

Robert Sutton

How organisations accumulate obstacles — and how friction fixers make the right things easier. ↗

Voice & learning

Amy Edmondson

Why candid feedback is execution infrastructure when assumptions are changing and bad news matters early. ↗

The +1 · Subtraction

Leidy Klotz

Why people overlook subtractive solutions — and how taking away can create the space transformation needs. ↗

These are complementary conversations, not interchangeable keynote briefs. For adjacent perspectives, explore Scurati’s Deep Dives on Digital Transformation, the Future of Work and the AI Ambition Gap.