Here is something the change management industry would rather you didn’t notice.
In 2003, somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of organizational change initiatives failed to achieve their stated goals. In 2026, somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of organizational change initiatives fail to achieve their stated goals. Twenty-three years. A trillion-dollar consulting industry built around closing that gap. The number has not moved.
We have spent two decades with the tires spinning. Smoke, noise, expense — and the same patch of road under the wheels.
The Crispian Advantage’s Focusing Change to Win research surveyed 1,072 leaders, managers, and consultants across 80 countries and 19 industry sectors, with 11,000 years of collective change experience between them. They wrote 6,617 comments in response to 22 questions. When we asked them what percentage of change initiatives they had seen fail, their answers ranged from 40 percent to 80 percent. The centre of the range sat above 60 percent. That figure has been corroborated by every major consulting firm that has measured it — McKinsey, Gartner, BCG — across the same window.
Three things are worth saying out loud about that.
The persistence of the failure rate is not an artifact of measurement. It has been measured the same way, by the same firms, using the same definitions, for two decades. The number is real. The number is steady. And the number is unacceptable.
Organizations have spent unprecedented amounts on change programs, PROSCI-certified practitioners, Kotter-trained leaders, and every flavor of methodology the consulting world has produced. If money and methodology were the answer, the answer would have shown up by now.
Two-thirds of those surveyed told us their organizations would require extensive changes to remain viable. Nearly all said they did not know how to make those changes successfully. The same people paid to lead change are telling us, on the record, that they do not know how.
That is a problem worth sitting with.
The industry’s response to a stuck failure rate has been to do the same things differently — new frameworks, new platforms, new acronyms — rather than to do different things.
Two decades of evidence suggest that has not worked. It is also not going to start working in the next two decades unless something fundamental changes about how we think about why change fails in the first place.
That diagnosis is where this conversation goes next. The standard answer is that people resist change. The FCTW research has something inconvenient to say about that answer.
But that is for next week.
In your own career, how many failed change initiatives have you been part of? Not the ones that succeeded with caveats. The ones that quietly got rebadged, abandoned, or absorbed into the next initiative. Count them honestly. That number is the conversation we are starting.