If you are reading this, you are probably standing in the wreckage of a change initiative. Maybe yours. Maybe one you inherited. Maybe the fourth attempt at the thing that didn’t work the first three times.
You are not browsing the business section of an airport bookshop. You are not catching up on the literature. You are someone who has the meeting tomorrow morning and is wondering, quietly, whether this round will be different — or just more expensive.
That is who this is for.
Our research — a survey of more than a thousand leaders across eighty countries and nineteen sectors — put the change-initiative failure rate at somewhere between 40 and 80 percent. Most large studies cluster around 70. Gartner. McKinsey. RAND on the AI side. The number has been stubbornly consistent for two decades.
Two decades. Through six waves of methodology. Through Agile, Lean, OKRs, design thinking, transformation offices. Through every certification, every playbook, every conference keynote that promised this time would be different.
Still. Through six waves of methodology, every certification, every playbook, and every keynote that promised this time would be different.
And the most consistent finding across all of that work is not what you would expect. It is not that people are afraid. It is not that the technology is hard. It is that the people inside these organisations — the ones living through the change — keep telling researchers, in their own words, that the problem is not them.
of AI projects fail to deliver business value. Primary cause: people and process, not technology.
more likely to outperform peers when strong change management practices are in place.
AI implementations failing at twice the rate of traditional IT projects. The cause is trust, not tech.
The problem is the same things, every time. Inconsistent direction from the top. Communication that arrives late and means less than it claims. Expectations that were never made explicit. Accountability that lives in the slide deck and dies on contact with the actual week.
None of that is a workforce problem. All of it is a leadership problem.
This conversation matters now because the cost of getting it wrong has gone up.
AI implementation is failing at roughly twice the rate of traditional IT projects. Not because the technology is bad — it is, mostly, very good. It is failing because organisations are deploying it on top of workforces that have already lived through three or four failed transformations, and have learned not to invest themselves in the next one.
If your people are quietly waiting for the AI rollout to follow the same arc as the last restructure — announce, scramble, slip, quietly retire — you are not facing a technology problem. You are facing a trust problem, and the technology is its presenting symptom.
That is the conversation this blog is here to have.
What this is
Every Tuesday for the next fifty weeks, we will publish a piece on some part of why change keeps failing and what — specifically, in practice — actually works instead. The pieces draw on our own research, on twenty years of consulting across organisations that have done it well and badly, and on the comments and disagreements that this dialogue will generate.
It is not a marketing channel. It is a working space. The pieces here are written for people who already know what failure tastes like, and who are not interested in being talked down to about it.
What this is not
It is not a countdown to a book. There is a book — we are co-writing it, and we will be honest about that when the time comes — but the writing here is not the warm-up act. Each post does its own work. If the only thing you ever read from us is the one that lands in front of you next Tuesday, it should still have been worth the click.
And it is not a monologue. The comment thread under each post is half of the post. The most interesting parts of this conversation — over the next year — will come from the people who arrive with their own wreckage to describe.
Where we are heading
Over the next three months we will work through what our research actually found, and why none of it should have been a surprise. We will look at why the failure rate has not budged in twenty years. We will look at where most of the resistance you encounter actually originates — and it is probably not where you have been told to look. We will look at the single variable that, statistically, makes the biggest difference to whether a change initiative survives contact with its own organisation.
None of this is going to be presented as a five-step solution. The book those usually live in is already written, and it did not help.
An invitation
If something in this rings true — or rings wrong — leave a note in the comments below. Tell us where you are reading from and what you are in the middle of. We read every one. Some of what is written here over the next year will come directly from what you put in those threads.
If you know one other person who is standing in the same wreckage and would benefit from being part of this conversation, send them the link. The point of fifty Tuesdays is to build something that is bigger than any one post.