Why Change So Often Fails

There are many reasons why change efforts fail. In an earlier article, I reviewed more than 50 years of research in the field of organizational development and noted the most frequent challenges we encounter when undertaking change. These fell into four broad phases of change efforts:

Understanding the need for change

Framing the change

Undertaking the change

Sustaining the change

In the first phase, we run into challenges of identifying the need for change and its importance. We make too much or too little of the need for change, and we try solutions that are familiar but not appropriate under the evolving circumstances. Our commitments to change lack true conviction, leading to abandonment later on.

In framing the change, we set the scope of the change too broadly or too narrowly. We fail to align important stakeholders or get early input from key people in the organization about factors that could affect success. We allow consultants to lead us down the wrong path by advocating approaches that they are pushing rather than what we really need. And we don’t assess readiness before we advance.

Examples? Both G. Richard Thoman at Xerox and Carly Fiorina at HP ran into staunch resistance when as outsider CEOs they declared that the cultures of their companies were barriers to progress. Both made their people and their boards uncomfortable, leading eventually to their replacement by CEOs who embraced what their companies’ cultures had to offer. Ann Mulchahy, who took over Xerox from Thoman, was a longtime insider who understood how to bring out the best in Xerox’s people. She had a stellar run as CEO before passing the reins to another longtime insider, Ursula Burns.

Once we undertake the change, we run into a host of issues. As leaders we may find that we are not prepared for our roles and have underestimated the personal challenge. Or we discover that the change will be more difficult than imagined because we uncover issues that we should have known about before we began. It could be that as things progress, we realize we are going down the wrong path but have difficulty adjusting due to the investment in our original plans.

My review of change obstacles was based on research and case studies involving, for the most part, single changes. As we step back from the details of single-change efforts and look instead at the reality of complex, continuous change, we multiply the degree of difficulty exponentially. Each of the individual efforts that make up complex, continuous change faces its own challenges, but together they create interference for one another. People quickly become overloaded, have difficulty sorting out what is really important, and complete for the resources required for implementation. The need to work through the overlaps among projects results in more “change overhead”—meetings that eat up time but do not advance progress.