Think about it for a while
We are teaching the NextGen CM's a lie and then punishing them for believing in it
One comment in a Change Management Unplugged discussion with Mark Green stuck with me ... his biggest frustration wasn’t just that the statistic is wrong. It was that people entering the profession repeat it innocently, because they’ve been taught it, only to be publicly corrected, criticised, or ridiculed for spreading misinformation. Think about that for a moment. We are socialising new Change Managers into the profession using a false narrative, then acting surprised when they repeat it. That is not how mature professions behave. It’s how insecure ones do.
We undermine our own credibility before we even start
Executives are not stupid, and clients are not gullible (mmmmm). Many are perfectly capable of checking sources, especially when a claim sounds dramatic.
When Change Managers lead with an exaggerated, poorly evidenced failure rate, we damage our credibility before we’ve even finished the opening slide. If the headline statistic doesn’t stand up, why should anyone trust:
Ironically, in trying to make Change Management sound indispensable, we make it sound unserious.
We replace nuance with fear and then have the gall to call it "insight"
The 70% statistic is rarely used to encourage learning. It is used to scare ... “If you don’t invest in Change Management, you’ll be part of the 70%” or “Change is risky because most of it fails” or “Transformation is dangerous without experts.” Fear may sell, but it does not educate.
By flattening all of that complexity into a single failure number, we don’t help leaders make better decisions; we encourage defensive behaviour and performative activity.
We let leadership conveniently off the hook
The 70% narrative is useful. Not to Change Managers but to organisations. If “most change fails anyway,” then:
A more honest conversation would ask:
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The myth avoids those questions beautifully.
We reduce a human discipline to a soundbite
Change Management constantly claims to be about people, behaviour, culture, and context, and then summarises its effectiveness with a single recycled number. Tbh that should really bother us because professions mature by increasing precision, not clinging to folklore. If Change Management really is contextual and human, then pretending all change can be measured against the same success criteria is intellectually lazy.
The statistic survives because it’s easy and not because it’s true.
We normalise the idea that we are c4ap at our own jobs
Ask yourself this ... What other profession constantly tells the world that most of what it does fails and expects to be taken seriously? Either:
Neither interpretation helps us. A confident profession does not need to exaggerate its own failure rate to justify its existence.
So What Needs to Change?
This is not about pretending change is easy. It isn’t and it never has been. But if we want Change Management to grow up as a profession, we need to:
Most of all, we need to take responsibility for the stories we tell because they shape expectations, behaviour, confidence, and careers.
Myths don’t just misinform; they do damage, and this one has been doing it for far too long.
Thank you Ron Leeman for sharing this perspective. I must say I do align with you on this. I have always been suspicious of the "stats" that we sometimes see in presentations. May be because of my background in sciences ( I have submitted 5 academic dissertations at university), I understand well that quotes/paraphrasing may sometimes be tweaked to fit a narrative, thus rendering the "stats" inacurate. My take is more organisational change managers practitioners might keep their own primary data and use those in their materials to challenge such information.
This is such an important call‑out. The “70% failure” claim was never supported by primary research, yet it has shaped thinking, frameworks, and even business cases for years. As you highlighted, the IBM Making Change Work study is one of the most misquoted sources. A 59% rate of initiatives missing one objective is not the same as a 70% failure rate—and it certainly doesn’t justify the narrative that change is inherently doomed. The real risk is what Mark Green points out: new practitioners entering the field, repeating this myth in good faith, and then getting criticised for trusting what the industry itself has been teaching them. We owe it to the next generation to clean up our own language and retire inaccurate statistics.
Chemotherapy has a failure rate of 90%, and that is still going. Ron Ron Leeman IMVHO, longevity and popularity of methods aren't strictly correlated just to success; there are many other factors: choice, monopoly, tradition...
Ron Isn't the more worrying concern that people entering the industry don't have the basic critical-thinking skills to challenge the 70% statistic themselves? What is the education system both at secondary and tertiary levels doing?
Ron, Thanks for continuing to provide real world experience and data points to quantify what success vs "failure" means in the context of Change Management. You'll find no love for McKinsey in me as they are the consultants whose advice, proposals, and direction nearly ran BP in to the ground.