This is article 1 of 3 in a series on rethinking organisational change. Article 2 — What the evidence really shows — follows soon. Article 3 — What this means for how you lead change — follows the after that
A note before you read: I am writing a longer piece on this subject, and these three articles are part of how I am developing my thinking. I am genuinely interested in what others have experienced and observed. If something here resonates — or if you disagree — I would very much welcome your perspective in the comments.
A few months ago I was preparing for a podcast conversation with Professor Julie Hodges, one of the world’s leading authorities on organisational change. I was pulling together my notes, thinking about the questions I wanted to ask, and I wrote down the line I had used dozens of times in client conversations and on slides:
“Seventy per cent of change programmes fail.”
Julie confirmed what I had started to think based on a few LinkedIn posts – there was no basis to this frequently recounted statistic!
The number has no evidence behind it.
The most influential modern use of the figure appears in a 2000 Harvard Business Review article by Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria. Their exact words: “The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail.” No citation. No study. No methodology. Just the assertion, dressed up as established truth.
Follow the trail back further and you reach Michael Hammer, co-author of the 1993 book Reengineering the Corporation, which contained an early version of the 50–70% claim. What is less well known is that Hammer himself later retracted it. In a 1995 follow-up he wrote that the original estimate had been “widely misrepresented and transmogrified and distorted into a normative statement… There is no inherent success or failure rate for reengineering.”
The man who created the number disowned it. The business world kept quoting it anyway.
In 2011, Professor Mark Hughes of Brighton Business School published a rigorous academic examination of the evidence. His conclusion was unambiguous: there is no valid and reliable empirical evidence behind the 70% figure. It is not a finding. It is a myth that has been repeated so often it has taken on the status of fact.
When I put this to Julie Hodges in our conversation, she did not hesitate.
She had been making the same point for years. The 70% figure, she said, creates a permission structure for failure. A low bar dressed up as realism. Organisations that accept it uncritically are not being honest about the complexity of change — they are giving themselves an excuse not to think harder about what success actually requires.
That reframe stayed with me long after we finished recording.
Because here is what I had been doing, without quite realising it. I had been starting conversations about change with a number that, if you accepted it, made failure sound inevitable. I was framing the problem before I had even introduced what good change looks like, before I had given anyone a reason to believe that this time could be different.
The statistic was undermining the very thing I was trying to do.
Why does the myth persist?
Keith Driver, whose 2025 research paper reviewed more than two decades of global transformation data, offers a sharp answer. The figure does real psychological work for the people quoting it. It is memorable. It feels endorsed — if McKinsey and HBR cite it, surely someone checked. It anchors the conversation. And perhaps most usefully, it flatters fatalism: if seven in ten fail, disappointment is destiny, and nobody has to explain anything.
The myth survives not because the evidence supports it, but because it is convenient.
So where does that leave us?
This is not a post arguing that change is easy, or that failure is rare, or that the consultants and academics who study it have been wasting their time. It is not a debunking exercise for its own sake.
It is an argument that we are asking the wrong question.
“What percentage of change programmes fail?” is a question that leads nowhere useful. It invites fatalism, invites imprecision, and invites us to treat complex, context-specific human endeavours as though they were governed by a fixed law of nature.
The more useful question is: what do the conditions for successful change actually look like?
That is what the research, done properly, has been trying to answer for decades. And the answers are more interesting — and more hopeful — than any failure rate.
A question for this community
I am still developing my thinking on this, and I am aware that my perspective comes primarily from working with organisations in agriculture, food and chemicals. I would be genuinely interested in what others have seen in practice.
Has the 70% figure shaped how your organisation approached a change programme? Did that framing help focus minds — or did it quietly lower the bar? And if you have pushed back on the number in your own work, what did you say instead?
Your experience and challenge will directly inform where this series goes next. I am grateful for anything you are willing to share.
About this series
This three-part series grew out of a conversation with Professor Julie Hodges on the Arkaro Insights podcast — a conversation that made me go back to the source on something I had been saying for years without examining it carefully enough.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Julie Hodges: People-Centric Change: The End of Linear Thinking
📺 YouTube: www.youtube.com/@arkaro
