If the famous 70% change failure statistic is a myth, what should we focus on instead? Four pointers from Julie Hodges, Keith Driver, Dave Snowden and Deborah Rowland on what doing change better actually looks like, and why most change is partially absorbed rather than failed outright.
The 70% change failure rate is everywhere. When you go back to the source data, the numbers tell a very different story.
Most industrial companies are adding AI to their existing models and calling it transformation. Professor Venkat Venkatraman of Boston University has a name for this: digital paint. In this episode of Arkaro Insights, the co-author of Fusion Strategy explains why the $75 trillion asset-heavy world is the real frontier of the intelligence age — and why winning companies will design intelligence into their core, not bolt it onto the edges.
The "seventy per cent of change programmes fail" statistic has no evidence behind it. The man who created it retracted it in 1995. The business world kept quoting it anyway. This is the story of how a myth became received wisdom — and why that matters.
Dr Johnathan Cromwell shares findings from a study of 1,100 real innovation teams that overturns conventional wisdom: teams that embraced ambiguity and discovered their problem over time achieved an implementation rate of over 80%, compared to around 50% for those that defined their problem clearly from the outset.
In his new book *Incorruptible*, Eric Ries exposes "financial gravity"—the structural force that pulls successful companies away from their core missions. Discover why traditional shareholder primacy fails, how global giants protect their purpose, and how leaders can build structural safeguards before success makes them a target for value extraction.
Two thirds of business leaders face imminent disruption, yet most are using AI as a forklift to move their thinking for them. Scott Anthony argues the right way is the hard way, and the muscle leaders need gets built through experience that feels more like play than punishment.
Linden Thorp argues that modern leadership has overinvested in the brilliant but limited mind, at the expense of the body, the breath, and the wider nervous system. A conversation on leadership presence, physiological safety, and three Monday-morning practices to bring the body back online.