That statistic you keep hearing, that 70% of organisational transformations fail, has no evidence behind it whatsoever. So says Professor Julie Hodges , and she is in a better position than most to know.
As Professor of Organisational Change at Durham University Business School, and with 20 years of commercial experience at PwC and Royal Bank of Scotland, Julie is one of the world’s leading authorities on how organisations change, and why it so often goes wrong. In a wide-ranging conversation on the Arkaro Insights podcast, we explored what people-centric change actually means in practice, why linear models are no longer fit for purpose, and what leaders should do differently starting on Monday morning.
Executive Summary
Key insights from Julie Hodges’s conversation with Mark Blackwell:
- The 70% failure statistic is a myth. The more useful question is how to do change better.
- Linear checklist models of change are no longer fit for purpose. Change is messy, emotional and rarely follows a straight line.
- Transformational change hits the deep structure of an organisation: its strategy, structure, mission, behaviours and ways of working.
- Change done to people fails. Change done with people sticks.
- Sense-making is not a soft activity. It is one of the most important things a manager can do during any change process.
- Resistance is usually rational. The people pushing back hardest often have the most at stake and the most useful things to say.
- Co-creation is not design by committee. It is the most reliable route to sustained change.
- HR has an underused role in change leadership, and AI is creating an opportunity to reclaim it.
- Change capability should be a core management competency, not an add-on to a job description.
Stop Quoting the 70% Statistic
It is one of the most repeated figures in management consulting: 70% of change programmes fail. Julie’s opening move in our conversation was to dismantle it entirely. There is no credible evidence behind it. It is a myth that has been perpetuated so often it has taken on the status of fact.
This matters, not because the number is wrong, but because of what happens when organisations accept it uncritically. It creates a permission structure for failure, a low bar dressed up as realism. The more productive question is not what the failure rate is but what the conditions for success actually look like.
That is where Julie’s work begins.
Transformational Change Versus Incremental Change
One of the most useful distinctions Julie draws is between incremental and transformational change. Incremental change happens around us all the time, step by step, often without us noticing. When people talk about constant change, this is usually what they mean.
Transformational change is something different. It hits the deep structure of an organisation: its strategy, its structure, its mission, how work gets done, and the behaviours of the people doing it. That is what makes it complex. That is what makes it messy. And that messiness is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that real change is under way.
The problem is that most change models were designed with incremental change in mind. Applied to transformational change, they offer a false sense of control that tends to collapse under the weight of the complexity they were never designed to handle.
Change Is an Emotional Process
Perhaps the most important reframe in Julie’s work is this: change is not a rational process. It is an emotional one.
When a change is announced, people do not first reach for a logical assessment of its merits. They feel it. For some, the feeling is energising. For others, it creates fear, uncertainty and a very immediate question: what does this mean for my job? Do I have the skills to do what is being asked of me? Will I still have a role at the end of it?
These are not irrational concerns to be managed away. They are the entirely human responses of people who have built their professional identity and their daily routines around ways of working that are about to change. Managers who understand this, and who create the space for people to ask these questions without fear of judgement, are the ones most likely to bring their teams through a change successfully.
This is what Julie calls sense-making: helping people understand what a change means for them personally, in the context of their specific role, their specific team, and their specific organisation. It is not a soft activity. It is one of the most practically important things a manager can do.
Why Resisters Are Worth Listening To
One of the more counterintuitive arguments Julie makes is about resistance. The people who push back hardest during a change process are not usually the ones who need to be managed around. They are often the ones most worth listening to.
Resistance is almost always rational, even when it does not look that way from the outside. People resist because they feel unheard. Because they can see a flaw in the plan that nobody else has noticed. Because the change adds to an already unsustainable workload. Because they have a better idea and no channel through which to share it.
Managers who take the time to understand what is driving the resistance, rather than simply labelling it as obstruction, tend to find something useful in it. And the act of listening itself, of genuinely hearing a concern and responding to it, is often enough to shift the dynamic.
This does not mean every objection should be acted upon. But it does mean that dismissing resistance as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a signal to be understood is one of the most reliable ways to ensure that a change fails to stick.
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Co-Creation Is Not Design by Committee
One of the most common objections to participative approaches to change is that they are inefficient. If you invite everyone into the room, you end up with a compromise that satisfies nobody and takes three times as long.
Julie’s response is direct: the research does not support that view. Wherever change is genuinely co-created, where the people who will have to implement it have been involved in shaping it, the outcomes are more effective and more durable. The time invested upfront in getting the right people around the table is consistently recovered many times over, because it removes the much larger cost of implementing something that does not work.
This is not about involving everyone in every decision. It is about identifying who will be affected, who has relevant expertise, and who will need to change their behaviour for the change to succeed, and then genuinely engaging those people rather than presenting them with a finished plan and calling it consultation.
The caveat Julie is always careful to add is: whenever feasible. There are moments, a regulatory change, a crisis, a pandemic, when there is no time for extended participation. In those moments, speed is right. But those moments are rarer than most organisations pretend, and the habit of treating urgency as the default condition is one of the reasons so many change programmes fail to deliver lasting results.
The Underused Role of HR in Change
Julie led a global research project on the role of HR in change, and the findings were clear: HR is one of the most underused resources available to organisations navigating transformation.
The traditional HR function has been heavily focused on transactional activity: recruitment, compliance, payroll, performance reviews. AI is already changing that, taking the transactional load off HR and creating the space for a more genuinely transformational role: coaching managers, supporting people through change experiences, and helping organisations think clearly about how work is designed and how it will evolve.
The example of Moderna, raised in our conversation, is instructive. The vaccine company placed its Chief Human Resources Officer in charge of the entire technology function, including AI implementation. The logic was straightforward: if you are fundamentally changing how people work, the people function should be at the centre of it, not brought in at the end to manage the fallout.
This is not the right structural answer for every organisation. But it is a useful provocation. How central is your HR function to the change decisions being made right now?
Change Capability as a Core Management Competency
One of Julie’s most practically important arguments is about where change capability sits in an organisation. For most organisations, it sits in a project office, or on a specialist team, or as a line in a job description that nobody ever really develops.
Julie’s contention is that this needs to change. In a world where disruption is continuous, where AI is reshaping roles faster than most organisations can plan for, and where geopolitical and market pressures can land without warning, change capability needs to be part of how every manager does their job. Not an additional responsibility, but a core one.
The skills involved are not exotic: empathy, the ability to listen and understand others’ perspectives; agility and adaptability, the capacity to move quickly and make decisions under uncertainty; courage, the willingness to take bold decisions and be transparent about them; and digital fluency, the confidence to work alongside AI tools and help teams do the same.
None of these is new. But the urgency of developing them has never been greater. Many managers today are dealing with the impact of AI, increases in tariffs, and supply chain disruption, often for the first time, with no real foundation in change leadership to draw on. Building that foundation is not a luxury. It is a competitive necessity.
What to Do on Monday Morning
Julie’s advice to leaders facing change is deliberately practical. Before galloping into action, take a moment to step back. Who needs to be involved? Who will be affected? Who has expertise that is relevant? Who will need to change their behaviour for this to work?
Those conversations do not need to take a long time. But they will almost always surface something important, either a risk that had not been considered, a better idea than the one on the table, or simply the early engagement that makes the difference between a change that is implemented and one that is sustained.
The goal is not a perfect plan. The goal is a change that actually changes things.
Listen to the Full Conversation
📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/5VGutsxXgis
🎧 Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012667/episodes/18875009 Or search Arkaro Insights with your favourite podcast provider
About Professor Julie Hodges
Julie Hodges is Professor of Organisational Change at Durham University Business School and one of the world’s leading authorities on people-centred change. She spent 20 years leading and managing change at PwC and Royal Bank of Scotland before moving into academia, and brings that combination of rigour and practical experience to all of her work. She is the author of ten books on organisational change, with an eleventh, on wellbeing and change, forthcoming.
Books mentioned in this episode:
📖 People-Centric Change
📖 Managing and Leading People Through Change (3rd edition)
🔗 Follow Professor Julie Hodges on LinkedIn
Related Reading from Arkaro Insights
On the Neuroscience of Change
The Neuroscience of Collaboration: The SPACES Model Explained — Hilary Scarlett, author of Neuroscience for Organisational Change, explains how human brains still operate in threat mode under pressure, and why leaders need to create the right conditions before people can collaborate, innovate or engage with change. Directly underpins Julie Hodges’s arguments about the emotional nature of change and why sense-making matters so much. Read the article
People Don’t Resist Change, They Resist Threat: How the SCARF Model Transforms Our Understanding of Transformation — a deep dive into David Rock’s SCARF model and why people push back against change for entirely rational neurological reasons. A natural companion to Julie’s argument that resisters are worth listening to. Read the article
On People-Centred Change in Practice
Why ADKAR and the Arkaro Approach Are Essential Partners — Jeff Hiatt’s ADKAR model recognises that organisational change happens one person at a time. This article explores how combining ADKAR’s individual change framework with Arkaro’s collaborative “do it with you” philosophy creates lasting transformation. Read the article
On Adaptive Organisations and Strategy
From Technical Fixes to Adaptive Solutions — using Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework, this article explains why the single biggest leadership failure is treating adaptive challenges like technical problems, and what organisations in agriculture, food and chemicals need to do differently. Directly supports Julie Hodges’s case for moving beyond linear checklist thinking. Read the article
Make Strategy Work: The Power of Integrated Business Planning — how rolling planning cycles and cross-functional alignment create the conditions for change to deliver real business value, rather than remaining a separate initiative disconnected from how the business actually operates. Read the article
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Is Your Organisation Ready to Lead Change Differently?
The conversation with Julie Hodges is a reminder that the biggest obstacle to successful change is rarely the plan. It is the gap between what leaders decide and what people actually experience.
At Arkaro, we work with leaders in agriculture, food and chemicals to close that gap. Our collaborative, do-it-with-you approach connects the technical and the human, ensuring that change programmes are grounded in real business priorities and that the people responsible for delivering them are genuinely enabled to do so.
We don’t just coach, we get on the pitch with you.
Contact Mark Blackwell: mark@arkaro.com Connect on LinkedIn: Mark Blackwell Subscribe to the Arkaro Insights newsletter: Arkaro Insights on LinkedIn
💬 What has your experience of leading or living through organisational change taught you? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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