The research on change is more interesting — and more hopeful — than the headline.
The 70% change failure rate is everywhere. When you go back to the source data, the numbers tell a very different story.
I’ve been quoting a statistic that doesn’t exist. Here’s how I found out.
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.