You’ve heard it in keynotes, vendor decks, and project kickoffs: 70 percent of transformation efforts fail. The number is repeated so often that it sounds like a law of nature. It isn’t.
I looked for the study behind that claim and couldn’t find one. That matters. A credible case for adoption should be built on evidence that holds up under scrutiny.
Where the 70% Claim Came From
The trail starts with Hammer and Champy’s Reengineering the Corporation. They estimated that 50 to 70 percent of reengineering efforts failed to achieve their intended results—and called the figure an “unscientific estimate” [Hammer & Champy, 1993]. They cited no study, sample, or methodology. More importantly, the claim concerned reengineering, not organizational change as a whole.
The number spread anyway. Beer and Nohria called it “the brutal fact” in Harvard Business Review [Beer & Nohria, 2000], and Kotter cited similar odds in Leading Change [Kotter, 1996]. But the citations kept pointing backward, not to new evidence.
In 2011, University of Brighton researcher Mark Hughes traced five prominent versions of the claim, including these three. His conclusion was direct: no valid, reliable empirical evidence supported it [Hughes, Journal of Change Management, 2011].
What Stronger Evidence Shows
A 2018 review of 200 published change case studies found that most were considered successful [Jones et al., 2018]. That is useful context, but not a final answer: reflective case studies are often written by the people who led the change.
The strongest recent evidence comes from McKinsey. In a 2021 survey of 1,034 people who had experienced a transformation within the previous five years, fewer than one in three said their organization improved performance and sustained it. Respondents at successful organizations estimated they captured 67 percent of the maximum benefit; everyone else estimated 37 percent [McKinsey, 2021].
That result is close to the 70 percent folklore, but the difference matters: McKinsey provides a source, sample, date, and definition. Its standard was demanding: improve performance and sustain it. Under a looser definition, the case-study review suggests much higher success rates. There is no universal failure rate. The answer depends on how success is defined and who is asked.
Why This Matters in a Utility Rollout
If you’re making the case for a GIS migration, distribution design implementation, or asset management program, the 70 percent claim can weaken your proposal. One informed question about its origin can move the conversation from your recommendation to your credibility.
The claim also makes failure sound uniform and inevitable. McKinsey’s data offers a more useful view: value leaks at identifiable stages. Respondents attributed nearly a quarter of lost value to target setting, 55 percent to implementation, and 20 percent to the post-implementation period [McKinsey, 2021]. A project team can inspect and improve each stage while the work is underway.
Adoption problems are real, and many organizations fall short of their goals. But this is not a coin flip with bad odds. It is a pattern you can diagnose: readiness was never assessed, workflows were designed without users, releases shipped with missing steps, metrics counted logins instead of outcomes, or reinforcement ended when the project team left.
When a statistic appears in a proposal, ask three questions: Who ran the study? Who was in the sample? How did they define failure? Then define success for your program at the workflow level. That is where adoption becomes measurable and where Law Four comes in.
From here on, every statistic in this series will include its source, date, and sample size when one exists. If a number cannot hold up under scrutiny, it will not be used.
Next, I’ll examine Law One readiness precedes rollout and what a practical readiness assessment should cover before the go-live date is set.
Sources: Hammer, M. & Champy, J., “Reengineering the Corporation,” 1993; Beer, M. & Nohria, N., “Cracking the Code of Change,” Harvard Business Review, 2000; Kotter, J., “Leading Change,” 1996; Hughes, M., “Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?” Journal of Change Management 11(4), 2011; Jones, J., Firth, J., Hannibal, C. & Ogunseyin, M., “Factors Contributing to Organizational Change Success or Failure: A Qualitative Meta-Analysis of 200 Reflective Case Studies,” 2018; McKinsey & Company, “Losing from day one: Why even successful transformations fall short,” McKinsey Global Survey, December 2021 (n=1,034).
About the Author
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