The turkeys don’t vote for Christmas
Why organisational change fails
When you’re writing a PhD you spend a good deal of time digging through piles of academic papers whose titles sound vaguely related to what you’re doing – quite a few turn out to be a super specific deep-cut on a completely different question after all. But every now and then you come across a paper that feels like a gold mine to you – that’s particularly true for meta-analyses. These are studies where another academic did the digging for you, gathering all studies around a topic and reviewing the whole lot: what do we know, what not so much, what are we still looking into? I love a meta analysis, so helpful!
When I came across this one by Mosadeghrad and Ansarian (2016) “Why do organisational change programmes fail?”, I had a feeling there may be gold. And it sure was: they found 56 empirical studies that reported the barriers of organisational change programmes and analysed in detail what the reasons for failed change were and how they were related.
Right off the bat, the authors cite a host of studies that show the fail rates of organisational change programmes between 50% and 80%, some researchers go as high as 95% in fact.
“A study on Fortune 100 companies that initiated change programmes between 1980 and 1995, found that only 30% of them realised an improvement in their performance (Pascale et al., 1997).”
Mosadeghrad and Ansarian systemise the reasons for failure and produce a thorough list with some surprising (dare I say, delightful) themes:
unjustified change
lack of employee involvement and participation
lack of expertise to implement change
So much of this literature usually pins a failed change adoption on the employees – that’s literally called “change resistance”. The tone of many studies mirrors what I’ve overheard in boardrooms over the years: negative reactions by staff to change are unanimously framed as unreasonable, ignorant or emotionally-driven, their perspective is dismissed as: “people just don’t like change”. The worst I ever heard was:
“The turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”
– said repeatedly by the Programme Manager of a massive change initiative, and echoed by giggles and snickering from the executive and senior leaders present. I still shudder thinking of the ease with which this group of people threw around such dehumanising language.
To see an academic article that presents a much more comprehensive and substantiated list of the many barriers to change was such a relief to me! Mosadeghrad and Ansarian’s list also features employee resistance and similar barriers, but the authors find statistical correlations that tell us about what influences what:
“Strategic problems leads to a culture which is not receptive to organisational change which in turn result in lack of employees’ interest and commitment to and involvement in the change programme and eventually their resistance to the change.”
Overall, they find three factors that cause organisational change programmes to fail:
Ineffective or inappropriate model of change
Ineffective or inappropriate method for implementing the change programme
Inappropriate environment for implementing the change programme
They write that:
“[One] should consider changes in all three interrelated components of the organisation: structure, processes and culture.”
This is the gold to me! Here are two academics who analysed a load of studies on organisational change, and they came to the same conclusion as me – a practitioner who slugged through change programmes and became increasingly frustrated at the windmills I found myself charging (more fool me).
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Change Managers in quite a few projects, and we always seemed to find ourselves in a similar pickle: being an expert with a set of specialised methods hired to apply those methods – but ending up a doing a job that had little to do with that. As a Service Designer or CX’er I’d tend to become a quasi Project Manager or BA, ticking off tasks while trying to wedge in even a little user research or co-design with some people. Meanwhile, the Change Managers became de facto internal comms managers, organising “road shows” and sending weekly updates on what was happening while trying to get the higher-ups to think of wider planning needed for what they were trying to do. I remember asking a colleague one day after work what percentage of their job descriptions they were actually doing day by day, and they said “15-20%, at best?”
When I still worked on projects I never thought to read academic articles about my work. But now as a PhD, I’m finding this almost a therapeutic part of my journey – it helps to put labels on what I’ve seen first-hand, and what my imposter-syndrome tried to tell me is just my experience, nothing bigger.
Like with the label “change washing”, being able to point to academic work that shows how often change fails, and why it fails, can be a relief to the practitioner – and should be of interest to those who are making decisions on change.