E60: Eureka! I found it
Part two on an adventure to discovering the source of the claim that 70% of change management efforts fail.
Missed part 1? Check it out here:
Picking up where we left off last week, I’m continuing my quest to find the origin of the claim that 70% of transformations fail.
And things start to get… curiouser and curiouser… We get to go back… way back to the 90’s. Since everything 90’s is back again, I guess we’re right on trend!
I enlist Bing Chat (Chat GPT) to help me, and we start to get to the bottom of it…
Page 1 of my queries to Bing Chat (Chat GPT)
One Amazon overnight delivery later, and I think I’m going to find exactly what I’m looking for, and end up… with more questions?
Reengingeering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy was first published in 1993 which is where I found the reference to this statistic – and what I read to you on the podcast, is surprising! Not only that, but I completely agree with what they are saying.
And importantly, what they state in the remainder of the chapter is pure Change Management gold. I start to think… why is so much of this missing from the change literature that followed?
And, dear listener, so many people helped me this week to get to the bottom of this wild (and bogus) claim! Thank you for your links, references, challenges and questions. I really appreciate it!
Here is a great article from 2014 – which outlines in excellent detail the origins of this claim and how it has shown up in various places since.
Here is one of the best links, published earlier this year that methodically tracks each reference to this stat. I’m grateful to the author for this painstaking research!
For next week, if this statistic has been routinely debunked, and it has, why has it reached the status of urban legend? Why does this persist?
And what are we measuring anyways? Are we measuring the right things?