The Announcement Is Not the Change (And Other Things Your Rollout Plan Gets Wrong)
Why 70% of change initiatives fail — and what’s actually driving it
There’s a moment that happens in a lot of organizations, usually about three months after a major initiative launches. Someone’s in a meeting, adoption numbers are disappointing, and the conversation turns — almost inevitably — to the people.
They’re resistant. They don’t like change. They need more training. They need to be held more accountable.
I’ve been in those meetings. I’ve watched smart, well-intentioned leaders spend the next several months trying to fix the people while leaving the actual problem completely untouched.
Here’s the actual problem: announcing change is not the same as leading it. And the gap between those two things is where most initiatives go to die.
**The Numbers Are Uncomfortable**
McKinsey has been tracking change initiative failure rates for three decades. The number that keeps coming up: 70% of change initiatives fail to meet their stated objectives. Thirty years. Billions spent on methodology, tooling, and training. The number barely moves.
Gartner found that the average employee experienced ten enterprise changes in 2022 — up from just two in 2016. More change, landing on more tired people, with less follow-through than ever.
This is not an employee problem. It’s a leadership of change problem.
**What “Announcing Change” Actually Looks Like**
It looks like a town hall with a slide deck and a Q&A that runs long. It looks like a CEO who sounds confident and an FAQ document attached to the follow-up email. It looks like a training module assigned in the LMS, maybe a lunch-and-learn, definitely a “we’re all excited about this” message from HR.
And then it looks like managers who are expected to cascade the change to their teams — without the context, clarity, or support to do it well.
Sound familiar? It should. This is the default change playbook for most organizations, and it produces default results: surface compliance, quiet resistance, and slow erosion of the initiative until the next one shows up.
**What Leading Change Actually Looks Like**
Early in my career, I was part of an implementation team tasked with moving a paper-reliant organization to fully paperless operations. Reasonable goal. The technology worked. The rollout was a disaster.
Not because people couldn’t adapt. Because leadership didn’t do the foundational work: explaining why this change mattered in human terms, how it would make people’s jobs better, what support would actually look like in practice. When people pushed back, the implementation team was blamed. The users were blamed. The one thing that didn’t get examined was the leadership of the change itself.
Full adoption was supposed to take a few months. It took over a year. And even then, people kept reaching for paper when no one was watching.
The organizations that lead change well — and they do exist — don’t have better project plans. They have leaders who understand that the change doesn’t begin when the announcement goes out. It begins when the people doing the work understand why it matters to them, believe leadership means it, and have enough support to actually do it differently.
That’s a longer, more human, more honest process than most organizations want to run.
It’s also the only one that works.
**Where to Start**
If you’re leading a change initiative right now — or about to — one question worth sitting with: can you explain, in two sentences, why this change matters to a frontline employee? Not the business case. The human case.
If you can’t, neither can they.
That’s your starting point.
And if you want to pressure-test your approach before the next initiative launches, I’m one conversation away.
