The Top Ten Real Reasons Why Change Initiatives Fail

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of books and publications on the management of change. Many provide their lists of the top reasons why change initiatives fail and cite reasons like poor planning, resistance, and leadership issues. Getting the list right is the Holy Grail of change management, but it is difficult to declare any given list right or wrong. I would agree, for example, that poor planning, resistance, and leadership issues contribute to the change management problem. Practically every list I have seen contains things that contribute to failed change initiatives, so who could call them wrong? Yet business leaders and academics keep coming out with new lists, perhaps hoping that their list will be the right one, the one people finally agree to. What have we been missing?

The answer is that we have been looking at why change initiatives fail from the standpoint of what change leaders did or didn't do in their initiatives. We have been searching for a recipe for change instead of looking at it from the context of how change occurs and doesn't occur. Fortunately, energy gives us that context. Change is a shift in energy. There can be no change without an energetic shift, and to create an energetic shift, we must apply a sufficient amount of energy in the right places and in the right directions until sustainable shift occurs. Based on this understanding, there is really only one reason why change initiatives fail.

Change initiatives fail because they run out of energy before they cross the finish line (i.e., before they reach the point of sustainable change).

It's really that simple. The list of things that cause initiatives to fail is the list of things that cause initiatives to waste and leak energy. When enough energy is wasted and leaked, initiatives die, and things generally slip back into status quo. Sometimes initiatives die a quiet death. It's as if people sneak away in the night and move on to something else. Other initiatives, especially high‐stakes initiatives with large budgets, go up in flames, along with the careers of some people associated with them. Either way, it's an unfortunate failure.

Many things cause change initiatives to waste and leak energy. We can't plug every hole, so it's best to focus on plugging the big ones. Here is our top ten list of things that cause waste and leakage and lead to the failure of change initiatives.

1. Misaligned enterprise. The enterprise has so much misalignment, conflict, and fragmented energy that it is almost impossible to build adequate alignment and energy for any initiative to succeed. There are too many energy drains in the field of play. Most of these drains are caused by environmental factors that breed misalignment among people. People who work in substantially misaligned companies often refer to change initiatives as the flavor of the month. They come and they go, but not much changes. These companies need major surgery.
2. Enterprise element leaks. The initiatives do not adequately consider or address the involved enterprise elements that negatively impact the new/improved function/activity/capability. In chapter 3 we discussed the need to define the footprint of a change initiative by identifying all of the involved enterprise elements. Many change leaders don't do this. They go in with tunnel vision and focus only on the core change. Others are aware of the involved elements but are restricted by the company's tunnel vision and inadequate budgets. Left unattended, the involved yet unrefined enterprise elements drain too much energy. As a result, the initiative starves for energy and has little or no impact. Remember our Alchemy Instruments example in chapter 3? To create the sustainable shift to a team selling model, changes were required in ten enterprise elements. Had we arbitrarily ignored half of them and called them optional, their ongoing negative impact, and the resulting energy leakage, would have almost certainly killed the initiative.
3. Lack of personal alignment. Alignment between the Personal dimensions of the affected people (e.g., their intent, attention, engagement, and effort) and the overall change itself does not occur. While there is effort to bring people on board, the needed shift in the Personal dimensions is not achieved because the business and/or change leader does not recognize the importance and magnitude of aligning this dimension. Said differently, the energetic ingredients of the Personal dimension are not understood and, therefore, are not specifically or fully addressed as part of the change. When the Personal dimension of energy is not aligned with the initiative, there can be no substantial change, since the aligned and consistent involvement of people is needed to achieve real, sustained change. This blockage happened consistently in the company discussed in chapter 4 where the veterans were all about maintaining the status quo. They knew how to nod their heads in apparent agreement but, all the while, had every intention of resisting and sabotaging any substantial change that came along.
4. Artificial success. Initiatives are declared successful too early. Apparent success is achieved, due primarily to an initially large amount of management attention focused on the change. This energy and attention partly and temporarily affects the Personal dimensions of energy in those involved, making it appear as if the change has occurred. When company leaders declare victory and remove their energy and attention (leaving the project team to finish up), the intrinsic Personal energies of those affected shift back as well and are not sufficient to sustain the change. Close but no cigar.
5. Inaccurate diagnosis. Surface‐level diagnostic methods are applied that do not identify the deeper root causes of problems in the business. Consequently, change leaders solve the wrong problems and fail to impact the overall issue significantly. Energy is misdirected and wasted, and the real problem persists. This happened the first time around in our Alchemy Instruments example.
6. Poor design. The design for the new function/activity/capability does not create alignment among the four dimensions of energy sufficient to drive and enable a sustainable change. This design issue can take many forms, including an inappropriate operational model, an incomplete design, misalignment among involved elements, and poor design of individual elements. Without the perspective of energy, your vision is limited and the art of design is hit or miss. When designing a business process, for example, you may focus on making it lean but inadvertently create a breeding ground for conflict.
7. Mixed messages. Leadership transmits conflicting messages about the initiative, leaving people confused, frustrated, and personally unaligned with it. For example, when people are aware that there are big enterprise obstacles to an initiative that leaders are not addressing, they are put into conflict. It is unclear to them if the status quo or the new initiative is more important. Thus, alignment with the Personal dimension is not possible, and people do not take the initiative seriously. Energy invested in the initiative is blocked and diffused by the unaligned Personal dimension and the obstacles in the way of the change. I've seen this happen in many companies. It is a close cousin with, and often a companion to, the enterprise element leaks discussed in item 2. Nothing turns people off faster in a change effort than leaders pretending obstacles/leaks don't exist or aren't something they need to worry about.
8. Inadequate resources. Energy applied to the initiative, usually in the form of people, money, and management attention, is insufficient to drive change to the point of sustainability. This situation is like starting a road trip with a quarter tank of gas. Poor planning, which leads to an underestimation of the initiative scope and resources, is often the culprit here. However the shortfall occurs, the result is that all of the resources and energy applied to the project, however insufficient, are wasted, and the initiative fails.
9. Piecemeal implementation. Implementation of the revised elements involved with the change are implemented serially over time rather than quickly in parallel. As the initial implementations occur, elements associated with the unimplemented changes continue to leak energy. The initiative becomes energy starved, creates negative reactions among those involved, and either dies on its own or is killed by the people. Companies and change agents often think they are being careful and responsible with a multiphase, drawn‐out implementation approach. Too much change too fast is not good, they reason. Ironically, with significant changes, just the opposite is more often the case. As we discussed in chapter 3, business transformations are vulnerable to the mischief of people during their implementation periods. The sooner we can establish and reinforce the new desired behaviors and eliminate opportunities to persist in old behaviors, the sooner we stop the leaking of energy in the involved enterprise elements and the more likely success will be achieved.
10. Poor visibility. Change leaders and “change experts” who operate and analyze at the surface level are not adept at managing the energy of business, nor do they know the techniques for doing so. Consequently, they have a partial view of the involved elements and energies at play. This partial view often leads to guesswork, inaccurate assumptions, and erroneous conclusions that send initiatives down paths that cannot succeed. Many well‐meaning change agents have done the best they could with limited surface‐level visibility and understanding, only to see their initiative fail for reasons that they often don't understand. How could they understand with such limited visibility and perspective?

When initiatives run out of energy before they cross the finish line, it is generally because significant energy is applied to the wrong things and/or not applied to the right things and/or not applied in sufficient quantities for a long enough period of time. Now that we know how change initiatives fail, the question becomes, how do we optimize their chances of success?

Managing the Energy of Change

Much of the answer for how to manage change initiatives to optimize their success has been discussed in previous chapters of this book. When we bring these pieces together, they collectively provide a set of tools and an overall approach for driving change in a business. They serve as the guideposts for managing the energy of change. The remainder of this section is devoted to knitting these pieces together to reveal a more enlightened approach for managing change.

As discussed in chapter 1, any business transformation happens within the current system of the business, which includes the environment, the people in it, and all of their associated energies. If we are to make any significant change, we must first understand that system and how it works so that we can make intelligent and informed adjustments. To do that we need to learn the language of energy through its many indicators. Chapter 1 provided the fundamentals of “seeing energy” and understanding its messages in the way we look at the behaviors of people, misalignments, and the flow of money. Learning and practicing this language is the starting point for managing change.

As chapter 2 explained, unintentional conflict is a huge problem in businesses today. Caused by misalignments at the organizational, operational, and individual levels, unintentional conflict can drain a business of a large portion of its vital energy. Change initiatives need to correct these misalignments, but they also need to view them as threats. If an initiative involves misaligned enterprise elements, it is subject to the conflict and energy drain that spews from those misalignments. Change leaders must be aware of these landmines and either steer around or eliminate them.

Chapter 3 explained that the creation of shared space is an antidote for unintentional conflict and a conscious way to fix broken business functions. We offered models for diagnosing problems, designing shared space, and implementing the solutions in an expeditious manner. We also offered a number of strategies for creating shared space in the enterprise. Together, these models and strategies form the backbone of any significant business transformation or change initiative.

In chapter 4, we defined the four dimensions of energy in work (Environmental, Intellectual, Personal, and Directional) and discussed their involvement in three types of work streams (Individual, Common, and Collective). These concepts and their associated tools provide meat for the bones discussed in chapter 3, in terms of both diagnosing problems and designing solutions, to optimize the outcomes of work streams. Change initiatives typically involve common work streams (e.g., a new business process or system) and collective work streams (e.g., the project planning and execution associated with the initiative). We discussed important relationships among the dimensions, such as the profound effect the Environmental dimension can have on the Personal dimensions of the affected people. In guiding a business through change, it is essential to understand and consider how these relationships may affect the success of the initiative. Finally, we discussed the notion that we must align the energies across the four dimensions to promote successful work and initiative outcomes. To achieve sustainable change in a business, the four dimensions must be adequately aligned. To gauge progress in a change initiative, one of the primary things we look at is the degree of alignment, which we strive to maintain throughout the project.

In chapter 5 we began our discussion of people and how we can create the kind of alignment discussed in earlier chapters. We addressed the increasing demand for effective collaboration and the emphasis on dynamic collaboration today and as we move forward in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Collaboration Dynamic explained, at the level of energy, the ingredients of collaboration and how they work together to form both positive and negative alignment and outcomes. We covered the skills and methods for having effective one‐on‐one and group collaborations and characterized projects, including change initiatives, as ongoing group collaborations. These models, skills, and behaviors are important to change initiatives for two primary reasons. First, they help the change agent/project manager develop a high‐functioning team with a high degree of alignment to drive the needed change. Second, the collaborative techniques and methods will ideally permeate the entire population of people performing work in the business and be reinforced by the designs of the various enterprise elements. There is no time like the present to begin this development and transition toward a higher level of collaboration in the business. All current and future change initiatives should support this shift as a common goal and strive to bring it about within the footprint of the particular initiative.

Continuing our discussion of people, in chapter 6 we covered the intrinsic essence within people and the two primary motivators that managers and leaders can tap into. We then provided a systematic path for leaders, including change leaders, to align the energies of the people and the business to create sustainable change. Whereas chapter 5 focused on alignment at the micro level, this chapter focused on alignment at the macro level. We then discussed some of the most significant and common negative behaviors that can quickly sap the energy of any change initiative. Change leaders should strive to be aware of these negative behaviors when they occur and address them appropriately whenever possible. Chronic resistance to change is perhaps the biggest enemy of any change initiative.

Strategy and Tactics

Overlaying these building blocks for managing change is an energy‐based change management strategy. As stated earlier, initiatives fail because they run out of energy before they cross the finish line. All of the ingredients discussed are designed to help build and maintain energy throughout the initiative so that it makes it to the finish line. However, we must recognize that, in practice, the level of energy in any change initiative fluctuates over time. Energy drops as it is used to drive change and overcome obstacles and as it leaks in the various ways described earlier. However, energy is also renewed by outside assistance, such as a boost in the initiative's budget or special positive attention from senior management, or from the initiative's wins along the way. For example, achievement of a milestone, completion of a pilot, or endorsement from a key manager or constituency will give an initiative an energetic boost. Refilling the gas tank along the way is probably the most important job of any change agent and team.

Ideally, initiatives are planned so that they come out of the gate with some momentum and refill their gas tanks at planned milestones along the way. However, while a good plan and strategy are essential, change initiatives are far from predictable. They become very tactical affairs as problems and obstacles present themselves and the team works to overcome them before they rob too much energy. Things can get political and downright nasty at times. Nevertheless, change leaders can optimize their chances of success by employing the strategies, tools, and techniques discussed in this chapter and in this book as a whole.

By managing the energy of change, we create an advantage and give ourselves a much greater power to create and implement the critical changes that businesses so urgently need to make. But driving change doesn't have to be so difficult. In the next section we look at business agility and organizational health and why they make change a whole lot easier.

The Business Imperative

Companies are very interested in achieving business agility. Gone are the days when we could rest on our laurels and do things the same way year after year. Advances in technology in the Fourth Industrial Revolution continue to accelerate, customers increasingly expect a good and more informed customer experience, and the management of supply chains is more complex, geographically dispersed, and dynamic than ever. These factors and many others add up to a business environment in a constant state of flux where the need for agility is a matter of survival.

Organizational agility has been defined as “the capability of a company to rapidly change or adapt in response to changes in the market. A high degree of organizational agility can help a company to react successfully to the emergence of new competitors, the development of new industry‐changing technologies, or sudden shifts in overall market conditions” (Business Dictionary.com 2019).

Similarly, organizational health is increasingly sought after as research‐based evidence mounts that “healthy” companies significantly outperform their peers. For example, a 2017 McKinsey Quarterly article by Chris Gagnon, Elizabeth John, and Rob Theunissen reported that publicly traded companies scoring in the top quartile of their Organizational Health Index (OHI) delivered roughly three times the returns to shareholders as those in the bottom quartile. In addition, data suggest that benefits can be realized rather quickly. In response to the traditional notion that companies have to sacrifice some short‐term performance to achieve long‐term health, the authors add: “Companies that work on their health … not only achieve measurable improvement in their organizational well‐being but demonstrate tangible performance gains in as little as 6 to 12 months. This holds true for companies across sectors and regions, as well as in contexts ranging from turnarounds to good‐to‐great initiatives.”

Clearly organizational agility and organizational health are essential capabilities and competitive enablers in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. However, opinions vary significantly on exactly what constitutes a healthy organization and an agile business. For example, in his 2012 book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, Patrick Lencioni suggests that creating a healthy organization involves four primary efforts: build a cohesive leadership team, create clarity, overcommunicate clarity, and reinforce clarity. From the perspective of energy as we have developed it here, Lencioni's model is focused primarily on building alignment but doesn't answer questions about how to codify the capabilities of a healthy organization so they don't slip away over time. In contrast, McKinsey's OHI focuses its definition of a healthy organization on management practices and broad organizational outcomes in nine specific areas. The dozens of management practices are a blend of business characteristics, capabilities, and aspirational goals that roll up into nine broad buckets representing the blend at a higher level of detail. McKinsey's model is research‐based and makes an important contribution. However, the conceptual difficulty here is in translating this blend of characteristics, capabilities, and goals in the McKinsey model into actions and assets that create organizational health. Although both the McKinsey and Lencioni models have pluses and minuses, the models are quite different in their constructs.

Definitions and approaches for organizational agility are equally divergent. For example, the Project Management Institute (2012) suggests that organizational agility is best achieved by improving practices for change management, risk management and portfolio, project, and program management. These are very important capabilities, but such a laser focus on projects limits the breadth of the model for a business enterprise. Using a different model, researchers at the University of Northern Colorado present an organizational agility framework that is grounded on ten pillars: a culture of innovation, empowerment, tolerance for ambiguity, vision, change management, organizational communication, market analysis and response, operations management, structural fluidity, and a learning organization (Harraf et al. 2015). These capabilities and characteristics cover a much wider swath, but we again face the challenge of translating them into actions and assets to create an agile organization.

Each of these publications contains valuable insights. However, the differences between them suggest that, while we use the terms “organizational health” and “organizational agility” freely, there is little agreement on exactly what constitutes them. The problem has more to do with the fact that researchers and authors are looking at different parts of the “elephant” and viewing them from different perspectives. That leaves business leaders and change agents grasping for clarity. They need a deeper view, perhaps one that explains how various viewpoints and models fit into the larger, more integrated, whole—one that provides an organizing principle enabling actionable paths toward sustained health and agility.

A Well‐Oiled Machine

At the surface, organizational agility and organizational health appear to be two different things. However, the deeper perspective of energy suggests they are actually achieved by doing the same things within the business. How can that be? Agility and health seem like such different outcomes. Surely the journeys to achieve these two major goals must have different paths. Actually, however, they don't. Agility and health are simply two different characteristics of what we will call here a high‐functioning business, which is the real goal. We have been talking about high‐functioning businesses and, in turn, organizational agility and organizational health, throughout this book. Both are achieved by managing the energy of the business and creating an enterprise that is, to use an old expression, a well‐oiled machine.

Let's take the opposite extreme to help make this point. We have looked at examples of businesses that have significant dysfunction as well as pervasive conflict created by that dysfunction. The conflict and dysfunction slow work down, block progress, create great difficulty, wear people down, waste huge amounts of energy, and ultimately lead to the failure of most change initiatives. A business simply cannot be healthy or agile under those conditions. How do you respond quickly to a changing business environment when you can't respond quickly to anything? How can you be a healthy business when everything you do flows through conflict and is forced to pay an energy toll as it passes through the gates of dysfunction, or sneaks around them, each step along the way? A great Zen story captures the essence here:

A Zen student approached his master one day, concerned about his progress. He said, “I have been working on my practice for years now and my progress has been painfully slow. Why does all of this take so long?” To which the Zen master replied, “Because it has to go through you!”

Such is the case with business. Whether we are doing work for customers or working to change our business, the work has to flow through us. The more we can create our business to stay out of our own way, the healthier and more agile the business will become. “Staying out of our own way” means minimizing the negative energy our business creates relative to the positive energy it creates. Therefore, it is the ratio of positive to negative energy over time that determines how high functioning, healthy, and agile a business is. If you want your business to be high functioning, healthy, and agile, manage the energy.

To explain exactly what that means, let's look back to some of the models and concepts introduced earlier to see how they connect to these goals. Specifically, there are four primary components for creating a high‐functioning business (aka a well‐oiled machine) that is both healthy and agile: robust enterprise elements, engaged and capable people, effective leadership and people management, and collaborative self‐management. In general, the first two, enterprise elements and people, are assets. They are where information, knowledge, and culture are stored, and we engage them to do the work of the business. The last two, leadership/people management and collaborative self‐management, have to do with the conduct of work. They are about actions and movement.

This distinction between assets and actions is important. A primary criticism of the organizational health and organizational agility models was that the path for implementing characteristics, capabilities, and goals was nebulous and the approach for sustaining the changes was unclear. The clarity of assets and actions solves this problem. It provides a framework for implementing any characteristic, capability, or goal and sustaining the change.

For example, take role clarity, one of McKinsey's management practices in its Organizational Health Index. Whether you view that as a characteristic, capability, or goal, it involves both the creation/development of assets and consistent actions associated with the management and conduct of work. Assets would likely include an organizational chart plus policies and procedures guiding the creation of such charts and job descriptions. These assets would help ensure clarity of responsibility and prevent unnecessary overlap in roles, especially among managers. The assets may also include a training course or tutorial for all who write job descriptions and manage people. This course would serve as a tool for developing the human assets involved in these matters. On the action side, managers will enforce appropriately the boundaries of roles as they have been defined to avoid damaging conflict and turf wars and to promote teamwork. The people will be responsible for managing themselves to stay within appropriate boundaries of their roles. With this framework, the assets serve as the “memory” and codification of role clarity, while the actions execute and enforce it. This combination of assets and actions makes the role clarity aspect of organizational health sustainable.

Next let's review the four primary components of creating a high‐functioning business as they relate to models and concepts developed in this book. In this view we focus on the broad characteristics of the components, not on the creation of individual capabilities, such as role clarity.

Moving Toward Health and Agility

There is no single way to move your business toward greater health and agility. Your options run the gamut from a sweeping enterprise overhaul to the development of a series of individual capabilities. The framework discussed in this chapter enables many optional paths for improvement, giving your business the flexibility it needs to accommodate its particular priorities and circumstances. Yet the framework also provides a stable context that facilitates the ongoing build and integration of each improvement within the overall enterprise architecture. As a practical matter, most businesses do best with an incremental approach toward health and agility through a series of change initiatives. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Leverage all initiatives. To move toward health and agility, make sure all of your initiatives contribute to the whole. That is, strive to have complete initiatives that address all of the affected enterprise elements, and make sure the contributions the initiatives make to the enterprise elements move the elements along their individual paths toward becoming what they ultimately need to be. No matter what the topic of a change initiative may be, it is an opportunity to move the enterprise forward. Leverage this opportunity.
• Architect your enterprise. To provide a stable context for incremental change, assign someone to be your enterprise architect or, if your business is large enough, hire a chief transformation officer who will spearhead change and own the enterprise architecture.
• Prioritize. Identify what is most important and urgent, but also identify your quick wins. Remember to design your overall path of change with milestones that refill your gas tank along the way with needed energy.
• Plug energy leaks. Just as you would plug leaks in a rubber raft before crossing a lake, consider plugging some of your energy leaks before starting a major initiative. You can begin this process with an enterprise energy assessment or an assessment of a problem area within your business. Alternatively, start in areas with chronic conflict, identify the root causes, and plug the energy leaks.
• Use technology. Technology can be a great way to automate and codify new capabilities. Similarly, systems can be quite effective in promoting compliance with policies and procedures. Use technology appropriately to help with change, but be careful about leading with technology. It's better to start with clarity around your business model and how you want people to work within that model.
• Use the tools and techniques. The tools and models discussed in this book can help virtually anyone make positive changes in the business. In addition, the powerful techniques, such as following the money and looking for the misalignment of control and responsibility, will serve you well. Use the tools and techniques to help you on your path.
• Rethink strategic initiatives. What you have learned from reading this book will help you rethink your strategic initiatives from the perspective of energy. It may change your entire approach to an initiative. Give yourself the latitude to take a fresh new look below the surface.
• Start with the work. Remember that virtually everything you do to improve your business is about making work happen better. In your design of any change, start with your vision for how you want the work to go, and then design everything to support that.
• Involve people appropriately. Develop your managers and people with the skills they need to be a part of your team, and then engage them in the change itself. However, be careful not to overinvolve people. You need buy‐in, but transformations are not democracies.
• Use a scorecard. Measuring progress not only proves that progress was made, but it gives people something visible to celebrate. Making change visible can be a great source of energy.
• Align, align, align. Align in the beginning, align along the way, and make sure you are aligned at the end.

In summary, organizational health and agility are essential capabilities in the Fourth Industrial Revolution that enable competitive advantages and produce financial dividends. They are by‐products of high‐functioning businesses, which combine well‐designed and developed assets with aligned management activity to effectively accomplish work effectively and evolve the business. High‐functioning businesses create significantly more positive energy than negative energy as they minimize conflict, avoid work blockages, and adeptly leverage the productive potential of their people. The concepts, language, and tools presented in this book provide an actionable framework for creating and sustaining a high‐functioning business through the management of energy.