Menu
70% of change initiatives fail
Find out how you can stack the odds in your favour
Research and Development
Menu
One minute briefing
- 70% of change initiatives fail
- Strategic change is key to competitive edge, so we researched why and how to improve success rates.
- Nine out of ten industry professionals agree ‘strategic change’ differs to ‘BAU change’, and it matters.
- A good start is pivotal, with almost 90% of the solutions to the most common problems being best addressed near the start.
- Just over 40% of the solutions related to soft skills.
Executive summary
“A good start is pivotal … rushing straight into detailed planning creates the illusion of accuracy”
– Seasoned technology professional
Introduction
Accomplish is a ‘challenger consultancy’ that helps investment firms achieve strategic change.
Strategic change is key to competitive edge, so a 70% industry failure rate¹ ² stimulated us to understand why and how to improve success rates.
Key findings
Nine out of ten industry professionals agree ‘strategic change’ differs to ‘BAU change’.
Why? Two factors differentiate them: breadth of impact, and experience (or how new the task is for the organisation).
The difference matters because, from the outset, a strategic change brings greater challenges that are not major features of BAU change. This means mis-diagnosis of your situation can be an early mistake and cause of the low success rate
We then found that people wrestle with common problems relating to strategic change:
- Unclear ambition
- Inadequate planning
- Lost momentum
- Capability gaps
- Change fatigue
The good news is that straightforward solutions exist. The trick is that almost 90% of the solutions to the most common problems are best addressed near the start, before detailed planning.
This sequencing means that a good start is pivotal, which implies that the cause of inadequate planning is ‘rushing at it’ before you have created the conditions for success.
And for those of you who may have felt ‘soft skills were for the weak’, we found that just over 40% of solutions relate to soft skills.
Contact us to see how we have helped others achieve strategic change.
Full report
Do you want to read the full story? You can download the pdf of our complete research report here.
