Changing Change, Introductory Thoughts

 Change! It's everywhere and omni present. In our personal lives, at work, the expectations of our customers and the market offerings of our competitors. Not only is change omni present we all believe that change is happening at a faster pace today than it ever has before (more on this later).

"change is the only constant in life." Heraclitus, (a Greek philosopher) approximately 535 BC

For something that has been around "forever" we are notoriously bad at managing change. I have written about this is various forms over the years. Consider this extract from my Value Led Change White Paper.

• Mckinsey report that 70 % of change programmes fail to deliver.
• The Standish Group, in their aptly named Chaos report, state that only 29% of software development projects are successful.  The remaining 71% being troubled or considered an outright failure.  To make matters worse, the larger and presumably more important a project the lower the chances that it will succeed, with these so called "grand" projects succeeding less than 10% of the time.
• Recently Forbes reported that when it comes to digital transformation, the change programme of our time, 84% of these programmes have failed to deliver to date.
• One of the most staggering findings comes from a joint study between McKinsey and Oxford University of mega projects, that is projects with a budget above $10 million.  They found that "17 percent of IT projects go so bad that they can threaten the very existence of the company."    

Compare the McKinsey / Oxford 17% threatening bankruptcy with Standish's 10% success for grand projects and you might conclude that large scale IT projects are more likely to cause you to flirt with bankruptcy than to be successful.  It may not be true but the comparison makes you pause and reflect.

Why are we collectively so bad at delivering change? and why, despite billions of dollars and attention from the best brains in business and academia have we not substantially improved our delivery of change over time?

Perhaps more importantly what do we need to do differently to actually make a difference and improve our ability to improve change delivery?

These are important questions for everyone but they are especially important for our organisational leaders because in a rapidly evolving environment our ability to maintain or improve performance is by in large the same as our ability to successfully deliver change, remain relevant and perhaps create some market advantage.

These are questions I have pondered for years and years and this blog is dedicated to capturing my thoughts on these questions.  Ideally this is not a one way conversation.  I would love to hear your thoughts on this as well whether they are criticisms and disagreements, questions or perhaps even a compliment(not that I am expecting that!)

Apart from this introductory blog I intend to start his enquiry by making some observations.