Tag: Evaluating Change

  • Notebook No.3 – Did I really say that?

    Notebook No.3 – Did I really say that?

    Notebook No.3 is a gentle tirade against business school academics frequently and repeatedly claiming that organizational change tends to fail.  Addressing these ‘failures’ informs university leadership and management courses for students and consultancy for organizations. Perversely I am now referenced as the missing change tends to fail ‘evidence’.

    This Notebook reflects my increasingly paranoid scream!!!

    The Chapters

    In this third and final Notebook in this series, Chapter One sets the scene and connects with the first two Notebooks. Understanding depictions today of organizational change as tending to fail requires an appreciation of the historical evolution – a chronology of framing organizational change failure over decades features in Chapter Two.

    A special issue of a prestigious academic journal, themed around organizational change failure, is this Notebook’s focus. There are reviews and commentary on the contributions in Chapter Three and the guest editorial in Chapter Four. The contributions and editorial make a significant contribution to understanding organizational change failure. I am referenced as claiming organizational change tends to fail on four occasions, and these instances are highlighted. Chapter Five takes the form of a discussion, offering four explanations; innocent misunderstanding, association fallacy, confirmation bias and impression management.

    Chapter Six draws this Notebook to a conclusion reflecting on the writing process and further potential dissemination. An awkward question has featured in all three Notebooks, why have organizational changes been depicted as tending to fail? The Notebook subtitle captures my succinct answer. Finally, I believe that erroneous depictions of organizational change failure have implications for universities, organizations and societies.  The debates featured here were never purely academic; they have enormous practical importance.

    Appendix – The Graveyard of Disappointed Hope features a conference paper where I question the gap-filling fetish of academics.  These three Notebooks have been my attempt instead to challenge sacred academic assumptions.

    Accessing Notebook No.3

    This Notebook and the other two were available on the Amazon self-publishing platform in paperback format. I enjoyed being a publisher – cover design, proof reading, layout etc. The Notebook even sold a few copies, which was a pleasant bonus. Today, if you would like a digital copy of the draft please contact me using the Contact page.

    References

    Hughes, M. (2011) Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?” Journal of Change Management 11(4): 451-464.

    Schwarz, G.M., Bouckenooghe, D. and Vakola, M. (2021) Organizational change failure: Framing the process of failing. Human Relations, 74(2): 159-179.

  • Challenging the 70% Organizational Change Failure Myth

    Challenging the 70% Organizational Change Failure Myth

    Challenging the 70% organizational change failure myth is pertinent to organizational practices, research and education. Unfortunately, business schools and consultants have a vested interest in promoting and amplifying the change failure myth.

    Do 70 per cent of all organizational changes really fail? The answer to this rhetorical question is – NO!

    Updated November 2024

    Organizational Change Tends to Fail, That’s Interesting! (YouTube 14.40min video, March 2023)

    Do 70 per cent of all organizational changes really fail?

    The question provides the rhetorical title for my paper published in 2011, in the Journal of Change Management 11(4): 451-464. It is gratifying that at the time of writing, this paper has been downloaded 26,880 times with an altmetric score of 61.

    I was troubled by academic claims that all organizational change tended to fail. The claims had apparently been substantiated by Harvard Business School research with a 70 per cent organizational change failure rate cited. In 2011, I highlighted the complete absence of either empirical evidence or theories in support of these rhetorical claims.

    The 70 per cent organizational change failure statistic was frequently cited by leading business schools and in leading journals before 2011. I would like to tell you that after 2011 the academic claims that organizational change practitioners tend to fail ceased, but sadly this has not been the case.

    My suspicion is that business schools depict change as failing in order to underpin their highly lucrative leadership courses, research and consultancy.

    Abstract A 70 per cent failure rate is frequently attributed to organizational change initiatives, raising questions about the origins and supporting evidence for this very specific statistic. This article critically reviews five separate published instances identifying a 70 per cent organizational change failure rate. In each instance, the review highlights the absence of valid and reliable empirical evidence in support of the espoused 70 per cent failure rate. Organizational change research and scholarship now exists which enables us to question the belief in inherent organizational change failure rates. Inherent failure rates are critically questioned in terms of the ambiguities of change, the context-dependent nature of change, competing perceptions, temporal aspects and measurability. In conclusion, whilst the existence of a popular narrative of 70 per cent organizational change failure is acknowledged, there is no valid and reliable empirical evidence to support such a narrative.

    Journal access If you have online access to academic journals the full published 2011 paper may be downloaded here:

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14697017.2011.630506

    Access to the final draft of the 2011 paper Alternatively, I have linked to this post the final draft of the 2011 paper, accepted for publication, after review. Please click on the link below.

    EvaluatingChangeFinalDraftDownload

    How studying organizational change lost its way

    A decade later in a Special Issue of Human Relations on organizational change failure the 70 per cent failure statistic was still being cited.  More troublingly my 2011 paper was now cited in support of the belief of the guest editors (Schwarz et al, 2021) that organizational change tends to fail. For example:

    Page 160 – Central to this outlook is that organizational research has long been concerned with the features of and mechanisms for how organizations change, while at the same time acknowledging separately that large-scale organizational changes tend to fail (Hughes, 2011).

    Page 167 – We do so recognizing that, even though the majority of change initiatives fail in some way (Hughes, 2011), there is perpetual interest in successful firms and success stories (Bledow et al., 2017).

    Source: Schwarz, G.M., Bouckenooghe, D., and Vakola, M. (2021) Organizational change failure: Framing the process of failing. Human Relations, 74(2) 159-179.

    For the avoidance of doubt, I never generalized in 2011 that change tends to fail. I never would make such a sweeping generalization given that organizational changes are highly context dependent and outcomes very dynamic. An either ‘fail’ or ‘succeed’ dualism misses the subtleties and processes of both failure and success in any organizational change.

    I did write to the lead guest editor on the 10th June 2019, collegially restating my position, but I never received a reply. In 2021, I included the lead guest editor in a tweet, highlighting my concern that I had been misrepresented, immediately after my tweet he left Twitter. I turned to the editorial office of Human Relations, seeking an impartial review. Their conclusion was that I hadn’t been misrepresented.

    If you have the time/inclination I have included a link below to my 2022 paper, in which I respond to the perceived misrepresentation.

    As this paper is part of the journal’s Reflections series it should be freely accessible (no firewall) to download using the link below.

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14697017.2022.2030980

    Hughes, M. (2022) Reflections: How Studying Organizational Change Lost Its Way, Journal of Change Management, 22:1, 8-25, DOI: 10.1080/14697017.2022.2030980

    If you have any difficulties accessing this paper, or you want to agree/disagree with my conclusions please email using the contact form on the home page.

    70 Per Cent Organizational Change Failure?
  • Notebook No.1 – Framing Organizational Change Failure

    Notebook No.1 – Framing Organizational Change Failure

    We need to question the currently favoured persuasive narrative that organizational change tends to fail. This post introduces Notebook No.1 and its chapter content questioning currently favoured change failure framing.

    Notebook No.1 Cover Image
    Notebook No.1 Cover Image

    Problematic Generalizations

    Academic journals, monographs and textbooks repeatedly claim that organizational change tends to fail.  However, the more that you examine this persuasive narrative the more doubtful you become.

    The label organizational change covers many types of change. Change is undertaken in different sectors and different countries. Approaches to making change happen are many and varied.  Specific organizational changes will succeed and fail with considerable variation given the contextual differences. Depicting organizational change as tending to fail is a problematic generalization.  It is problematic like a sexist or racist generalization and we know such generalizations do great harm.

    Persuasive Narratives

    If still persuaded by the narrative that change tends to fail, look to the main proponents Harvard Business School (HBS) professors.  They claimed that change and transformation initiatives failed. However, a large part of the work of their school involves facilitating change and transformation.

    Should we applaud a business school for its social responsibility in sacrificing all that income through so publicly acknowledging change failure? Or was a far more subtle narrative at work?

    Today I believe that it was change management which they wanted to depict as failing, this was so that we would believe that change leadership would succeed.  Unfortunately, my insight has turned into an albatross for myself.  I have been unable to convince academic journal Editors and their reviewers about the wisdom of my little epiphany.  They reasonably want evidence, they rightly claim that in telling my story, multiple stories are at work.  Notebook No.1 and Notebook No.2 are my best effort to retrace my steps in clarifying and explaining my thinking. 

    I feel oddly obligated to offer an alternative narrative to the current dominant narrative that organizational change tends to fail. In this first Notebook, I reflect on my successes and failures, perhaps a little too candidly. The idea of the Notebook label is to signpost that these aren’t the usual sanitized and contorted words we commit to paper. 

    The Chapters

    The following discussion introduces the chapters in this first Notebook. In, Do 70% of organizational change initiatives really fail, I tell the story of how I came to write the paper of the same name. I tell the story of how one of the HBS professors reviewed the paper and what I learnt from him.  Who killed change management also shares a title with a paper. This chapter takes an enjoyable postmodern turn when I decide to investigate the conceptual murder of change management. I begin to appreciate that it wasn’t organizational change which was failing it was change management. The role of textbooks in framing organizational change failure asks an awkward question. If we believe change tends to fail, why is there so little coverage of evaluating organizational change in textbooks?  In A tale of change management failure on the misty literature mountains, I share my learning from writing the monograph The leadership of organizational change. In that monograph, I wanted to establish the origins of change leadership which required a narrative review of 35 years writing. The chapter tells the tale of an author going off on a Tolkienesque adventure in search of the precious thing. A different organizational change failure story is the penultimate chapter. I offer my account of an alternative organizational change failure frame.  In Beyond the rhetoric of failure, I reflect on my successes and failures and the need to do things differently. I also reflect on my hopes for the future framing of organizational change failure.

    The first two Notebooks include unusual appendices which require a little explanation. Ernst Bloch’s (1995) The Principle of Hope made a big impression on me.  Bloch (1995:195) wrote ‘even disappointed hope wanders around agonizing, a ghost that has lost its way back to the cemetery and clings to refuted images.’ Academics invest hopes in unpublished papers. The graveyard of disappointed hope offers a public resting place for an unpublished paper.

    I do hope that these Notebooks might provoke meaningful practically orientated organizational change debate beyond the firewalled academic journals and costly academic books. As change is all about moving into an unknown future only time will tell…

    Accessing Notebook No.1 

    This Notebook and the other two were available on the Amazon self-publishing platform in paperback format. I enjoyed being a publisher – cover design, proof reading, layout etc. The Notebook even sold a few copies, which was a pleasant bonus. Today, if you would like a digital copy of the draft please contact me using the Contact page.

    References

    Bloch, E. (1995) The Principle of Hope. Translated by N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

    Hughes, M. (2011) Do 70 per cent of organizational change initiatives really fail? Journal of Change Management, 11 (4): 451-464.

    Hughes, M. (2016) Who killed change management? Culture and Organization, 22(4): 330-347.

    Hughes, M. (2016) The leadership of organizational change. London, Routledge.

  • Whatever Happened to Sustaining Organizational Change?

    Whatever Happened to Sustaining Organizational Change?

    Post in 54 words

    Managers/leaders initiate organizational changes such as service delivery improvements in the expectation that such service improvements will be sustained. But what do we know about sustaining organizational change? A debate sparked just over a decade ago spoke to this question, but for various reasons, this debate was never sustained.

    Fashion

    Effectively overcoming resistance to change and communicating change have been recurrent themes in discussions amongst organizational change practitioners and amongst academics.  Today, they may be perceived as old chestnuts, yet they appear to have been sustained over time, possibly even after their shelf-life has been exceeded. My own lived experience confirmed a tendency towards the influence of management fashion.

    The implication was that the organizational change everyone was talking about today, nobody might be talking about in six months and vice versa. Whilst such management fashions go far beyond organizational change they have significant implications for organizational change.  Imagine quality circles being in vogue as a participative means of managing quality you invest human and financial resources in developing these quality circles and in developing the skills to make them effective.  Then the world moves on, quality circles are no longer in vogue and the debate has moved on to a different means of managing quality, yet you are left with your infrastructure of quality circles.

    Organizational change after the launch party

    My concern is not with the transitory or fashion orientated nature of organizational life, but with what happens to an organizational change after the launch party is a distant memory. I draw on my lived experience inside organizations again.  These changes for a time appear to capture the imagination of individuals and organizations.  Discussions about these changes are very prominent in written and spoken communications, it can be as dramatic as if you are not discussing the particular change you are not ‘on message’. Ideally, the new way of working becomes the norm, the ‘normal’ if you like.  I can think of many examples of this happening.

    Some changes stick whilst others drift away

    I used to assess paper-based student assignments, rocking away merrily in my rocking chair.  Then everything went digital and students submitted their work digitally online, I assessed it online via an intranet site. I do not envisage us returning to paper-based assignments, it was an outcome of a process of change which was sustained.  Alternatively, our university departments used to be clustered into Faculties, a change initiative was initiated in which departments would be clustered into Colleges rather than Faculties and there would be fewer of these new clusters. In this instance, the College organizational structure didn’t really work and after a few years, the Colleges and their supporting infrastructure were abandoned.  In reflecting on both these examples the organizational change I experienced may be ‘stepping stones’ to further organizational change with changes along the way embedded or abandoned.

    David Buchanan and the National Health Service (NHS)

    I want to introduce the writings of David Buchanan and his colleagues which were particularly grounded in experiences of change in the NHS.  Anyone interested in reading more about sustaining organizational change should check out Buchanan et al’s (2005) review of this literature. They offered reasons why this area of study received only limited attention, which may today explain why the debate was not sustained.

    • Organizational change theories in emphasizing adaptation and constant change, negate the need to sustain organizational change outcomes.
    • Next, implementation can be studied over a short time horizon, whereas sustainability requires a longer time horizon.
    • Researching change may be more appealing than researching stability and sustainability which may be regarded as a condition to be achieved, not as a problem to be solved.

    Modernizing the organizational change lexicon

    Buchanan et al (2007) based on their research into the Modernization Agency implementation of the NHS Plan introduced four useful and informative terms into the organizational change lexicon.

    Sustainability – The process through which new working methods, performance enhancements, and continuous improvements are maintained for a period appropriate to a given context.

    Do we want to ensure the enhancements of this change initiative are maintained?

    Decay – The opposite of sustainability, where change is not maintained and benefits are lost.

    Is it best if what we were seeking in this instance is not maintained and allowed to decay?

    Spread – The process through which new working methods developed in one setting are adopted, perhaps with appropriate modifications, in other contexts.

    Do we want these new working methods to be adopted elsewhere?

    Containment – The opposite of spread, where changes at one site are not adapted and adopted by others.

    Do we want to actively avoid rolling out what we attempted here elsewhere?

    This lexicon appears to me to be useful in discussing organizational change within a single organization and between organizations. In studying or practically engaging with an organizational change it raises questions which I have couched in practical terms in italics beneath each term.

    Returning to my earlier reflections, the shift from paper-based marking to online marking spread through my university, it is a change that has been sustained.  The shift to Colleges decayed, it was not sustained.  However, we now have a flatter organization structure without either Faculties or Colleges, in this sense Colleges may have provided a stepping stone towards a new organization structure, only time will tell if this structure is sustained.

    References

    Buchanan, D., L. Fitzgerald., D. Ketley., R. Gollop., J.L. Jones., S.S. Lamont., A. Neath., and E. Whitby. (2005) No Going Back: A Review of the Literature on Sustaining Organizational Change. International Journal of Management Reviews 7 (3):189-205.

    Buchanan, D.A., L. Fitzgerald and D. Ketley. (Eds). (2007). The Sustainability and Spread of Organizational Change: Modernizing Healthcare. London: Routledge.

    Hughes, M. (2019) Sustaining Organizational Change.  In Hughes, M. (2019) Managing and Leading Organizational Change. London: Routledge.

    Whatever happened to sustaining organizational change