“70% of change initiatives fail.” It is the most quoted statistic in change management – and it has no credible empirical source. Tracing the claim back through decades of consulting literature, change scholar Mark Hughes found it repeated without a study behind it, used more as a rhetorical device than a research finding.

What the actual research says

Real research on resistance is less dramatic and more useful. Shaul Oreg’s 2006 study found that resistance to change is strongly shaped by stable personality traits – particularly how much someone dislikes routine disruption and how attached they are to the status quo – not simply by how well a change is communicated. That means two employees can receive the identical announcement and respond in opposite ways for reasons that have nothing to do with the change itself.

Six ways to respond, not one

The earliest rigorous treatment of this problem is still one of the best: Kotter and Schlesinger’s 1979 Harvard Business Review article identified six distinct approaches to overcoming resistance – education and communication, participation, facilitation and support, negotiation, manipulation and co-optation, and explicit or implicit coercion – and argued that choosing the wrong one for the situation is a bigger risk than resistance itself.

The practical takeaway

Skip the “70% fail” framing – it does not hold up, and it invites fatalism rather than diagnosis. Instead, treat resistance as information: find out whether it is rooted in a legitimate gap in the plan, a personality-driven discomfort with disruption, or a mismatch between the change approach and the situation. Each calls for a different response.

We help leadership teams diagnose which kind of resistance they are actually dealing with before designing the change approach. Talk to us if you are planning a change and want that diagnosis done properly.

References

Hughes, M. (2011) ‘Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?’, Journal of Change Management, 11(4), pp. 451–464.

Oreg, S. (2006) ‘Personality, context, and resistance to organizational change’, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 15(1), pp. 73–101.

Kotter, J.P. and Schlesinger, L.A. (1979) ‘Choosing strategies for change’, Harvard Business Review, 57(2), pp. 106–114.