Change Management: Guiding Organizational Transformations

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1. 31 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

   A review of this article on change management found that its opening statistic, a famous claim that McKinsey research shows 70 percent of transformations fail, does not trace back to any real McKinsey study, and that several other precise figures attributed to McKinsey, Prosci, IBM, and Towers Watson research did not match those organizations' real published findings.

   What the page claimed

   The article opened by attributing a '70 percent of large-scale change initiatives fail,' claim to McKinsey research 'replicated across multiple studies over several decades.' It also cited a precise 2009 McKinsey failure-cause breakdown (33/39/14/14 percent) with 'three times/twice as likely' success multipliers, a 2023 Prosci report claiming organizations with poor change management spend 'two to three times more,' a 2022 IBM Institute for Business Value study claiming '30 percent higher financial performance' for top versus bottom quartile change capability, a 2021 McKinsey survey claiming exactly '30 percent' digital transformation success, a '15-20 percent of technology budget' benchmark for change management spend, a 2023 Prosci benchmarking claim of 'six times/five times/two times' more likely outcomes, and a 2022 Towers Watson study claiming '3.5 times greater total returns to shareholders.'

   What was corrected

   The article now explains that the famous '70 percent fail' statistic does not trace to any real McKinsey study and instead traces to an unsupported line in a 2000 Harvard Business Review article, while McKinsey's own real research finds that roughly one in three transformations succeed. It presents the McKinsey failure-cause findings and success correlates in accurate general terms rather than unverifiable precise percentages, describes Prosci's and IBM's real research directionally without the specific unconfirmed multipliers, corrects the digital-transformation figure to McKinsey's real 2018-sourced 'under 30 percent' finding and a lower 16 percent sustained-improvement figure, softens the technology-budget guidance to an acknowledged rule of thumb, corrects the Prosci ROI multipliers to match Prosci's commonly documented figures, and corrects the Towers Watson claim to reflect that 3.5 times describes likelihood of outperformance rather than a shareholder-return multiple.

   Why: Web searches for each cited statistic found that while McKinsey, Prosci, IBM Institute for Business Value, and Towers Watson have all published real, relevant research in this area, several of the specific figures, years, and multipliers attached to that research in the article did not match their real published findings, most notably the widely repeated '70 percent fail' statistic, which does not trace back to McKinsey at all. The article was corrected to present the real, verifiable findings from each organization instead.

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