Beyond the Wall: Top 10 Reasons Why Changes Fail

What you can do to move beyond resistance

Since almost 70 percent of all changes in organizations fail, you might be interested in knowing why that’s so. Rick Maurer, author of Beyond the Wall of Resistance: Why 70% of Changes Still Fail and What You Can Do About It, Revised Edition (Bard Press, 2010), put together his top 10 list in the spirit of David Letterman.

10. Some leaders don’t know how to lead change. Unless you are a brand new manager or have been living in a windowless cellar for the past 20 years, you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to change management. You’ve read a couple of books, attended training, heard motivational speakers, and been subjected to consultants who tout their brand of change management. As a result, most leaders know what to do—but they don’t put that knowledge into practice.

9. Leaders assume that change is easy. They expect people to add a new project to their already full plate of activities. When these leaders are asked, “What’s the top priority now?” they reply, “Everything.”

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Three more Top 10 reasons

Excellent! I’ll add three more top 10 reasons:

3. The leader talks about the change but doesn’t physically act in accordance with making the change. At the first signs the change isn’t succeeding, the leader frequently backs away—the common source of “lack of management support.”
2. Change efforts get distracted by overemphasizing “change” and losing sight of the content. For example, by the time organizations got done fiddling with all the quality groupings and statistics training trappings of Total Quality Management, the organization had lost interest in improving quality. Organizations are like a dog lying down, all circling.
1. It’s the wrong change or changing the wrong thing. Organizations routinely bypass accurately understanding what their REAL problem is, what the REAL value of solving it is, what its REAL causes are, and what the REAL business requirements deliverable _whats_ are that will reasonably solve the problem and achieve the value. Instead, they regularly leap to an often erroneous conclusion about _how_ they can solve their (often-misunderstood) problem and go straight to trying to implement it. All types of change situations (not just software) can considerably overcome these issues by using the powerful Problem Pyramid™ and other approaches described in my book.

Author of the recent Artech House book:
Discovering REAL Business Requirements for Software Project Success