Despite an organization’s best intentions, most change efforts fail.
You probably already know this. Depending on the study, most researchers find that between 60% and 80% of all change initiatives either completely or partially fail. Year after year, these numbers stay stubbornly consistent. Pursuing change is, in itself, a risky proposition.
The question is: Why?
It’s not that organizations don’t understand the need for effective change management. It’s not like they don’t have resources available to them. And it’s not like organizations don’t understand the risks involved in pursuing change before they commit. They see the same scary statistics on success/fail rates as the rest of us do, they choose to pursue change anyway, and they wind up making the same mistakes other organizations do.
The biggest mistake most organizations make happens right out of the gate: they treat change management as a technical problem with a linear, repeatable solution. It’s not. By its nature, change and change management constitute what is known as an adaptive challenge—a complex, often nonlinear problem that requires learning, innovation, and collaboration to solve.
Adaptive challenges are tougher to crack and certainly come with their share of risk. But then again, that’s what change management is all about: taking a big leap to tangibly improve your organization. Here are a few surprising risk mitigation strategies we follow at Softway that you can begin applying to your change effort today.
Put People First
Every business has the same three levers to pull when pursuing change: people, process, and technology. Most organizations focus on process and technology, relegating their people to nothing more than an afterthought.
It rarely works. But rather than take a step back to understand what went wrong, these organizations double down, convinced that if they roll out even more elaborate processes and a more complicated tech stack, their employees will eventually embrace the change.
They don’t. Typically, they just dig their heels in further.
To reduce risk and increase the chances your change initiative actually succeeds, go all-in on your people. Yes, process and technology matter, but people matter more. Your people, after all, are the ones who will follow these processes and adopt these tools. If they don’t understand how these changes help them or help them do their work better, they will resist.
Here’s the catch: You actually have to do the work. According to Gartner, while 74% of leaders believe they involve their employees in developing a change strategy, only 42% of employees agree. In other words, this isn’t a case of “fake it till you make it.” Putting people first can’t just be a slogan or a box to check. The effort must be genuine and persistent. If you can do that, your chances of success will greatly improve. According to the University of Oxford, organizations that took a people-centric approach to their digital transformation achieved a 73% success rate, compared to 28% for those that didn’t.
Create Experiences
In 2023, the leadership team at Softway determined that we needed to restructure the company to better position it for a changing global economy. We foresaw a big change, including a complete overhaul of the organization chart. Roles and responsibilities would drastically change. People in management positions—including some in leadership positions—would become individual contributors. We were adamant that our new org structure reflect not what we had done, but where we were going.
We had the vision, now we just needed to communicate it. But how?
Here’s what we didn’t do. We didn’t announce the change as a sub-bullet during our monthly all-hands meeting. And we sure didn’t disrupt our team members with a surprise email on a Friday, full of bullet points, charts, and corporate-speak. Instead, we led our entire team on a retreat to the jungles of India to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience for them.
But even then, we didn’t focus on the change itself. Instead, we focused on creating a culture of change-readiness. Through a week’s worth of exercises, excursions, and workshops, we reaffirmed our commitment to our people, strengthened our bond to each other, and celebrated our shared humanity. Only then, toward the end of the retreat, did we share our vision for the company’s future and invite our gathered teams to join us on that journey.
Was the trip expensive? Let’s just say we had many careful budget discussions. But whatever we spent on that experience, we gained back tenfold in terms of change-readiness. Over the next few months, we engaged with team members one-on-one, addressing their concerns and helping them build an individual case for change. By the time we were ready to roll out our big change initiative in early 2024, our teams were fully committed and ready to execute the plan.
By committing to our people, we improved buy-in and dramatically reduced internal resistance—two of the biggest killers of any change program. In so doing, we successfully mitigated risk and significantly improved our chances of success.
Experiment
From the outset of our transformation, we knew that AI adoption would play a central role in our journey. What that role looked like remained unclear to us. Rather than make a series of assumptions, design a set of elaborate processes, and commit to a tech stack that we didn’t fully understand, we took a different approach: let our people lead us.
So, we announced a three-day AI hackathon. The goal: to analyze our current systems and processes as a group, identify pinch points and inefficiencies, and identify AI processes that could improve them. Sometimes, we ditched old systems and processes altogether and built an entirely new, AI-assisted approach to solving the same problem.
The results were staggering. We innovated entirely new ways of working. We reduced the number of steps to reach a target outcome—in one case, breaking down a workflow from seven steps to two. We even identified and built two entirely new service offerings.
These were all great business outcomes. But the human impact was far more significant. By involving our people in the conversation, not only were we able to meet any natural resistance to AI adoption head-on, but we created an environment in which they could experience the impact of these changes on their work and see firsthand what their roles would look like in a changed Softway.
Many people would assume that experimenting during an already underway change initiative would increase risk rather than mitigate it. We found the opposite. The understandings and breakthroughs that came out of this hackathon far exceeded anything we could have designed, mandated, and trained our teams on our own.
Choose Your Hard
In practice, some of these strategies might feel like too much work up front. However, this isn’t pre-work or prep-work. This is the work. A people-first approach to change management might feel too uncertain, too involved, or even too hard. But, as we like to say at Softway, “Choose your hard.”
Prioritizing your people might sound harder than building and adopting shiny new processes and tech tools. But so mandating adoption when your teams are skeptical, confused, and even cynical about the planned change.
Creating experiences focused on building trust and developing a person-to-person case for change might sound like hard work. But so is scrambling to undo or patch over the damage of a lackluster change effort that no one ever bought into.
Experimenting with your teams in a way that’s both safe and constructive is hard. But so is learning after the fact that the solutions you mandated are incompatible with several of your teams’ workflows.
The question isn’t whether your change management project will be hard. It’s a question of which part you want to make hard.
So, which hard will you choose?
Frank Danna is Director at Softway Solutions and author of the USA Today bestseller Love As a Change Strategy.
Photo courtesy Allison Saeng for Unsplash+
