The problem with change leadership isn’t so much a problem as it is a misleading narrative; it’s how change practitioners of all brands and experience levels, and change scholars in particular, seem to characterize them in contrast to otherwise inept management – the essential villain cast as the reason why change efforts fail. We all know bad leadership when we see it: poor communication, inability to engender trust, micromanagement, blame, lack of empathy, taking credit for others’ accomplishments, failure to create and manage clear expectations…this list goes on. And on.

The unsubstantiated rhetoric regarding organizational change failure, most notably the frequently quoted and universally unproven claim that 70% of all change initiatives fail has, in fact, profoundly shaped academic scholarship by embedding flawed assumptions into academic research and shifting the focus of change agency. A primary impact of the perpetuation of this failure rhetoric has been the social construction of change leadership in scholarly circles at the expense of the practice of change management.

Mark Hughes and colleagues have an interesting perspective on the issue. They suggest that the frequently repeated claim that “around 70% of change initiatives fail” persists in the scholarly literature not because it is empirically robust, but because it remains an academically convenient and institutionally rewarding framing device. They argue that “failure rhetoric” has become “academically fashionable,” serving as a ready-made problem statement that is easy to reproduce in articles, books, and leadership development discourse.

More importantly, they contend that this rhetoric has been functional in a broader shift from “managing change” to “leading change,” where establishing the authority of change leaders has been aided by corroding the perceived credibility of change managers and portraying change as chronically unsuccessful without heroic leadership intervention.

They further submit that the persistence of the claim is reinforced by business-school and academic incentive structures, where disparaging practitioner approaches and foregrounding failure can support lucrative programs, reputational positioning, and personal career-building under journal-ranking pressures. Finally, they highlight citation dynamics that allow the statistic to survive correction, including credibility “halo effects” and even instances where debunking work is cited in ways that effectively reproduce the failure narrative rather than dismantle it.

So, in order to establish the authority of “change leaders,” it is argued, scholarship first had to destroy the authority of change “managers” by depicting their efforts as failing. The most influential articles from the 1990s and 2000s used titles that framed change as failing (e.g., “Why Transformation Efforts Fail”) and diagnosed “management” as the problem and prescribed “leadership” as the successful solution. This illustrates a scholarly environment where important critical scholarship is reversed to fit a dominant “failure” narrative. Kotter (1995) specifically denigrated management, claiming that paralyzed senior management often resulted from having too many managers and not enough leaders.

Academic scholarship continues to disseminate such idealized concepts as empirical realities. This results in a “paucity of knowledge” regarding how change actually works because academics, consultants, and managers unconsciously collude to leave the actual processes of change unexamined in favor of the broad failure narrative. They make the “heroic leader” appear necessary and successful, while our “inept manager” must be the reason why every effort fails. Scholarship has spent decades building the set and writing the script for this drama, often ignoring the fact that the “statistics” used to set the scene were never actually based on real-world data.

Sources:

Burnes, B., & Jackson, P. (2011). “Success and Failure In Organizational Change: An Exploration of the Role of Values”, Journal of Change Management, 11(2), 133–162.

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

Hughes, M. (2018). “Managing and Leading Organizational Change (1st ed.)”. Routledge.

By, R.T., Hughes, M. & Ford, J. (2016) Change Leadership: Oxymoron and Myths, Journal of Change Management, 16:1, 8-17.