Stop putting Transformation on a pedestal.

Transformations seem to be all the rage these days.  While my loyal research assistant, Claude, couldn’t specifically quantify the surge in headlines, it shared that HBR, MIT Sloan Management Review, Forbes, the WSJ all have dramatically ramped up their transformation coverage over the past two to three years, driven almost entirely by the AI wave. Nearly every major consulting firm has rebranded practices around Transformation, and the Big Three have gone a step further, establishing entirely new business models and fee structures around it. 

As I enter my third wave of seeing the word Transformation tacked on to major enterprise-level initiatives (reengineering, digital, and now AI) it feels like it’s become a label inflated to the point of meaninglessness. Thirty years ago the statistic that 70-80% of transformation efforts fail was plastered on the inside flap of every change management book available at your favorite airport. Today, the failure rate hovers around…70-80%.  Why hasn’t anything changed?  Three reasons, and none of them are new.

1.        Hyping the destination rather than a journey

Leadership teams focus on getting the vision statement right. They dedicate a war room. They announce the initiative, build the slide deck, and put a logo on it. And then the organization waits for a definitive beginning and an end that never comes. In reality though, transformation has no finish line. It is an ongoing alignment of structure, talent, culture, and technology to a moving strategic target. Usually, the moment a leadership team believes it has "the answer," the real work has not yet started.

Similarly, the desire to declare victory prematurely is one of the greatest sins of transformation. It signals to the entire organization that the difficult behavioral shifts required to sustain change are now optional. Much of the transformation work we engage in begins with the following statement: “the high-level future state design is complete, now we are just working on clean up”. In their minds, the transformation is complete and they’ve psychologically moved on. In reality,  they’re not even at half time, they’re at the first timeout in the first quarter. That “clean up” can have a long tail, and often does, because the hard organizational work was deferred, not eliminated.

2.        Transformation is treated as a substitute for great execution.

I have been making this argument since 2017, when I co-authored an article about redefining transformation in People + Strategy journal. The insight has only gotten sharper with time. Business as usual is boring. In contrast, Transformation is fresh, exciting, bold, and novel...if also highly anxiety producing and disruptive. McKinsey once published a list of 24 actions associated with successful transformation. Strip out the transformation-specific language and what you have is a list of solid, foundational leadership practices: clear accountability, people development, consistent communication, aligned incentives. None of it is revolutionary.

I wholeheartedly agree with Rigby & First’s recent provocation in HBR that the best way to manage transformations is to minimize the need for them.  Transformation does not require a new playbook. It requires the discipline to execute the fundamentals at a higher level and across a larger canvas. The "burning platform" narrative that usually kicks off a transformation is useful for getting organizational attention as an organization performance defibrillator. It is terrible for sustaining momentum after the initial urgency fades.

3.        Transformation is rarely executed in a holistic fashion.

The most common version of corporate transformation I see is technology or finance led: a platform implementation or an across the board cost-cutting exercise. Technology gets 80% of the budget, Finance drives the methodology; talent and culture get the PowerPoint slide, and structure gets "addressed later." You cannot bolt new technology onto an organizational design that was built for a different strategy. You cannot install new processes on top of a leadership culture that still rewards the old behaviors. The most visible and tangible facets of the transformation get the attention; the invisible ones (culture, ways of working, leadership behaviors) are addressed last, if at all, due to transformation fatigue. Yet these are the ones that make or break the sustainability measure of success.

What to do to break the cycle?

None of these failure modes are inevitable. The leaders who break the cycle share a few consistent habits.

Stop announcing transformations. Start building the organizational muscle to adapt continuously. Here is what that requires in practice.

• Get ruthlessly honest about your culture before you launch anything. A recent study by Russell Reynolds revealed that only 42% of Transformation leaders chose to address culture as part of the effort. This isn’t a resource issue. It is a courage issue. Culture work is hard, uncomfortable, and slow. It also determines whether every other investment sticks. Do the diagnostic first.

• Treat transformation as operational discipline, not a campaign. The organizations that sustain meaningful change are not the ones with the best launch events. They are the ones that build short-cycle feedback loops, measure adaptation speed alongside operational performance, and have leaders who model learning rather than only declaring conviction.

• Resist the victory lap. When the new org chart is announced, when the platform goes live, when the first results show improvement: those moments will create enormous pressure to declare success and move on. The real test of transformation is what your leaders do in month 18, when the change effort is no longer novel and the old gravity starts pulling people back.

• Build your leadership team for the journey, not the announcement and set expectations accordingly. Every transformation either rises or falls on the quality of the people in the top seats. Leaders who can tolerate ambiguity, challenge their own assumptions, think across the enterprise, and develop their people in real time are the ones who sustain change. Leaders who communicate well but cannot model the new behaviors quietly undermine the momentum.

AI has given transformation a new urgency and a new vocabulary. That is not inherently a bad thing. The pace of market change genuinely demands more from organizations than it did five years ago. But urgency is not a strategy, and relabeling the same episodic change playbook with new technology language will produce the same 70% failure rate it always has.

The companies that will come out ahead are the ones that stop treating transformation as a program with a start and end date and start treating continuous adaptation as a core organizational competency.

Not a logo. Not a war room. A muscle. Prepare and execute accordingly.

Sources referenced:  Rigby & First, “Get off the transformation treadmill,” Harvard Business Review, Vol.104.1. (January-February, 2026). Russell Reynolds Associates, "Adapt or Die in the Age of Perpetual Transformation" (June 2025); McKinsey Quarterly, "How to Beat the Transformation Odds" (2015, updated); BCG, digital transformation research (2024); Hawkins & Fryling, "Redefining Transformation," People + Strategy, Vol. 40.2 (Spring 2017).