KEVSTEMPLATES.COM
Myths and Traps in Change Management
Before you brief anyone senior
Read this before your first exec conversation. Some of it will contradict things you’ve been told in training.
Myth 1 — “70% of change programmes fail”
Don’t say this. It’s the most-quoted statistic in the field and it has no reliable empirical basis. It traces back to 1990s business-process-reengineering consulting material (Hammer & Champy, later echoed by Beer & Nohria) and was never supported by a peer-reviewed study. Mark Hughes’ 2011 review is the standard academic takedown.
Three reasons to drop it:
- It’s probably wrong. Where it has been examined, most initiatives land in the middle — partial success — with genuine total failures a small minority.
- A sharp exec may know it’s a myth. Being caught citing folklore in your opening slide is an expensive way to start.
- It frames change as a lottery, which quietly excuses poor design. “70% fail” is a comfortable thing for a leader to hear.
Say instead: “Change initiatives rarely fail outright — they usually half-land. People get told, some get trained, and then the day job reasserts itself. Our job is to close the gap between the launch and the Tuesday.”
Myth 2 — “People naturally resist change”
People resist loss, ambiguity, and being done to. They queue overnight for new phones. What’s actually being resisted is usually a specific cost you haven’t acknowledged, or a change that’s genuinely worse for them. See Resistance Decoder.
Treating resistance as a personality flaw of the workforce is both wrong and strategically useless — it points to no action other than pressure.
Myth 3 — “If we communicate well enough, they’ll come on board”
Communication addresses Awareness and, at best, some Reflective Motivation. It does nothing for Capability, Physical Opportunity or Habit — which is where most rollouts actually fail. See COM-B and the Behaviour Change Wheel.
The tell: when the response to low adoption is “we need to communicate the benefits better.” That’s the third or fourth email now. The problem is rarely comprehension.
Myth 4 — “Training equals adoption”
Training completion is an attendance metric. The gap between “knows how” and “does it under pressure on a Thursday” is the entire problem — Knowledge vs Ability in ADKAR — Individual Change.
Myth 5 — “Get the burning platform right and people will move”
Fear creates urgency and a short burst of compliance. It also creates risk-aversion, information-hiding and blame, all of which are poison to the exploratory behaviour a new way of working needs. It doesn’t sustain — you can’t keep a platform burning for eighteen months.
Myth 6 — “Change is a project with an end date”
The system goes live on a date. The behaviour transitions over months. The programme disbands at go-live; the drift starts at week six. See Habit Loop and Behavioural Drift.
Myth 7 — “The culture is the problem”
Culture isn’t a cause, it’s an outcome — the accumulated residue of what gets rewarded, tolerated and modelled. “We need to change the culture” is usually a way of naming a problem without owning it. Push for behaviours: Target Behaviour Definition.
Myth 8 — Learning-styles and personality-type framing
Matching delivery to “visual/auditory/kinaesthetic learners” has been repeatedly tested and doesn’t improve outcomes. MBTI-style typing has weak reliability and validity. Both are common in change collateral and both will be challenged by anyone who’s read the research. Don’t build your credibility on them.
The traps (things that are true but tempting)
The Comms Trap. Comms is visible, controllable and feels like progress. It becomes the default output of a change function. Ask of every plan: what in here would change behaviour if nobody read the emails?
The Pilot Trap. Pilot with a volunteer team, a great manager and unlimited support; it succeeds; scale it to teams with none of those things. The pilot proved the change works under ideal conditions — which was never in question. Pilot somewhere ordinary.
The Steering Group Trap. Governance expands to fill available time. Attendance at the steering group becomes the measure of engagement. Meanwhile nobody has spoken to anyone who does the actual work in six weeks.
The Survey Trap. A 40-question engagement survey tells you sentiment, not barriers. Six honest conversations tell you what’s actually stopping people. Do the conversations first; use the survey to size what you’ve found.
The Hero Trap. One passionate person carries the change personally. It works while they’re there and collapses when they move. If the change depends on you, you haven’t finished.
The Perfection Trap. Waiting for the process to be fully designed before anyone sees it. You lose the chance to be wrong cheaply, and you lose co-design — which is the single best generator of Desire.
What the evidence does consistently support
- Active, visible sponsorship is repeatedly identified as the largest single contributor to change outcomes — and “visible” is doing the work in that sentence. See Sponsor Briefing Pack.
- Line manager involvement — the employee’s own manager is the preferred and most effective messenger for personal impact.
- Involvement in design raises commitment more reliably than any communication.
- Making the desired behaviour the easy default outperforms persuasion, consistently and cheaply.
- Clear, specific behavioural asks beat values and principles.
Links
→ Sources and Further Reading → The One-Page Board Narrative
← Back to the Behavioural Change Toolkit