Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?

A 70 per cent failure rate is frequently attributed to organizational-change initiatives, raising questions about the origins and supporting evidence for this very specific statistic. This article critically reviews five separate published instances identifying a 70 per cent organizational-change failure rate. In each instance, the review highlights the absence of valid and reliable empirical evidence in support of the espoused 70 per cent failure rate. Organizational-change research and scholarship now exists which enables us to question the belief in inherent organizational-change failure rates. Inherent failure rates are critically questioned in terms of the ambiguities of change, the context-dependent nature of change, competing perceptions, temporal aspects and measurability. In conclusion, whilst the existence of a popular narrative of 70 per cent organizational-change failure is acknowledged, there is no valid and reliable empirical evidence to support such a narrative.