After 35 years and more than 200 transformation programmes across 65 markets, I have reached a conclusion that most organisations find uncomfortable: transformations do not fail because of poor strategy. They fail because of poor execution, inadequate accountability, and the persistent illusion that a well-constructed slide deck constitutes a plan.
01The number that hasn't moved in a decade
Boston Consulting Group's analysis of more than 850 companies puts the figure at roughly 70% of transformation initiatives failing to meet their stated objectives. McKinsey's own 2021 research, Losing From Day One, found the success rate stuck at around 30% — and noted that even the transformations classed as "successful" routinely leave value on the table. Bain's most recent analysis goes further: 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions in full.
What should unsettle every board director reading those numbers is not the size of the failure rate. It is how static it is. Methodologies have multiplied. Change-management certifications have proliferated. Technology has transformed twice over in the period these studies cover. And the success rate has not moved. That tells you the problem was never a knowledge problem.
02It is not a strategy problem
I have sat across the table from a great many strategy decks in 35 years, including some written by the very firms whose own research is quoted above. The decks are rarely the differentiator. Most well-resourced organisations can produce a credible, well-argued, intellectually defensible transformation strategy. The differentiator is what happens in the eighteen months after the deck is approved — and that is where the standard model breaks down.
This is uncomfortable for an industry — and I include parts of my own career in this — that has spent decades selling the diagnostic and design phase as the hard part. It isn't. The diagnostic phase produces a document. The execution phase produces, or fails to produce, a changed organisation. Treating the document as the deliverable is the single most expensive category error in enterprise transformation, and it is one that persists because the document is easy to evaluate at the point of sale and the changed organisation is only evaluable two years later, by which point the team that sold the document has moved on to the next mandate.
03Three patterns I see repeatedly
Across dozens of mandates, in financial services, technology, automotive, telecommunications, and consumer businesses, the same three patterns recur with remarkable consistency.
The slide deck as plan. A transformation strategy gets approved, a programme office gets stood up, and the organisation treats the approval itself as the achievement. The actual work — sequencing, resourcing, named accountability for each milestone — gets built afterward, often by people who were not in the room when the strategy was agreed.
The adviser, not the operator. The most senior, most capable people on the engagement are positioned to advise the executive team rather than to own a P&L outcome. Advice is valuable. It is also, by design, something the client can choose to act on or not. An operator does not have that luxury, and that difference in accountability changes behaviour throughout the organisation.
No two-year test. Success gets measured at programme close — the deck delivered, the system live, the reorganisation announced. Almost nobody measures what is still functioning, unprompted, two years later. That is the only test that actually distinguishes a transformation from an expensive interruption.
Transformations do not fail because of poor strategy. They fail because of poor execution, inadequate accountability, and the persistent illusion that a well-constructed slide deck constitutes a plan.Dan Collins
04What good actually looks like
The organisations that beat the odds share three characteristics, and none of them are exotic.
- They treat the transformation leader as an operator, not an adviser. Accountability sits with someone who carries the commercial outcome, not the consulting deliverable.
- They co-design the future state with the team that will operate it. The people who will run the new model are involved in designing it, not handed it at go-live.
- They measure success by what remains active two years after the engagement concludes — not by what was delivered at programme close.
At BellSouth, an enterprise digital programme I led rebuilt operations around this model: the operator carried the commercial number, the future-state design was built with the team inheriting it, and the result — $150M+ in Year 1 operational savings and 205% of CRM targets — held up because it was never dependent on the consulting team staying in the building.
05Why this is so hard to fix from inside
If the diagnosis is this consistent, it is worth asking why so few organisations correct for it. Part of the answer is structural rather than personal. The people best placed to redesign the operating model — senior executives — are also the people whose authority the current model protects. Asking a COO to dismantle the escalation chain that runs through their office is asking them to dilute their own organisational position, even when they can see intellectually that the chain is the problem. This is not a failure of will. It is a predictable feature of asking insiders to redesign the structure that gives them their standing.
The second reason is more mundane: most transformation budgets are approved against a design phase, not an embedding phase. The funded plan ends at go-live. The unfunded, unstaffed period that follows — the eighteen months when the new operating model either takes root or gets quietly reverted under operational pressure — is exactly the period the BCG and McKinsey research identifies as decisive, and exactly the period least resourced.
06A short diagnostic for your own organisation
Before commissioning the next transformation programme, four questions tend to surface the real risk faster than a readiness assessment.
- Who carries the commercial number, by name? If the honest answer is a steering committee or a programme office, accountability has already been diffused before the work begins.
- Was the future-state design built with, or handed to, the team that will run it? Designs handed down are designs that get quietly unwound the first time they collide with an operational reality nobody anticipated.
- What is funded after go-live? If the answer is "support," not "embedding," the organisation has budgeted for the easy 80% of the work and left the hard 20% — the part that determines whether anything survives — unresourced.
- What would still be true in two years if the programme team disappeared tomorrow? This is the single most diagnostic question I use with new clients, because the honest answer usually arrives faster than people expect, and it is rarely comfortable.
07The question worth asking this week
If you are sponsoring a transformation right now, the most useful question is not "is the strategy right?" It is: who, specifically, carries the commercial outcome — and would that person's role survive the programme being declared a success at launch, with nobody checking back in eighteen months? If the honest answer is that nobody is accountable in that way, the strategy quality is close to irrelevant. You already know how the story ends, because the research above has already told you how it ends for 70% of organisations that started in exactly the same position.