A few years ago I watched a national public service agency try to change how a few hundred people worked, overnight, with a memo. New scopes, new reporting lines, a new way of communicating between teams and managers, all announced in a single note de service. No meeting, no transition period, no one asking what anyone stood to lose. Just: this is how it works now.
The memo went out. The work didn’t change. Six months later, most teams were still operating exactly the way they had before, underneath the paperwork that said otherwise.
I think about that agency every time I read that the success rate for organisational transformations has sat at roughly 30 percent for more than fifteen years. Not improving. Not getting worse. Just stuck, according to McKinsey’s own longitudinal research, through a decade that gave companies better tools, more data, and a lot more change management certifications than they had in 2011. A number that refuses to move for that long usually isn’t telling you about a skills gap. It’s telling you the mistake is structural.
Here’s the Bridges line I can’t stop applying to that agency:
when a change happens without people going through a transition, it is just a rearrangement of the chairs.
The memo rearranged the chairs perfectly. Org chart, done. Reporting lines, done. What it never did was the other half of the job Bridges names explicitly: someone has to say out loud, specifically, what it is time to leave behind. Not “we’re modernising.” What, exactly, is ending, and for whom. Most leaders, Bridges writes, spend ten percent of their energy explaining the problem and ninety percent selling the solution. That agency spent close to zero percent on either. It just announced the outcome and assumed the transition would follow the memo home.
It didn’t. It never does.
There’s a second McKinsey piece, newer, that complicates the 30 percent story in a way I find more useful than the number itself: leaders who understand what they’re actually managing can apparently flip the odds to 70 or 80 percent. Which means the stuck number isn’t a ceiling on what’s possible, it’s an average across a lot of organisations solving the wrong problem well. A perfectly executed memo is still a memo.
I don’t fully know yet what I’d have told that agency to do differently in the room, under whatever pressure produced a same-day memo instead of a plan. I know what Bridges would have told them. I know what fifteen years of a flat number is still proving, one unread memo at a time.
Sources: William Bridges & Susan Bridges, Managing Transitions. McKinsey — Losing From Day One: Why Even Successful Transformations Fall Short (30% success rate, unchanged for over fifteen years). McKinsey — Change Is Changing: How to Meet the Challenge of Radical Reinvention (informed leaders reaching 70-80% success rates). Mission anonymised, same convention as the city near Paris in “Change as Becoming What Was Already Possible.”
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