You’ve probably heard that 70% of change programmes fail. It gets quoted in board papers, consultancy pitches and conference keynotes with the confidence of settled science. It turns up on the first slide of a good deal of change management training too.

It isn’t. When academics went looking for the original evidence behind that figure, they struggled to find any. Mark Hughes, writing in the Journal of Change Management,  traced the claim back through citation after citation and concluded there was no empirical basis for it at all. It has survived because it’s memorable, not because it’s true.

Which matters more than it might seem. If you believe most change fails, you plan defensively. You over-communicate the inevitability of it and under-invest in the people being asked to live through it. And you arrive at the first sign of pushback with a ready-made explanation: resistance. Told you so.

Resistance is usually information

In fifteen years of helping organisations through change, I’ve almost never met someone who was simply against change in principle. What I meet instead are people who know something the plan doesn’t.

The depot supervisor who can tell you exactly why the new shift pattern will fall over in week three. The customer service adviser who has already spotted that the new system asks a question the customer can’t possibly answer. The engineer who has watched three versions of this initiative come and go and is waiting to see whether this one survives the next reorganisation.

That isn’t resistance. That’s operational intelligence arriving through the only channel available to it. Label it as resistance and you lose the information and the person in one move.

What actually makes change stick

McKinsey’s research on this is blunt: when people are genuinely invested in a change, it is around 30% more likely to stick. Not informed about it. Not consulted on it after the decision. Invested in it.

The distinction is the whole game. Most change programmes — and a fair amount of change management training with them — are, in practice, communication exercises. There’s a plan, and then there’s a campaign to explain the plan, and the explaining is mistaken for involvement. People can tell the difference immediately. They know when they’re being consulted and when they’re being managed.

Genuine investment means something was actually different because of what people said. Not everything — not every decision is up for negotiation, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. But something. And people need to be able to point at it.

Understand, create, deliver

This is why every programme we build follows the same three phases, in the same order.

Understand. Before anything is designed, we listen. Frontline staff, supervisors, union representatives, the people who’ve been there twenty years and the ones who joined last month. Not a survey — conversations. The themes that emerge are almost never the ones the steering group predicted.

Create. Then we build, using what we heard. Real scenarios drawn from real situations people described, in the language they actually use. When someone recognises their own job in a training scenario, the argument about relevance is over before it starts.

Deliver. And we deliver in a way that outlasts us, usually through in-house facilitators and employee change champions who are still there long after the programme has finished. Change that depends on external consultants remaining in the building was never change. It was supervision.

Why change management training must reach middle managers

One more thing worth saying, because it’s where most change leadership training misses the mark.

Senior leaders get the vision. Frontline teams get the training. Middle managers get a to-do list and are expected to hold the whole thing together while still hitting last year’s targets. They’re asked to advocate for a change they had no hand in shaping, absorb the frustration of their teams, and show no doubt while doing it.

If your change programme has a weak point, it is almost certainly there. Give that group the time, the honest briefing and the practical skills to have hard conversations, and a surprising amount of the rest looks after itself.

Nobody wakes up wanting to resist change. They wake up wanting to do a decent job, to not be made to look foolish, and to have some say in what happens to them. Design for that and you’re most of the way there.

If you’re planning a change that depends on people actually behaving differently, let’s talk about how change management training could support it. Explore our website, read our blog, and follow us on LinkedIn to learn more and discover ways to grow a more successful business.