CHAPTER 1
Why Change?

As professional change experts, we've mastered the art of making change work regardless of the stakes or circumstances.

We've also mastered the art of failing miserably and falling flat on our faces. To prove our point, here's a brief montage of failure for your reading pleasure.

We'll start at the individual level with Frank. One time, Frank got really into non-fungible tokens (NFTs). He bought one NFT for a couple hundred dollars, and then he got an offer to sell it for over thirty thousand dollars. He declined, certain he'd get a higher bid than that. (Insert narrator's voice: he didn't.)

On the team level, we once changed our project management tools-from smart sheets to spreadsheets and then from spreadsheets to "Oh, sheets!" when we realized the hell we wrought. That "little change" threw a gear in the works for a while. Another time, we spent three years repeatedly redesigning and relaunching our website (Softway.com). They all sucked. In fact, they got progressively worse.

We also have plenty of groaners to share at the organizational level. Like when we tried to implement 8 a.m. standups and no one showed, not even on the first day. Or the time in 2018 when we mandated the adoption of a specific time-logging system. If everyone in the company logged their time just once, we got a pizza party. No matter when you read this book, we still haven't had a pizza party.

There was also that time when Chris tried to make Beyoncé's birthday a company holiday. We're not sure how the failure works here exactly. Did Chris fail Softway for suggesting the idea, or did we fail Chris for rejecting it? He'll tell you it's the latter, but we're pretty sure it's the former. What's the big deal with Beyoncé, anyway? Has she done anything noteworthy since Destiny's Child? We don't think so.

Just kidding. We love Beyoncé.

The point is that we have failed at leading change-a lot. The organizations we work with have, too, and we're willing to bet that you and your organization have as well.

And look at us: we're all still standing. These failures are nothing to be ashamed of. (Except for those NFTs. Those were a terrible financial decision.) They're lessons to learn from. We're change experts not because we're perfect but because we've dissected our experiences-both the good and the bad-so we can understand what works.

No matter how you slice it, change is hard. It's also unavoidable. The way we see it, you can either build a change-ready organization now or get caught flat-footed when the change bug bites you. Unfortunately, that's not what most organizations do.

Change as Usual Sucks

We live in a state of perpetual and accelerating change. Some organizations lead this change proactively, while others react to it and struggle. In either case, these organizations understand they have a lot riding on the outcomes of these change efforts. For instance:

• Companies that change successfully generate almost twice the earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization; create higher shareholder returns; and experience 1.5-3 times the revenue growth.1
• Only about 34 percent of change initiatives succeed, with one-third of CEOs failing to achieve their intended outcomes.2
• Of the $1.3 trillion spent on digital transformations in 2018, an estimated $900 billion (69 percent) resulted in an avoidable loss.3

That's a lot of money spent with very little to show. As if that weren't bad enough, research shows that 50 percent of leaders don't know if their change programs succeeded or failed at their nominal conclusion.4 So, not only did they spend a lot of money and make a big change effort but they also don't know whether that effort amounted to anything.

To understand how these organizations could be leveraging so many resources with so little to show for it, just ask the employees:

• Thirty-seven percent of employees are resistant to change.5
• Two-thirds of employees experience burnout during a change initiative.6
• Employees suffering from change-related stress perform 5 percent worse than average employees.7
• Seventy-four percent of employees think their organizational leadership needs to make more effort to understand why their teams resist change.8
• While 72 percent of leaders say they involved their employees in developing a change strategy, only 42 percent of employees agreed.9

Here's what we can conclude from this data: many organizations either attempt or experience change. However, these organizations-as well as their leaders and employees-struggle to change successfully. Just like we learned in our change mishaps and failures, these problems start at the top. Research shows that over a third of executives underestimate their role and require involvement in successful change management, while a third of CEOs are fired for reported poor change management.10

So, what are our options? One is to avoid change entirely. Just set your course and try to maintain it as best you can. The other is to improve our understanding and leadership of change.

Naturally, we recommend the latter path. Throughout history, humankind has faced changes in technology, politics, weather, economies, public health, and industry. Through these massive, often involuntary shifts, these people realized the same thing we have: staying the course is neither practical nor tenable.

Most organizations appear to recognize this. In one survey, 79.7 percent of respondents expected they would need to adapt their business in the next five years.11 Many are already getting started. When we first set out to write this book in late 2024, we found over sixty thousand open positions related to change management. This massive groundswell and demand for change will fundamentally alter every organization, no matter its size.

In such a reality, the question isn't why you should change or if change will come for you but how you will effectively lead change when it is necessary.

To answer that question, first, we must examine our understanding and assumptions about change. Rather than view change as a force we must respond to, we must learn to embrace it as an opportunity to lead through.

What Is Change?

Change doesn't happen overnight because people don't change overnight. In fact, most of us resist change when we're not called or compelled to do so. Before Jeff addressed the elephant in the room and challenged our complacency during our leadership meeting (see "The Elephant in the Room"), we resisted our own change effort-even though we had conceived, planned, and initiated that change!

We resisted this change partly because it's human nature to fear change. Although we had learned a lot about pivoting an organization in the preceding years, we had never considered the nature of change and how to lead it successfully. Here's what we understand now that we didn't understand then.

CHANGE IS NONLINEAR

One day, Frank decided to go vegan. He preached to everyone who would listen about the virtues of veganism-and how tasty the food was. Had they even tried the Impossible Burger? Five stars. Would recommend.

Frank's evangelism lasted about a week. By week two, he quite literally walked into a meeting with a bucket of KFC in his hands and a giant grin on his face.

So, what happened? Why did Frank fall off the vegan wagon so quickly?

Frank would chalk it up to several reasons. First, while he had good intentions, he wasn't intrinsically motivated to change. He had some initial energy for the idea, but eventually, that energy burned out. When faced with challenges, his desire to change was put to the test. Was he willing to sacrifice and change his habits when it got a little bit uncomfortable? Turns out, the answer was no.

Second, Frank hadn't anticipated the big bump in his Whole Foods bill. Going vegan was expensive-at least the way he was doing it. Frank certainly could have overcome this challenge if he had kept with it, but in the short term, that grocery bill shook him off his goals. He hadn't anticipated the practical impact that this choice would have on his wallet.

The more salient reason, however, is that change doesn't happen in a straight line. It restarts, it repeats, it cycles through. It's an on-going effort, not a single decision, episode, or experience.

Viewed in isolation, Frank's attempt to go vegan is a failure. Viewed in the larger context of his health journey, however, it looks like a minor misstep. Sure, this little side quest didn't work out, but Frank's overall change project for his health has been a resounding success (which we'll explore more in Chapter 7). Not every step toward your goal is going to be the right one. But if you take more right steps than wrong ones, you'll get there.

Many leaders-and, as a result, organizations-don't see it this way. They see change as linear, a simple tweak of processes and technology. Set the course, mandate the change, herd your teams up, push them through the gates, and watch as the pieces fall into place. It doesn't work. A study...