In 1996, Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter published the best-selling book Leading Change. In it he reported that only 30 percent of all change programs succeed and offered an eight-step process for managing change. The popularity of his work triggered an explosion of thinking. In the 15 years that followed, more than 25,000 books were published, hundreds of business schools built change management into their curricula, and many organizations created change-management functions.
By 2011, when the first version of Beyond Performance was published, one would have expected success rates to be much higher. The facts, however, were clear: multiple studies, including one by McKinsey & Company, had shown that the odds of leading a successful change program remained unchanged. The field of change management, despite its prolific output, hadn’t improved success rates.
Almost five years after Beyond Performance was published, enough time had passed that the efficacy of the approach it detailed could be tested to know if it was helping leaders beat the 30 percent odds of change success. A second global survey of 1,713 executives who had been part of at least one large-scale change program was conducted. The sample represented a full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. The results spoke for themselves: 79 percent of those organizations that fully implemented the Five Frames of Performance and Health methodology reported their change programs were successful.