Damon Boswell and Ashley Boswell cut through the '70% failure' myth to reveal what actually separates transformations that sustain from those that quietly revert.
There is a number that haunts every change management conversation: 70% of transformations fail. Damon Boswell has heard it in boardrooms, read it in pitch decks, and watched it be cited as settled fact by consultants selling the cure. The problem, as he is quick to tell clients, is that the number is not settled fact at all. Academic researchers have spent over a decade tracing the 70% claim through its citation chain — from Kotter to McKinsey to Bain — and found that in every case the figure was either stated without evidence or cited another source that stated it without evidence. The number is a meme, not a measurement. But the underlying truth it gestures at is real: change is genuinely hard, and somewhere between half and two-thirds of transformations produce disappointing results by most definitions of success.
The more useful question is not how many fail, but what separates the ones that succeed. Ashley Boswell has guided enough transformations to know that the difference is rarely the quality of the strategy. The strategy deck is usually strong. The difference is in the execution — specifically, in the discipline of managing adoption, which is the part most programs leave entirely unmanaged. Organizations keep getting better at installation — the go-live, the new technology, the tighter project management — and no better at implementation, the sustained behavioral change that follows. The gap between the two is where transformations die.
McKinsey's most detailed research on transformation outcomes confirms this. Their global surveys, conducted over fifteen years, consistently find that less than a third of respondents say their transformations succeeded at both improving performance and sustaining those improvements over time. But the more revealing finding is where value gets lost: not in the planning, but in the failure to engage the people who have to live with the change. At companies where frontline employees took visible ownership of the transformation, McKinsey found success rates of 70% or higher. At companies where the change was pushed down from the top without that ownership, the odds collapsed. The people dimension, not the technology dimension, is usually the determining factor.
Damon Boswell structures a change management engagement around a framework that addresses the adoption gap directly. The first pillar is sponsorship — a visible, sustained, and active executive sponsor who champions the change long after the launch event. A sponsor who appears at the kickoff and disappears by week three signals to the organization that the initiative is not actually a priority. The second pillar is communication — not the one-way email blast, but the two-way conversation that gives people a chance to voice concerns, ask questions, and shape how the change lands in their daily work. Face-to-face communication, McKinsey found, is one of the strongest predictors of transformation success.
The third pillar is what Ashley Boswell calls the 'what's in it for me' layer. Most change programs explain the business case to the leadership team and assume the message will cascade. It does not. A frontline employee does not adopt a new process because it improves shareholder value. They adopt it because it makes their work easier, because they trust the person asking them to change, or because they were involved in designing it. Building the case for change at the level of the individual — not just the organization — is the work that turns compliance into commitment. Without it, the team will go through the motions until the pressure lifts, and then quietly revert.
The fourth pillar is reinforcement. Damon Boswell is insistent that change is not an event with a finish line; it is a behavior that has to be reinforced until it becomes the new default. That means adjusting incentives so the new behavior is rewarded, removing the old systems and shortcuts that make reverting easy, and measuring adoption long after the go-live. Prosci's research, drawn from over 10,000 change practitioners, found that organizations with excellent change management discipline achieved adoption rates of 88% — compared to the dismal baseline. The gap between 12% and 88% is not luck. It is the difference between managing adoption and hoping for it.
Ashley Boswell is candid about why this discipline is so often skipped. Adoption work is slow, unglamorous, and difficult to put on a project timeline. Installation has a go-live date. Implementation has a behavior curve that takes months and resists neat reporting. Leaders under pressure to show progress gravitate toward the measurable milestone and defer the human work. But the deferral is not a savings — it is a debt that comes due the moment the project team disbands and the organization is left with a new system nobody actually uses.
Change management is not a soft skill layered on top of transformation. It is the core mechanism through which transformation either takes hold or fails. Damon Boswell and Ashley Boswell help leadership teams build the sponsorship, communication, personal case, and reinforcement that beat the odds — because the transformations that sustain are the ones that were built to be adopted, not just installed. That is the work, and it is the work Blueprint Business Advisors was built to do.
