A recent McKinsey survey examines the reasons executives cite for successful and unsuccessful implementations, and in doing so, offers one set of explanations for why organizational transformations so rarely succeed.
Organizations often redesign themselves to unlock latent value. They typically pay a great deal of attention to the form of the new design, but in our experience, much less to actually making the plan happen—even though only a successfully implemented redesign generates value. This survey asked why organizations redesigned, what challenges they faced, what tactics they used for implementation, and how the redesign and its delivery affected employee morale and shareholder value.