After failing at change a few times early in my career, I set out to understand what I was doing wrong.

During the next 25 years, I’ve looked at scores of companies going through change. I’ve read the literature and learned I wasn’t alone: Two-thirds of change efforts fail, according to McKinsey, which studied more than 3,000 change efforts.

Why?

The “experts” will say you need a good strategy and great execution to succeed at change. And you do. But plenty of organizations I studied had perfectly fine strategy and execution and they still failed at change.

Ultimately, after peeling back the onion on this, I found one big differentiator at the winning organizations: Mindset. They had a different mindset about change.

There were many aspects to the mindset difference, but the biggest one had to do with how their leaders thought about their people.

You see, it turns out that organizations don’t change. Things don’t change (except for the weather). No, organizations and things don’t change: People do.

If our people don’t change, there is no change. Full stop.

I’ve had to work on my own mindset about this throughout my career. It’s a journey.

I hope you’ll join it.

Let me know what you think. I look forward to being in touch.

Al Comeaux