By Eleanor Tweddell
Most organisations plan meticulously for change itself and barely at all for how employees experience it, a gap now costing revenue, trust and execution.
Eleanor Tweddell spent 23 years leading transformation communications for global corporate brands before creating Another Door, a platform helping people and organisations navigate change. Her direct answer to why so many transformations underdeliver: it’s often not the change itself. It’s the trust, space, and honesty employees are, or aren’t, given while navigating through it. It’s time we acknowledge that change is not a process to get through, that humans are involved, and they are messy.
Why do we keep calling change a failure?
Every consulting report includes some version of the same statistic: roughly seven in ten change programmes fail. It’s been quoted for over a decade, in different forms, in training and talks across the land. But the question worth exploring isn’t just about the figure, or volume of failures, it’s about what is meant by ‘failure’?
That commentary often comes from measuring change against a plan: a Gantt chart, a fixed go-live date, a neat line between “before” and “after.” But change doesn’t actually move in a straight line. It’s iterative. It requires false starts, ideas that get tried and dropped, conversations that couldn’t happen on schedule because nobody knew they had to happen until they happened. Judged against the original plan, that looks like drift, delay, failure. Judged against what the organisation needed to learn, it’s often exactly the process working.
Gartner’s 2025 HR research found that only 32% of business leaders report achieving genuinely healthy employee adoption of their most recent major change and that organisations which do get this right see roughly double the year-over-year revenue growth of those that don’t. That’s a more useful data point because it isn’t measuring against an idealised plan. It’s asking whether the people living through the change experienced it as well led.
Leaders have spent years refining the mechanics of change: sharper timelines, better project governance, deeper technology rollouts, with frameworks and the Gantt chart getting more sophisticated (perhaps more complex too?). What hasn’t had the focus is how the people inside the change are experiencing it, day to day, mess and all, while it’s happening to them, and seeing it as an opportunity rather than an inconvenience to manage through.
Why isn’t change itself the real risk?
The instinct in most organisations is to treat employee resistance as a communications problem: a messaging gap, a training deficiency, something to be solved with a better slide deck. This misreads what resistance really is.
Resistance is data. It reflects trust, capacity, and whether people believe the change was designed with them in mind or simply delivered to them. It can also hold insights on why the change will succeed or fail, or questions that turn into opportunity. Dismissing employee resistance as a problem starts to shut down the willingness to join the journey.
Gartner’s longitudinal tracking shows employees’ willingness to support enterprise change fell from 74% in 2016 to just 43% in 2022, even as the average number of major changes employees were expected to absorb annually rose sharply over the same period.
The workforce hasn’t grown lazier or more resistant by nature, or even fatigued necessarily. It is a workforce that has been through repeated cycles of change that was announced and landed, rather than led and invited to join in, and has adjusted its trust accordingly.
What does the old leadership playbook get wrong now?
Most leaders were brought up on change being about setting a compelling vision, a ‘burning platform,’ projecting confident direction, rally the organisation around a clear “after” state. This works well when there is a genuine destination to describe.
It doesn’t work as well in times of uncertainty. AI adoption, geopolitical volatility, and continuous restructuring don’t always come with a confident future vision. Leaders who perform certainty they don’t have aren’t reassuring anyone. Employees can generally tell the difference, and the pretence erodes trust faster than an honest “we don’t have all the answers” ever would.
| Old playbook | What replaces it |
| Rally the organisation around a confident vision | Create space for honest, ongoing dialogue |
| One-off town halls with pre-approved Q&A | Regular, iterative check-ins that hold space for questions and conversations |
| Leaders project certainty to maintain authority | Leaders name what they don’t know to build trust |
| Change communicated top-down as a fixed plan | Change explored collaboratively as it unfolds |
| Resistance treated as a messaging failure | Resistance treated as insights and information |
How can leaders build trust through uncertainty?
What replaces the rallying speech is conversation. I call this approach messy conversations: not a polished town hall with pre-screened questions, but the honest, sometimes uncomfortable exchange where someone can say what’s actually worrying them, what still feels unclear, and what can realistically be focused on right now. And they feel safe to do so.
These aren’t one-off events; they work best as an ongoing commitment, regular check-ins that hold space for both immediate priorities and longer-term exploration, rather than forcing people to compartmentalise one while also carrying the other.
This is a harder shift for leaders than it sounds. It trades the comfort of authority for the discomfort of presence, and requires leaders to regulate their own uncertainty well enough to sit with everyone else’s, rather than reaching for false reassurance that makes the discomfort disappear faster on the surface, while doing nothing to address it underneath. The leaders who can do this consistently, who can say “I don’t know, let’s explore together” out loud and still hold the room, are the ones building the kind of trust the data above shows is now in genuinely short supply.
What can leaders do differently?
A few shifts follow from treating the experience of change as a strategic variable:
- Measure trust in change, not just adoption of it. Go-live dates and usage metrics are always tracked; whether employee trust in leadership’s ability to manage change is rising or falling over time is rarely tracked, despite being one of the more reliable predictors of whether change will bring maximum opportunities.
- Build a deliberate pause into the timeline. Space for people to process before they are asked to perform in a new way looks unproductive on a project plan. In practice, it’s one of the most effective forms of helping employees navigate change, make it meaningful for them, and therefore make it happen.
- Equip managers to say “I don’t know” without losing authority. Manager confidence is one of the largest gaps in the research. This is less a training-content problem, although training can help, but more often it’s a permission problem; managers need explicit licence and encouragement to be honest about uncertainty.
- Investigate resistance instead of seeing it as a problem to be fixed. Resistance nearly always contains insights and information, from where the change design didn’t account for how people actually work to opportunities to take advantage of.
The human experience of change remains one of the largest, most measurable and most consistently overlooked risks, and therefore also opportunities, left on the table because it hasn’t earned a place on the traditional dashboard yet. The organisations that will take advantage of change, and maximise potential during change and uncertainty will be the ones that get better at leading people through the middle of it, and acknowledging it’s messy but all part of the process, absolutely not a failure.
Eleanor Tweddell
