Determined to Change: Why Most Change Efforts Crash During Takeoff

‍ ‍

The crash does not usually happen during landing. It's often happens during takeoff.

A few years ago, I stood in an executive conference room on the ninth floor of a large construction company. I was about to share findings that no one in that room wanted to hear. Out of 138 process improvement initiatives completed over three years, only nineteen had sustained.

The silence was immediate. Disbelief shifted to discomfort. Then came the blame.

I asked the team to pause — not to point fingers — but to look honestly at what had happened in their culture throughout the change effort. What we found was not surprising. The change has launched with success at the top, yet it landed nowhere near the people responsible for sustaining it.

‍ Being determined to change happens in a moment of truth and pain.

‍This scene is hot in organizations everywhere. Leaders invest in the right strategy, hire the right consultants, and build the right plan. They launch with energy. And then, out of nowhere, the initiative stalls. The reports keep coming. The metrics look acceptable. But something essential has stopped moving.

‍According to KPMG, 80 percent of organizations have experienced at least one major project failure in the previous 12 months. McKinsey puts the failure rate of large-scale transformation programs even higher. The numbers are not surprising as teams leap forward faster with less data.

‍The challenge is not the failed initiative. The gap is the cost of time and people who gave everything to make it work, without being given what they needed to succeed.

‍ Crash Patterns

‍ In Determined to Change, we identify seven patterns that predict failure. One common pattern is misalignment at the top — when executives disagree on the vision, the inconsistency cascades and teams interpret the confusion as a lack of commitment to clarity. Clarity impacts trust, and without it, people comply on the surface and resist in the trenches. When the grapevine carries more truth than leadership communication, the narrative is already lost.

‍Then there is abandonment, when people feel their concerns are dismissed. Once they feel abandoned, they stop contributing. We observe Superficial Compliance in action when teams nod in silence during meetings to protect themselves from a culture that punishes honesty.

‍I can’t help but of Mesha, a nurse manager who built a brilliant training program to improve the patient experience during an emergency crisis. She had purpose, creativity, and a committed team. What she didn't have was the contributions of the lead physician in the room. The program crashed before it launched — not because of a flawed idea, but because the right voice wasn't at the table from the start.

‍The Save Before Takeoff

‍Leaders who navigate this well share one counterintuitive habit: they slow the start so the middle can move fast. Before launch, they invest time in the conversations most leaders skip — the ones about resistance, assumptions, competing priorities, and the people who will carry the change when the excitement fades.

‍ They ask: What might we be missing? Who isn't at the table yet? Where do our assumptions about readiness fall short? These are not feel-good questions. They are risk-management questions. And the leaders who ask them before launch are the ones whose change actually lands.

People do not resist change. They resist confusion.

The executive team on that ninth floor eventually did something hard. They stopped defending the failed initiatives and started analyzing why the 19 had survived. The answer was consistent: in every case that sustained, the senior leader co-created the solution with their teams. They made it safe for others to say what wasn't working, before it was too late to course-correct.

‍This is a people-centered approach to change. And it changes everything about how you lead your next initiative.

‍Before your next change goes live, block 90 minutes with your team. Not to review the plan, but to connect the dots for your team and to break down where the plan is missing, and who needs to be in the room before you launch.

‍People do not resist change. They resist confusion. As AI reshapes how work is done, we help  senior leaders improve leadership alignment to drive better results, faster. Let’s connect.