Faced with the need for massive change, most managers respond predictably. They revamp the organisation’s strategy, then round up the usual set of suspects — people, pay, and processes — shifting around staff, realigning incentives, and rooting out inefficiencies.

They then wait patiently for performance to improve, only to be bitterly disappointed. For some reason, the right things still don’t happen.

Why is change so hard? First of all, most people are reluctant to alter their habits. What worked in the past is good enough; in the absence of a dire threat, employees will keep doing what they’ve always done. And when an organisation has had a succession of leaders, resistance to change is even stronger. A legacy of disappointment and distrust creates an environment in which employees automatically condemn the next turnaround champion to failure, assuming that he or she is “just like all the others.” Calls for sacrifice and self-discipline are met with cynicism, skepticism, and knee-jerk resistance.

Most major change initiatives — whether intended to boost quality, improve culture, or reverse a corporate death spiral — generate only lukewarm results. Many fail miserably.

This is so remarkably common that for the most part, organisations begrudgingly accept medicority.

We’ve found that for change to stick, leaders must design and run an effective persuasion campaign. One that begins weeks or months before the actual turnaround plan is set in concrete. Managers must perform significant work up front to ensure that employees will actually listen to tough messages, question old assumptions, and consider new ways of working.

This means taking a series of deliberate but subtle steps to recast employees’ prevailing views and create a new context for action. Such a shaping process must be actively managed during the first few months of a turnaround, when uncertainty is high and setbacks are inevitable. Otherwise, there is little hope for sustained improvement.

Why? Kotter maintains that too many managers don’t realise transformation is a process, not an event. It advances through stages that build on each other. And it takes years. Pressured to accelerate the process, managers skip stages. But shortcuts never work.

Equally troubling, even highly capable managers make critical mistakes — such as declaring victory
too soon. Result? Loss of momentum, reversal of hard-won gains, and devastation of the entire transformation effort.

By understanding the stages of change — and the pitfalls unique to each stage—you boost your chances of a successful transformation. The payoff? Your organisation flexes with tectonic shifts in competitors, markets, and technologies, leaving rivals far behind.

There are still more mistakes that people make, but these eight are the big ones. I realise that in a short article everything is made to sound a bit too simplistic. In reality, even successful change efforts are messy and full of surprises. But just as a relatively simple vision is needed to guide people through a major change, so a vision of the change process can reduce the error rate.

And fewer errors can spell the difference between success and failure.