Why the traditional ways of changing your organization no longer work

Around 70% of large-scale corporate transformation efforts fail. That figure has remained consistent for 25 years—and it comes from an era of relatively manageable change. Artificial intelligence will demand far more of companies: faster adaptation, more comprehensive reinvention, and continuous evolution rather than periodic adjustment. Yet more than three years after the launch of ChatGPT, only 5% of businesses report extracting significant value from their AI initiatives. If companies struggled with transformation before, the coming years will be harder still. Managing rapid change is becoming the central competency for business leadership.

Every serious observer agrees that executives need to develop new skills and mindsets to navigate what is coming. Yet there is a paradox at the heart of corporate America’s response. In a recent survey of leaders at large organizations, the Center for Creative Leadership found that 82% believed leadership development offers a competitive advantage amid economic uncertainty, and 72% said that cutting development budgets would create significant challenges. Yet 71% expected those budgets to be reduced in the event of any downturn.

How can leaders simultaneously believe that executive development is essential while treating it as expendable? The answer isn’t confusion or hypocrisy. It is that businesses have lost faith in the solutions on offer.

The Problems With Traditional Approaches

And rightly so. Traditionally, companies have turned to executive education programs to help guide them through change. But most of these programs tend to focus on information transfer—sharing research findings without showing how to apply them to the specific realities of an individual business. The work of translation falls entirely on the leadership team. At the same time, much of the research informing these programs is backward-looking. Foundational studies may have been conducted two, three, or even more years ago. That cadence just can’t keep pace with the speed at which AI is reshaping competitive landscapes.

The classic consulting model does not fare any better. Whether providing leadership coaching or conducting transformation work directly, these engagements are expensive and the results they deliver are unreliable. More fundamentally, the pace of change ahead makes it simply unfeasible to bring in external teams to reshape the organization every time an advance in AI tech delivers paradigm-shifting capabilities. This approach is not sustainable financially, operationally, or culturally.

The Resources Are Already There

At present, most companies see organizational change as something rare that needs to be handled episodically. As a result, they lack the embedded processes that enable continuous innovation and transformation. They invest in a leadership program here and an external engagement there without ever establishing the permanent mechanisms that can capture value from new developments on an ongoing basis. This means that every disruption must be addressed from scratch, as if the organization had learned nothing from the last one.

Instead of looking outward, corporations should be making the most of the resources they already have. Most companies employ extremely capable leaders who understand how their organizations actually work far better than any outside advisor could hope to. I have seen this repeatedly in the more than thirty years I have spent leading transformation initiatives at major corporations and government agencies. The talent and the institutional knowledge are already there—they just need to be unlocked.

What is missing is not capability. It is a repeatable management system—and a spark.

Repeatable Management Systems

If the internal resources are already there, why aren’t companies already building these management systems on their own? The answer is that potential is not the same as momentum. Most organizations need something to break through the inertia—a catalyst that disrupts established patterns and creates the conditions for change to take hold.

This is where outside expertise remains essential. But the nature of that expertise must change. The goal is not to perform the transformation work on the organization’s behalf. It is to provide the spark that sets internal capabilities in motion: diagnosing the current state, establishing the right frameworks, and building the confidence that allows leadership teams to take ownership of what comes next.

Think of it as the difference between hiring someone to drive your car and hiring an instructor who teaches you to drive yourself. Both involve external help. But only one leaves you with a capability you can use forever.

The key is establishing repeatable management systems that can be applied consistently across different challenges. When transformation processes are repeatable, each new disruption becomes an occasion to deploy proven methods rather than an emergency that demands improvisation from scratch.

Building repeatable management systems is not a matter of snapping one’s fingers. But all the core ingredients exist within most large organizations. Outside partners can help establish the frameworks and get things moving in the right direction. But once an organization has built the engine to manage its ongoing evolution, it should not have to keep returning to the well again and again.

The Compounding Advantage

Businesses cannot afford to keep approaching change in the same way they have for decades. It has not worked well historically, and it will work even less well in the years ahead. The companies that thrive will be those that stop waiting for external partners to perform transformation on their behalf and start building the internal systems that make continuous adaptation part of how they operate.

The organizations that get this right first will build a compounding advantage. Once the spark has been provided and the engine is running, each successive change becomes easier. The organization learns from one transformation and applies those lessons to the next. Meanwhile, competitors who remain locked in cycles of episodic external intervention will struggle to keep pace with technological shifts that arrive faster than any outside partner can respond to.

Five Steps to Unlock Your Internal Transformation Capability

• Recognize that the capability already exists. Stop assuming that transformation requires importing talent or expertise your organization lacks. Audit the skills, institutional knowledge, and leadership capacity you already have. The gap is rarely capability—it is the management systems and confidence needed to channel that capability toward change.
• Seek sparks, not ongoing support. When you bring in outside help, structure engagements around ignition, not dependency. The right external partner diagnoses your current state, establishes frameworks, and builds internal confidence—then steps back. The measure of their success is whether your organization can manage the next transformation on its own.
• Establish permanent change infrastructure. Create the internal systems, frameworks, and repeatable processes that will allow your organization to manage continuous evolution. This includes clear decision-rights for transformational initiatives, standardized methodologies for workflow redesign, and protocols for evaluating and deploying new capabilities. The goal is to make transformation a core organizational competence rather than an occasional intervention.
• Move transformation ownership to the CEO. Stop treating leadership development and organizational change as HR functions or IT projects. When the chief executive owns the transformation strategy, it becomes integrated with business objectives rather than running parallel to them. Development initiatives should be evaluated against strategic outcomes, not training completion rates.
• Build learning loops into every change. The compounding advantage comes from treating each transformation as an opportunity to strengthen your capacity for the next one. After every significant change initiative, capture what worked, what failed, and what you would do differently. Feed those lessons back into your frameworks and processes so the organization genuinely learns rather than simply moves on.

The age of AI demands a new approach to how organizations change. The old models—whether executive education or traditional consulting—served a slower world. That world is gone. The companies that will lead in the years ahead will not be those that find the best external partners to perform transformation for them. They will be those that find the right spark to unlock the transformation capability they already possess.