What Are Change Management Issues?
- Change Management Issues
- The people, cultural, and process barriers that prevent planned organisational change from achieving its intended outcomes. Research consistently finds that approximately 70% of change initiatives fail — and that the primary causes are almost never technical or strategic, but human: inadequate leadership, insufficient communication, unmanaged resistance, and failure to embed new behaviours.
Kotter’s research at Harvard Business School, published in Leading Change (1996), analysed over 100 major transformation efforts and identified eight recurring failure patterns. These remain as relevant today as when first documented.
The Most Common Change Management Issues
| Issue | What It Looks Like | Prevention Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Insufficient urgency | People do not believe change is truly necessary; complacency | Present compelling data on current performance gap; make the cost of inaction visible |
| Weak coalition | Change is driven by one leader or function; broader buy-in absent | Build a cross-functional guiding coalition with genuine authority and credibility |
| No clear vision | People cannot articulate where the change is going or why | Create a vivid, specific, communicable vision; test it by asking team members to describe it |
| Under-communication | Change is announced once; questions go unanswered | Over-communicate through multiple channels; address resistance directly and repeatedly |
| Obstacles not removed | Systems, structures, or managers block the new behaviours | Identify and eliminate structural barriers; address resistant managers explicitly |
| No short-term wins | People cannot see progress; cynicism grows | Plan and celebrate visible early wins within 6–12 months |
| Declaring victory too early | Pressure eases before new behaviours are embedded | Keep urgency high until new culture is demonstrably self-sustaining |
| Culture not anchored | New ways of working not connected to organisational identity | Explicitly link changes to values; hire and promote based on new cultural standards |
The Human Factor: Why People Resist Change
Resistance is not obstruction — it is information. Common sources of resistance include:
- Fear of job loss, status loss, or skill obsolescence
- Lack of trust in leadership’s motives or competence
- Genuine disagreement with the change design (sometimes valid)
- Psychological contract breach — the change violates implicit expectations
Effective change leaders treat resistance as a diagnostic signal rather than a management problem to suppress.
Related Change Management Resources
- Change Management Models: Lewin, Kotter, ADKAR
- Change Management Process: Step-by-Step Guide
- The Change Curve: Managing Emotional Reactions
- Psychological Contract: How Change Breaks Implicit Agreements
The following section contains our original guide to change management issues and failure factors.
What are the change management issues? In most instances, change management initiatives fail.
The Journal of Change Management in 2002 stated, “Change initiatives crucial to organisational success fail 70% of the time.”
There are many studies which suggest similar statistics. So what change management issues cause this high rate of failure? Kotter, in his book, ‘Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management’, lists the following points as the main reasons why change fails:
- Allowing too much complexity – Getting bogged down into too much detail instead of keeping an eye on the bigger picture.
- Failing to build a substantial coalition – failing to create momentum through effective teams that drive the change.
- Not understanding the need for a clear vision – Failure to understand a clear vision for everyone to drive towards is the biggest sin. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know how to get there? If people cannot see the direction, they are lost and will resort back to the old way of working.
- Failing to clearly communicate the vision – No Vision means no future goal to drive towards.
- Permitting roadblocks against the vision – Not understanding potential roadblocks, and not acting on them when they arise permits long term failure. Every road block must be overcome, or negativity festers and breeds.
- Not planning and getting short-term wins – It’s a long process and without quick wins that everyone can see, morale suffers – low morale increases the chance of systems, processes and ways of working falling back to the way things were before the change.
- Declaring victory too soon – Celebrate those successes, but never take your foot of the pedal. The minute you celebrate victory in the plan, the minute Leaders stop enforcing the message, and things fall back. – it’s a long process
- Not anchoring changes in corporate culture – Through enforcement of the vision and regular reviews and audits over time, culture slowly changes and becomes anchored. If a change programme incorporates a quick implementation and then nothing to reinforce this, it will positively 100% fail!
The bottom line is, change management issues arise because you are dealing with people, and change in people. We all have our own beliefs and values, and we all have to understand change and believe in this. If we don’t see the benefit and vision, then we will simply not want to change and will create natural barriers.
The greater the number of people who don’t want to change, the greater the chance of failure. – Communication, therefore, is crucial. Communicating the vision is doubly imperative.
Other change management issues
Change comes from effectively leading cultural change in people. Using a change management plan is crucial, but more importantly, that change management plan must also capture a transition plan.
Most practitioners concentrate solely on developing a Change Management plan and not on the transition plan within the same document. Here are the differences:
•A change management plan – Focuses on the process of change and the tasks needed to successfully complete the project. It starts with the end in mind and works back.
•The Transition plan – focuses on people and culture change, starting on the current culture and looks at how to transition into the new desired state.
Failure to focus on the cultural change side creates a high degree of failure and adds to the list of change management issues in organisational development.
Change is constant..
Change cannot be enforced, nor can it be sold. It has to be communicated, nurtured and developed until those affected believe in it and drive it themselves. Not everyone will, but the majority should, given the right environment, and it’s the majority that you want on board to drive the new ways of working and beliefs that will support change.