We bring behavioral science, psychology, and neuroscience together to increase the odds of success in a transformation.
Book
How Change Really Works
Preorder and be the first to get your copy of BCG’s change book when it’s released on May 19.
BCG’s change guide shows that the secret of successful business transformation is neither rare nor mysterious—it is knowable, repeatable, and firmly rooted in the science of behavior change.
Seven Science-Based Principles for Successful Change
Change management efforts succeed or fail based on how people behave, think, and feel. Grounded in behavioral science, the seven principles for successful change outlined in our new organizational change book give leaders what they need to beat the odds and lead effective transformations and change programs.
- Get true agreement, not false alignment
- Increase agency, not just involvement
- Expect take up to be earned, not automatic
- Understand emotions through feedback, not instinct
- Use a process with rituals, not reactions
- Share stories and symbols, not just dollars
- Create momentum throughout, not just at the start
Principle 1
Too often, executive teams embark on a transformation before they truly agree on why change is needed, what those changes are, and how they will occur. When people behave as if they are more agreed than they really are, we say that they are in a state of false alignment. What they should seek instead is true agreement.
There are three common consequences of false alignment: paralysis, hyperactivity, and tunnel vision.
There are three common causes of false alignment: Sometimes, executives don’t realize that they don’t agree. At other times, they are pretending to agree to avoid conflict. And sometimes they believe they can resolve their differences later.
To reach true agreement, you should set clear parameters, provoke an early exchange, have a quality debate, come to a formal verdict, and send a unified message.
If you encounter strongly held disagreements, you have four options. The best thing to do is try disagreeing again. Alternatively, you can subtract the parts of the change program or defer them to a later date. You can also offer those who disagree an attractive exit. Or, as the worst but sometimes necessary option, you can proceed with a plan despite disagreement.
There are three common consequences of false alignment: paralysis, hyperactivity, and tunnel vision.
There are three common causes of false alignment: Sometimes, executives don’t realize that they don’t agree. At other times, they are pretending to agree to avoid conflict. And sometimes they believe they can resolve their differences later.
To reach true agreement, you should set clear parameters, provoke an early exchange, have a quality debate, come to a formal verdict, and send a unified message.
If you encounter strongly held disagreements, you have four options. The best thing to do is try disagreeing again. Alternatively, you can subtract the parts of the change program or defer them to a later date. You can also offer those who disagree an attractive exit. Or, as the worst but sometimes necessary option, you can proceed with a plan despite disagreement.
Principle 2
Agency is the capacity to make choices and act on them.
During transformation, you need your people to have a high-agency mindset because you cannot hope to prescribe everything they will need to do differently.
Asking employees for ideas and suggestions does not create a high-agency workforce unless you demonstrate that you are listening and taking action. Ineffective involvement can backfire badly.
Employees develop high-agency mindsets when you let them make genuine contributions to the changes that will affect them and to the expected outcomes. Putting effort into something makes you value it more; behavioral scientists call this the IKEA effect.
Not every employee can give input on every design question in your transformation. Give experiences of decision-making to some employees, experiences of influence to many employees, and experiences of representation to all remaining employees.
During transformation, you need your people to have a high-agency mindset because you cannot hope to prescribe everything they will need to do differently.
Asking employees for ideas and suggestions does not create a high-agency workforce unless you demonstrate that you are listening and taking action. Ineffective involvement can backfire badly.
Employees develop high-agency mindsets when you let them make genuine contributions to the changes that will affect them and to the expected outcomes. Putting effort into something makes you value it more; behavioral scientists call this the IKEA effect.
Not every employee can give input on every design question in your transformation. Give experiences of decision-making to some employees, experiences of influence to many employees, and experiences of representation to all remaining employees.
Principle 3
Take up describes people doing what you’ve asked them to do. For your transformation to succeed, initiatives need good take up from employees.
When take up is low, you may be tempted to attribute the failure to employees’ personalities, character, or commitment. This unhelpful tendency is called fundamental attribution error. Rather than expecting take up, leaders need to earn it.
To earn take up for a change, you need to eliminate seven barriers: knowledge gaps, skills gaps, time constraints, resource constraints, permission gaps, the perception that there is little to gain, and the perception that there is something to lose.
A five-step process can help you remove the barriers to take up: define whose behavior needs to change; specify the change in behavior you expect; identify barriers to new behaviors; act to minimize barriers; and measure take up and collect feedback.
When take up is low, you may be tempted to attribute the failure to employees’ personalities, character, or commitment. This unhelpful tendency is called fundamental attribution error. Rather than expecting take up, leaders need to earn it.
To earn take up for a change, you need to eliminate seven barriers: knowledge gaps, skills gaps, time constraints, resource constraints, permission gaps, the perception that there is little to gain, and the perception that there is something to lose.
A five-step process can help you remove the barriers to take up: define whose behavior needs to change; specify the change in behavior you expect; identify barriers to new behaviors; act to minimize barriers; and measure take up and collect feedback.
Principle 4
Change is an emotional experience for employees. The emotions that employees feel during a transformation may not be your fault, but they are your problem, because they affect your chances of success.
Don’t rely on your own instincts about what hundreds or thousands of employees might be feeling. Rosy retrospection (the tendency to give past events a positive spin) and social projection (the tendency to imagine that other people think, feel, or want the same things you do) hinder your judgment.
We recommend asking employees about their emotions, confidence (belief in their own abilities), and capacity (mental bandwidth for complex tasks).
Create a closed feedback loop by acting on the data employees give you in specific and personal ways.
Don’t rely on your own instincts about what hundreds or thousands of employees might be feeling. Rosy retrospection (the tendency to give past events a positive spin) and social projection (the tendency to imagine that other people think, feel, or want the same things you do) hinder your judgment.
We recommend asking employees about their emotions, confidence (belief in their own abilities), and capacity (mental bandwidth for complex tasks).
Create a closed feedback loop by acting on the data employees give you in specific and personal ways.
Principle 5
During major change, people need to engage with each other constantly to make joint decisions, share information, and build rapport.
After many conversations on many complex issues, you and others will start to suffer from decision fatigue—the cognitive exhaustion and deteriorating quality of decisions that come after repeated acts of choice-making.
In general, we can reduce decision fatigue by replacing routine decisions (like when and how to meet) with a system of automatic rituals—repeated behaviors that serve a meaningful purpose.
You can serve others well by prescribing weekly meeting rituals for people to follow. These rituals should be predefined and executed consistently, including their times, locations, and precise agendas. They should never be canceled or rescheduled.
Take designing rituals seriously. Make it easy and satisfying for employees to attend consistently. You should tap into the five HIIDE triggers: help, information, influence, duty, and enjoyment.
After many conversations on many complex issues, you and others will start to suffer from decision fatigue—the cognitive exhaustion and deteriorating quality of decisions that come after repeated acts of choice-making.
In general, we can reduce decision fatigue by replacing routine decisions (like when and how to meet) with a system of automatic rituals—repeated behaviors that serve a meaningful purpose.
You can serve others well by prescribing weekly meeting rituals for people to follow. These rituals should be predefined and executed consistently, including their times, locations, and precise agendas. They should never be canceled or rescheduled.
Take designing rituals seriously. Make it easy and satisfying for employees to attend consistently. You should tap into the five HIIDE triggers: help, information, influence, duty, and enjoyment.
Principle 6
In a transformation, stories are the most effective way to capture employees’ attention, facilitate their recall of information, and activate motivation and behavior.
Leaders make two common mistakes when developing and delivering change stories for employees: a narrow focus on financial targets with vague justifications and an overreliance on “telling” instead of using symbols to “show” as well as tell.
You should deploy one of the three types of change story: the threat story (“if we don’t change, we’ll suffer . . . or die”), the fitness story (“changing will make us stronger”), or the destiny story (“by changing, we can realize our full potential”).
Reinforce the core messages of your story by developing a complementary set of symbolic objects (things people experience or own), actions (things people do) and events (gatherings of people for a purpose).
Leaders make two common mistakes when developing and delivering change stories for employees: a narrow focus on financial targets with vague justifications and an overreliance on “telling” instead of using symbols to “show” as well as tell.
You should deploy one of the three types of change story: the threat story (“if we don’t change, we’ll suffer . . . or die”), the fitness story (“changing will make us stronger”), or the destiny story (“by changing, we can realize our full potential”).
Reinforce the core messages of your story by developing a complementary set of symbolic objects (things people experience or own), actions (things people do) and events (gatherings of people for a purpose).
Principle 7
Transformations are more likely to succeed when they gain the feeling of momentum. Leaders of successful transformations invest heavily in creating such a feeling.
Seeing progress motivates humans to go further—this is known as the endowed progress effect. In the workplace, employees are highly sensitive to their own perception of achievement—this is known as the progress principle.
You can gain and keep momentum by showing belief, promoting wins, setting new challenges for overperformers, and engineering fresh starts for underperformers.
Make predictions about how progress might ebb and flow across your transformation and make advance plans with your colleagues on how you will sustain a feeling of momentum throughout.
Seeing progress motivates humans to go further—this is known as the endowed progress effect. In the workplace, employees are highly sensitive to their own perception of achievement—this is known as the progress principle.
You can gain and keep momentum by showing belief, promoting wins, setting new challenges for overperformers, and engineering fresh starts for underperformers.
Make predictions about how progress might ebb and flow across your transformation and make advance plans with your colleagues on how you will sustain a feeling of momentum throughout.
Putting the Principles to Work
These seven principles describe what it takes for change to succeed. The five phases of change demonstrate how to put those principles into practice over the lifecycle of a transformation to drive outcomes that are sustainable. Together, they provide a structured approach for applying the right actions at the right moment.
Deciding to Change
Engage in debate with fellow executives on why change is needed, what needs to change, and how it could occur before coming to a true agreement on a specific change program and its goals.
Planning for Change
Establish a Transformation Office, determine your approach (including the definition of workstreams and their goals), appoint key leaders to your change team, and make essential preparations for the transformation.
Starting Change
Launch the transformation with announcements and events, prepare detailed, bottom-up plans, prioritize and finalize the full transformation plan, execute and deliver early wins, and start executing the full organizational change plan.
Persisting with Change
Demonstrate sustained progress, proactively measure and respond to emotions, persist with your rituals and transformation approach, manage contextual pressures, and periodically refill your pipeline of initiatives and projects.
Ending Change
Decide how to end your transformation and what is next for your company. Consolidate knowledge, celebrate achievements, and determine what’s next.
Meet the Authors
We wrote How Change Really Works because organizations and people deserve better returns and experiences from their transformation and change investments. Executives need an easy guide grounded in science and data to help them anticipate obstacles. Employees deserve change programs built with their needs and emotions in mind. Change can be more scientific, and far more successful.
Our Insights into How Change Really Works
Video
May 8, 2025
The Key to Navigating Change with Confidence
What if the change you fear most is actually the best thing for you? Kristy Ellmer explains how even the most difficult transitions can open unexpected doors.
Video
June 28, 2020
How to Disagree Productively and Find Common Ground
Public discourse is broken. BCG’s Julia Dhar shares three techniques to reshape how we talk with—and disagree with—each other.
Article
April 16, 2025
Unlikely as it seems, businesses can not only thrive amid economic uncertainty—they can seize the opportunity to transform for sustained growth.
Article
April 12, 2024
In an increasingly turbulent world, the need for and the challenges of corporate change remain remarkably persistent. Empirical insights reveal how change leaders can beat the odds.
Article
January 26, 2024
Transformations are critical to building competitive advantage and delivering shareholder value. They are most successful when managed through a transformation office.
Why Is Change So Hard?
Change is hard because the people leading change and the people living it experience it very differently. We call the gap between the two groups change distance. In our research with more than 6,000 executives and employees for our organizational change book How Change Really Works, 68% of executives feel positive about a change before they have even heard the details, compared with only 45% of employees. When asked whether a change is likely to succeed, 72% of leaders said yes, but only 49% of employees share that confidence. Leaders also tend to overestimate how much their enthusiasm is shared across the organization, a cognitive bias known as the false consensus effect. Change works when leaders understand change distance and act to close it.
Why Is My Transformation Not Working?
Transformations commonly fail because leaders invest heavily in the what of change (the goals and expected outcomes) and simultaneously underinvest in the how (the way they will lead and execute).
Specifically, your organizational change plan may not be working because leaders:
- haven’t reached true agreement on what needs to change, and why—creating contradictory signals that radiate outward through the organization;
- have asked employees for input without giving them genuine agency to shape the change—which backfires;
- have assumed that take up of new behaviors and change is automatic, rather than something that has to be earned by removing specific barriers;
- are relying on instinct rather than real feedback to understand how employees feel;
- are overloading people with a reactive, inconsistent process instead of structured rituals that reduce decision fatigue;
- are focusing too narrowly on financial targets without a compelling story that resonates emotionally;
- launched with energy, but have lost momentum — and haven't planned for how to sustain it.
What’s the Difference Between Change Management and Transformation?
Change management refers to a set of practices for helping people adopt specific new behaviors, tools, or processes. Transformation is broader: it describes a large-scale, organization-wide effort that fundamentally shifts how a company operates, competes, or creates value.
A transformation typically involves multiple interconnected workstreams, a sustained commitment of executive time (often 30% to 70% of capacity across phases that span months or years), and structural shifts in how the organization works. It will include many change management activities, but it also requires an activist Transformation Office, a phased execution framework, deliberate investment in narrative and symbols, ritualized meetings to protect against decision fatigue, and continuous measurement of employee emotion and organizational momentum.
