The Reality of Creating New Realities

Successful enterprise transformation is considered the holy grail of the corporate world — continually sought after, but difficult to grasp. 25 years ago, John Kotter highlighted the challenge when he made his now-famous assertion that 70% of corporate transformation efforts are doomed to fail.

Today, organizations are still littered with compelling visions of the future that never made it off the PowerPoint slide. While it's challenging for leaders to paint pictures of transformative futures, it's even harder to mobilize people to create them. The gap between imagining tomorrow and building it is where many stumble - and where the real work begins.

Hillary Carey, Ph.D. studies how organizations design compelling futures, but she sat down with my longtime colleague Mike Lin and me to explore the harder challenge: how organizations actually implement them.

Drawing from our successes -- and failures -- working with private and public sector clients, we discovered that while strategic planning matters, three key principles drive successful transformation:

> Move at the pace of social energy
> Plan carefully and then accept the unexpected
> Change emerges as people see a role for themselves in it

We unpacked what it really takes to turn imaginative futures into tangible realities - and why the human element makes all the difference.

As you read on, consider:

What might happen if we stopped treating transformation as a perfectly orchestrated symphony and started seeing it as jazz improvisation?

How would your change initiatives shift if you focused less on perfect plans and more on perfect timing?

What becomes possible when you start seeing resistance not as an obstacle, but as valuable feedback about where energy truly lies?

Here’s the interview.