Organizational Change in 2026: The Principles Still Hold. The Stakes Are Higher.

A retrospective on “Five Critical Principles to Guide Organizational Change,” originally published in OD Practitioner, 2017

The issue no longer is whether organizations know how to drive change but rather whether their leaders can sustain it long enough for it to matter.

At the time we published our five principles for organizational change ten years ago, up to 93% of change initiatives were failing to meet their goals. The five principles we offered were designed to close the gaps that Bridges, Schein, and Kotter left open — chief among them, change leadership. Kotter himself acknowledged it as a critical shortcoming , noting that “…almost nobody is very good at it.”

Nearly a decade later, that gap has not closed. In fact, it has widened and the cost of getting it wrong is no longer contained to a single initiative. Most organizations can launch transformation initiatives, but few carry it through to achieve sustained behavioral change at the individual or organizational level.

What Hasn’t Changed — and What Has

The five failure categories from the original article remain accurate:

• Lack of a compelling vision
• Failure to change individual beliefs
• Poor planning and execution
• Inadequate leadership preparation
• Insufficient communication

Organizations continue to stumble on all five. What has changed is that these failures no longer occur only in the context of planned, large-scale initiatives. They now occur continuously, in every corner of the organization, triggered by forces that move much faster than any change plan can realistically anticipate.

In 2017, the primary frame of reference was the ‘planned’ large-scale change — a merger integration, a field force restructuring, a strategic pivot. Leaders could prepare themselves prior to such an initiative being launched. Communication cascades could be planned for and designed in advance. Risks could be identified and mitigation plans contemplated early on.

That sequential logic assumed a stable runway between changes that simply no longer exist.

Today the reality looks much different: One quarter brings an AI-enabled pre-call planning tool that fundamentally redefines what a field rep is accountable for. The next brings a product addition, a role restructuring, or a market access shift driven by health system consolidation. Kotter’s guidance to “never let up” was meant to sustain momentum through a single large change. Leaders now are expected to sustain momentum through overlapping, simultaneous changes.

The Real Constraint: Change Leadership

Most organizations have not adjusted how they develop leaders for today’s realities. They continue to treat change leadership as something to train for and deploy prior to the implementation of a major initiative. That model is obsolete as it is structurally misaligned with the environment leaders operate in today. With the pace and multidimensionality of change being introduced in organizations these days, by the time leaders are “prepared,” the ‘change’ has already moved.

Organizations that are falling behind aren’t missing a change strategy. They’re missing a truly agile leadership bench who view even the smallest of initiatives through the lens of change management.

Leaders today only win when they can:

• Diagnose what is happening in real time
• Translate change into clear expectations for their teams
• Reinforce the change long enough for it to take hold

This is a question of developing a leadership capability that can operate under real-world pressure and a myriad of stakeholder expectations.

The Calibration Gap Is Getting More Costly

Of the five principles, calibration remains the most consistently underfunded across organizations. The typical pattern is outlined below:

• Organizations measure launch metrics and track adoption in the first 180 days
• Leadership moves on to the next priority
• Initiative quietly reverts as no one kept asking whether it took hold

When changes were episodic in nature, a calibration gap meant that one initiative failed to fully embed. Conversely, in a continuous environment, characterized by simultaneous change efforts, the impact compounds:

• Organizations develop a quiet cynicism about whether anything will stick
• Leaders lose credibility
• Teams operate with conflicting expectations
• Individuals lose confidence in the change process itself

Over time, this vicious cycle creates an organization that is constantly changing but rarely improving.

Risk mitigation and calibration, both treated in the original framework as supporting disciplines, now deserve equal standing with the other principles. They can no longer be viewed as constituting clean-up work taking place at the end of a change effort. They are now the ongoing enabling mechanism that determines the efficacy of the other principles’ ability to actually deliver organizational results.

AI Is Creating Change and Exposing the Need for Change Leadership More than Ever

The 2017 article identified technology change as one of four types of large-scale change, alongside structural reorganization, cost reduction, and process improvement. That categorization no longer captures what AI represents. AI is not a discrete initiative with a launch date and a close-out review, like an ERP implementation. It is a continuous redefinition of roles, accountabilities, and the nature of expertise itself.

For biopharma commercial organizations, this is already visible. Consider what happens when AI-driven tools take over ecosystem analysis and deliver next-best-action guidance, the role of the field professional necessarily shifts. Not incrementally, but fundamentally:

• The field rep role shifts from analyst and relationship manager to executor of algorithmically generated recommendations and guidance.
• The MSL asked to change her behavior based on AI-derived insights — without understanding the data’s origin or validation — resists not out of obstinance, but because scientific rigor is core to her professional identity.

These are not technology adoption issues. They represent clear change leadership issues. And they require the same disciplined approach: working at three levels, connecting beliefs to results, equipping leaders to guide individuals through the transition that the original article prescribed for mergers and restructurings.

Change Leadership Must Be a Standing Capability

In the end, the most important evolution from 2017 is in how organizations need to think about and approach leadership preparation. The original article argued that leaders need specific tools and to acquire a certain level of ‘readiness’ before launching and optimizing the success of a major change initiative. That argument still holds. However, what must change is the timing.

Leaders who receive change leadership training only when a major initiative has been announced will always be playing catch-up. There is no longer a clear “before” and “after” to change. As such, the requisite skills need to be in place prior to the arrival of the next change, and the one after that.

The 5C’s of Transition Leadership® can no longer be deployed only during large-scale initiatives. They must be adapted and embedded as a baseline expectation of change leadership:

• In how decisions are communicated
• In how teams become aligned
• In how progress is assessed and adjusted