It is one of the oldest and most tragic truths of modern business: even though we know that people are the key to business success, we often fail to provide those people with what they need to succeed.
A case in point
At a recent Business Transformation conference, there was a session on how to boost performance and transformation outcomes. The session hosts surveyed those in attendance to find out which “transformation levers” were their top priorities and which solutions were preferred to impact those levers.
Not surprisingly, most attendees identified people and culture as the number one lever for a successful transformation, putting it ahead of strategy, process, and technology.
More surprisingly, however, was the ranking of solutions.
The attendees viewed automation as the top tool to support a transformation, followed by process management, AI upskilling, and data and analytics. At the bottom of the list was change management.
Everyone has a slightly different definition of change management.
But in most of those definitions, there is an acknowledgement that to achieve success, organizations must learn how to manage the people side of change. That makes change management arguably the solution best suited to address the people and culture lever.
Let’s think about those results for a minute.
The business leaders acknowledged that transformation cannot be achieved without employees. And yet, when it comes time to put their money where their priorities are, they invest in process, technology, and data and leave the people to their own devices.
This gap between what business leaders think is most important and the solutions they invest in largely explains why so many transformation initiatives fail.
This pattern isn’t unique to any single type of change initiative. Whether organizations are implementing new technology, restructuring operations, or shifting strategic direction, the story is remarkably consistent.
Take technology transformation as an example: Gartner, a global business trends and analytics firm, has consistently found that less than half of the organizations investing in these initiatives—which can include cybersecurity, AI, and data analytics—meet or exceed their outcome targets.
Why the low rate of transformation success?
Gartner—among others—has argued that organizations do not pay enough attention to the people side of the transformation equation. In its 2025 technology executives survey, only 14 percent of respondents said they were going to prioritize the building of “an Enterprise-Wide Technology Workforce.”
You can mince words all you want, but those findings strongly suggest that investments in technology are not being accompanied by investments in the people who are expected to utilize that technology.
Deep thinkers have tried for decades to figure out how business leaders can so consistently ignore something that they know, deep down inside, is a key to business success.
In some instances, leaders believe new technology is so good that it’s “plug-and-play,” and their workforces will adopt it without skipping a beat. In other instances, there is faith—sometimes driven by over-zealous vendors or consultants—that new tech can be effective with only a modicum of training.
The missing investment
How can you help your organization become more balanced in its transformation investments and pay equal attention to both technology and people? One way is to acknowledge certain fundamental truths about people and technology.
First, if you want your employees to work in new ways, you must do more than provide training and expect immediate adoption. New ways of working require behavior change, and that can only come from a focused effort to explain the benefits of new tech, cultivate buy-in from employees, and implement a consequence management system that reinforces adoption. Nobody ever succeeded in deploying a new technology solution by ignoring the end-users.
Second, recognize that you will likely require outside input on how to encourage new behaviors and ultimately change your culture.
Most businesses will task a senior member with overseeing culture. While some of those leaders can be objective about the strengths and opportunities in the existing culture, in many instances, they may not know whether that culture is amenable to new ways of working.
Although there certainly are consultants who will promise to get your people to adopt the new ways of working without any idea on how to do that, there are good ones who focus on how to help leaders build a culture through their management behaviors and their workforce’s behaviors to achieve the greatest value from new tech and drive transformation efforts.
The path to transformation success isn’t a mystery—we know what works. The question is whether we’re willing to invest as thoughtfully in our people as we do in our technology.
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