70 percent of transformations still fall short — not because organizations lack the right capabilities, but because they can’t name the ones they already have.
In a study of 1,115 organizations across 15 countries, the capabilities most strongly correlated with transformation success were Transformation Expertise (35.2 percent), Data Transparency (34.4 percent), and Team Continuity (32.1 percent) [1]. C-level executives independently confirm the same pattern: sponsorship, communication, and engagement top their lists [2]. These are change management capabilities by any definition. The capabilities are present, the category is absent. This is a categorization gap, not a capability gap — and organizations cannot systematize capabilities they cannot name.
The problem is recognition. Organizations have been navigating their transformation territory by instinct — recognizing landmarks after every initiative but never drawing the map that would make the route repeatable. What follows is an argument for naming as the structural prerequisite that unlocks systematization, investment, and scaling.
Your Success Factors Are Already Change Management — You Just Don’t Call Them That
The NTT DATA Transformationsstudie 2026 asked over 1,000 leaders what made their transformation efforts succeed [1]. The top three answers read like a change management textbook. Transformation Expertise — knowing how to navigate complex organizational change. Data Transparency — making information visible and accessible across the system. Team Continuity — keeping the right people in place through the full arc of the effort.
These are implicit change management capabilities operating under different labels. The practitioners wielding them would likely not recognize them as “change management.” The category exists in practice but not in vocabulary.
C-level research reaches the same conclusion from a different direction. Executive sponsors independently name sponsorship, communication, and stakeholder engagement as the factors that determine whether transformations deliver [2]. The language differs. The underlying capabilities are identical.
Yet when the NTT study asked respondents to name change management directly — whether as a crucial organizational measure, a surprising difficulty, or an underestimated aspect — only about a quarter named it [1]. The capability is widespread. The recognition is not.
The capabilities are present, the category is absent — and organizations cannot systematize capabilities they cannot name.
Meanwhile, 82 percent of organizations exceed their transformation budgets [1]. The 70 percent failure rate in change initiatives persists across industries and geographies [3]. Organizations are exercising these capabilities by accident, project after project, without ever connecting the dots.
You Can’t Systematize What You Can’t Categorize
Michael Polanyi identified the mechanism in 1966 when he described tacit knowledge — the capabilities we exercise but cannot articulate [4]. “We can know more than we can tell,” he observed. The insight applies directly to organizational capability — vast territories of proven practice, capabilities demonstrated repeatedly in successful transformations, that remain invisible because they have never been named.
The knowledge management field knows this pattern well. Between 50 and 70 percent of knowledge management initiatives fail to deliver lasting value [5] — a structural failure, not a motivational one. Organizations invest in capturing knowledge without first building the categories that would make that knowledge visible to the systems that need it.
Consider an observation from energy research. A suburb of identical houses near Amsterdam showed a 30 percent difference in electricity consumption, with the only variable being meter location — hidden in the basement versus visible in the front hall. The capability to conserve energy was present in both cases. What changed was visibility.
Organizational systems operate through categories — budgets fund them, roles govern them, metrics track them, development programs build them. A capability that no category claims remains invisible to every one of these systems simultaneously. It exists in practice but not in structure.
The territory of proven transformation practice exists. The map that would make it navigable has never been drawn.
Naming Is Not Semantics — It’s Structural Infrastructure
Naming a capability is a structural act. It changes what organizational systems can see, fund, measure, and develop. The name is not decoration — it is infrastructure.
Programs designed to increase team autonomy consistently stall when they lack naming infrastructure. Boundaries, freedoms, and constraints must each receive explicit names.
The naming is what makes autonomy operable rather than aspirational. Without explicit labels, people cannot tell where their decision space begins and where it ends.
The same pattern appears with organizational friction. Teams experience friction daily — unclear dependencies, ambiguous decision rights, resource constraints they cannot resolve — yet it persists because it has not been named, categorized, and made addressable at the structural level.
Friction becomes manageable only once it receives a name and a location in the organizational operating system.
Resistance to change follows a similar logic. Resistance is often about ability rather than attitude — people stuck not because they refuse to move, but because the capability they need has not been identified and made available to them [6]. Naming the gap between where they are and where the transformation requires them to be is the first step toward closing it.
Naming is the difference between exercising a capability by accident and developing it by design.
The KM Institute recommends that organizations explicitly identify methods like storytelling, mentorship, and communities of practice as mechanisms for capturing tacit capability [7]. The recommendation rests on a deeper insight: what remains unnamed remains unmanageable. Naming is the structural act that brings capability into the reach of organizational systems — and each name adds a landmark to the map.
Name It, Measure It, Scale It: The Causal Chain That Starts with a Label
Named capabilities enter a causal chain that unnamed capabilities cannot access. The sequence runs from label to leverage: what is named can be measured, what is measured can be developed, what is developed can be invested in, and what is invested in can be scaled. Unnamed capabilities never enter this cycle — they remain invisible to every system that could develop them.
Organizations that have made their governance structures explicit — with transparent decision rights and named role definitions — integrate new capabilities like AI agents more naturally than organizations relying on informal power structures. The naming came first. The integration followed.
C-level executives consistently report that they fail to institutionalize the very success factors their transformations depend on [2]. The factors are recognized in retrospect but never captured for reuse. The transformation succeeds, the capabilities dissolve back into the background, and the next transformation starts from scratch.
The transformation succeeds, the capabilities dissolve back into the background, and the next transformation starts from scratch.
APQC identifies four structural reasons change management efforts fail: too many simultaneous initiatives, lack of readiness assessments, poor sequencing, and limited learning mechanisms [8]. Each reflects a deeper absence — the measurement and learning infrastructure that naming makes possible. Readiness assessments require named capabilities to assess. Sequencing requires named stages to order. Learning requires named outcomes to evaluate.
The evidence from the NTT study reinforces the pattern. 71 percent of organizations had to adjust their transformation methodology mid-project [1] — an act of learning that requires recognizing what is working and what is not. Recognition requires categories: names for the capabilities being exercised and the gaps being encountered.
Naming doesn’t create new capabilities. It draws the map that makes the existing territory navigable. And once you can navigate it, you can develop it, invest in it, and scale it.
Sources
- NTT DATA Business Solutions & Natuvion — “Transformationsstudie 2026,” January–February 2026
- Clare Ryan (Evanta / Gartner) — “Five C-Level Findings on Change Management,” November 2024
- Joseph Robinson (via Flevy) — “Why Do Change Management Initiatives Fail? 5 Critical Factors Explained,” 2026
- KMS Lighthouse — “What is Tacit Knowledge Management? Definition, Examples”
- Mark Sheppard (via LinkedIn) — “Organizations Are Solving the Wrong Problem with Knowledge Management (And We’re Letting Them)”
- Cicely Simpson (Forbes Books) — “Why Change Management Fails: It’s About People, Not Process,” May 2025
- KM Institute (Ekta Sachania) — “Tacit Knowledge: Why and How to Capture It”
- APQC — “Why Change Management Fails (and How Organizations Can Avoid It)”
Please note: 51even is an AI-first organization. We embrace AI at every step of our value creation and build our processes with a deep integration of human-AI capability. Humans always have the last decision. But this text was heavily built with AI.