70% of Change Initiatives Fail. Here’s How to Join the Successful 30%.

Introduction: The “Presentation Graveyard”

Think back to the last major town hall where a new corporate strategy was announced. Energetic speeches, beautiful slides, inspiring slogans. Now, think about what happened to that initiative three months later. If it quietly faded away as employees reverted to their old ways of working, you are not alone. Your strategy was laid to rest in the “presentation graveyard”—the vast digital space where good intentions go to die.

This isn’t just a feeling. Research from McKinsey shows that nearly 72% of all organizational transformations fail. Why does this happen?

Why Good Intentions Fail: A Diagnosis

Materials from Harvard Business Review and other sources point to several key reasons for failure. According to McKinsey, the main culprits are management ineffectiveness (33%) and employee resistance (39%). But if you dig deeper, all these problems converge on a single, critical point:

There is no reinforcement mechanism. The new, desired behavior (like “collaborate more” or “be more proactive”) is never rewarded and quickly extinguishes.

The Behavioral Economics of Change

Any organizational change is, in essence, an attempt to form new habits in hundreds of people. The formula for habit formation is well-established: “Cue → Routine → Reward.”

The traditional approach to change management handles the first two parts perfectly:

Cue: The announcement of the new strategy.
Routine: The instructions on what to do now.

But it completely fails at the third and most crucial part: the Reward. Without immediate and regular reinforcement, the new way of acting doesn’t stick. The brain chooses the old, familiar, and less energy-intensive path.

Technology as a “Reinforcement Engine”

This is where technology can become the missing link—a system of immediate rewards that makes new behavior profitable and visible. AlbiCoins is precisely that “reinforcement engine” that helps implement change in practice.

Examples:

Change Goal: “More cross-functional collaboration.” Instead of slogans, you can instantly reward employees for real help to colleagues in other departments through Peer-to-peer Recognition. When someone receives “coins” and a thank you for helping a marketer with data, they are far more likely to do it again.
Change Goal: “Become more innovative.” The Internal Startups module allows you not just to call for innovation, but to directly encourage and motivate the creation of new ideas from the ground up.
Change Goal: “Develop new skills.” The Upskill & Reskill Reward feature makes the learning process visible and valuable to the entire company by rewarding every effort.

Conclusion: From Announcing Change to Making It Happen

A successful transformation is not a project with a start and an end date; it is a continuous process of forming and encouraging the right habits. To join the successful 30%, companies need an operating system to manage this process—a system that makes desired behavior visible, easy, and, most importantly, rewarding.

Learn how AlbiCoins can become the engine for your next organizational transformation: https://albimarketing.com/employee-tech/

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