Decades of experience and research have consistently shown that most organizational change efforts fail. In 1993 Michael Hammer, who launched the business-process-reengineering movement, somberly concluded in his book Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution that “as many as 50% to 70% of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.”

Things have not improved with the passing of time. Over the past 20 years Boston Consulting Group research into nearly 2,000 public companies from around the globe has found that more than 70% of companies fail to outperform their industry peer-group average in both the short (one year) and long term (five years) after a performance downturn. It is a remarkable data point. During the same period, we digitized the global economy, mapped the human genome, and built self-driving cars. But we did not get systematically better at helping groups of people to do things differently.

There is, of course, no simple reason why companies struggle so much with change, but in many cases change failures can be traced to dysfunction at the top. Members of the leadership team often fall into a behavioral trap: false alignment around the transformation they’re attempting to implement. In this article we’ll describe the trap, explain why executives get stuck in it, and present the consequences, drawing on our studies of and experience with companies we’ve advised or researched. We’ll conclude by offering guidance on what leaders need to do to ensure true agreement with and around change, illustrating the process with the success and experiences of Alexander Lacik, the former CEO of the Danish jewelry group Pandora.

The False Alignment Trap

Every change program needs clear answers to a few seemingly obvious questions:

1. Why are we changing our company?
2. What are we changing about our company? (And what are we not changing?)
3. How will the changes occur?

Executive teams often make the mistake of embarking on a transformation before everyone truly agrees on the specific answers to those questions. Worse, executives frequently behave as if they are much more in agreement than they really are.

Alignment and agreement are not the same. Alignment suggests a set of objects that are positioned in a line or perhaps facing the same direction. When company leaders say, “We are aligned,” what they usually mean is, “We are not in one another’s way.” Or perhaps, “We have discussed this topic at least once and generally accept the contours of a plan.”