Change management: do success stories make good models?
When choosing an approach to change, executives often turn to companies held up as exemplary. The more precise managerial question is this: how can a practice be assessed when organisations that adopted it without succeeding remain outside the field of observation?
What the literature establishes
Jerker Denrell (2003, Organization Science) uses modelling to show that the underrepresentation of failures can distort learning from other organisations' experience. A practice may appear associated with success in the observed sample without improving performance in the full population. Applied to change management, this finding calls for a distinction between an example's visibility and its evidential value.
Why performance is a poor guide to its own causes
James G. March and Robert I. Sutton (1997, Organization Science) analyse the difficulties of explaining organisational performance, particularly when practices and outcomes influence each other. A high-performing company may have the resources to adopt an arrangement subsequently presented as the cause of its success. Observing that arrangement in the company is therefore not, on its own, enough to establish the direction of the relationship.
The premature conclusion
It would be excessive to conclude that examples of successful transformations are useless. They help generate hypotheses and identify concrete ways of implementing change. The important qualification is not to turn a practice observed in a successful organisation into a universal prescription: situations in which it failed to deliver the expected results must also be sought. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the available evidence cannot settle
These two articles analyse learning mechanisms and problems of inference; they do not provide an experimental comparison of change management methods. They neither rank those methods nor quantify the extent of bias in a particular company. In practice, limited access to abandoned or disappointing projects complicates comparisons; the absence of documented failure is not evidence of effectiveness.
A practical check in Vevey
In Vevey, where global food businesses, group headquarters and Riviera SMEs shape the business environment, an exercise in the SHR — Swiss Human Resources “Change Management” programme could audit the references used to justify a transformation. Before the decision, record the practice adopted, the expected outcome, the documented outcome and the source for each cited case, then explicitly search for disappointing or abandoned cases. The verifiable measure is the proportion of recommended practices for which the file contains both a documented favourable case and a documented unfavourable case. This indicator measures the file's coverage of contrasting evidence, not the method's effectiveness; it makes visible recommendations still based solely on successes. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Vevey in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Change Leadership in Vevey
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