变革正在改变：如何应对彻底重塑的挑战（英）

People & Organizational Performance PracticeChange is changing: How to meet the challenge ofradical reinvention The core task of leadership is managing change—seeing new realities anddriving adaptation. To reinvent the organization, leaders must rethinktraditional tools and master a more complex level of change. This article is a collaborative effort by Aaron De Smet, Arne Gast, Erik Mandersloot, and Richard Steele, withCarmen James, representing views from McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance Practice. People are exhausted.From senior leaders to frontline workers, employees are feeling tiredand even burned out from too much change. Many are uncertain about what the future willbring. When change becomes “everything, everywhere, all at once,” it’s not surprising that employeesfeel worn out. The average employee now experiences ten planned change programs a year, afivefold increase from a decade ago.1At the same time, engagement and health measures havefallen, support for change programs has dropped, and employee disconnect with leaders hasgrown (Exhibit 1). Exhibit1 But the pace of change is not going to slow down; in fact, it is likely to accelerate. Driven bygeopolitical, societal,technological, and financial shifts, the changes hitting most companiestoday are far reaching, often creating ripple effects that bring even more change. Despite all the disruption, leaders should be aware that this is not a story of doom: The worldthat is emerging is ripe withopportunities for high growth and dynamism. Indeed, two winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics were recognized for their “theory of sustained growththrough creative destruction,”2showing that reinvention is essential to growth and prosperity. The problem is that the tool kit for managing change is outdated. Organizations and theirleaders need new tools, skills, and methods to navigate multiple transformations at once—tomake change a source of energy, or “sustainably exothermic,” as one CEO put it. On top of that,they need to learn how to manage a new and more unsettling form of change: reinvention.Reinvention goes beyond adapting processes or structures, challenging the very identity of thecompany. It requires rethinking how organizations create value and who they are at their core. In this article, we discuss how leaders can be more effective at three traditional levels of changemanagement and think through the newly emerging fourth level of reinvention change. Thechallenge for leaders is to match the right change method to each part of their change portfolio,spending organizational energy and resources where they are needed most. Four levels of change The first step for leaders is to understand that not all changes are created equal. Some typesare easier and more traditional to manage, while reinvention change is far harder and moredisruptive. As the need for reinvention grows, organizations must first focus on three traditional levels ofchange management. Execution (C1) focuses on stakeholder compliance—adopting newprocedures, processes, or tools. Mobilizing (C2) prepares employees for broader shifts thatrequire new behaviors and ways of working. Transformation (C3) goes further, improvingperformance and organizational health by embedding new management practices that changethe way the place is run. These three levels follow a familiar arc, with a defined beginning,middle, and end state. Because each level fully incorporates and builds on prior levels, augmentingoverall performanceand health, leaders can’t simply jump to reinvention change (Exhibit 2). Our work with organizations across industries and geographies indicates that there is a hugeperformance opportunity when leaders get better at each level of change. While the old mantraheld that 70 percent of change programs fail, well-informed leaders are able toflip the odds toreach 70 to 80 percent success rates. C1: Execute The first change level, execute, involves managing tactical change, for which employeecompliance is sufficient. Typically, there are multiple, and often hundreds, of execution effortsunderway at a large company. A quintessential example is upgrading a basic sales or budgetingtool. This type of change is often perceived as straightforward, yet it still requires defining thechange clearly, having empathy for the user through stakeholder engagement, and using Exhibit2 disciplined project management and communication. Change management tends to focus onjob aids and training. When assessing a portfolio of change initiatives, it is striking how few C1 initiatives have clearoutcome-based goals. Instead, we find that leaders get reports on activity-based plans thatshow progress but rarely on the business results that must be achieved. When leaders set a new bar and scrutinize planned outcomes, they can uncover countlessinitiatives that can be ended or deferred to reduce the change burden and channel resources tomore important priorities. Leaders at one