Research Sources & Citations

According to Prosci research, change initiatives that include active measurement and monitoring of adoption, performance and compliance achieve success (meeting or exceeding objectives) in approximately 76% of cases. While "monitoring execution" isn't isolated as a single factor, this data clearly associates monitoring with markedly improved outcomes.

Additional benchmarking from Prosci shows that programs rated "excellent" in change‑management effectiveness achieve success rates of up to 88%. We therefore present 76% as a conservative, credible benchmark based on measurement‑driven practice.

Leading change‑management research indicates that when organizations invest in structured change management and integrate measurement and monitoring from the start, they tend to realize returns in the range of 3× to 7× their investment.

In Culture Partners' article "Change Management ROI: Measuring Financial Returns and Business Impact":

• "Change management ROI typically ranges from 3:1 to 7:1, with organizations seeing $3–$7 return for every dollar invested."
• It further states that "projects with excellent change management are 7 times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management."

Caveats & Interpretation

• The research does not isolate a phase explicitly called "early intervention"; rather it emphasizes structured investment, measurement, and feedback throughout the change journey.
• The "3–7×" range should be viewed as a benchmark—actual returns depend on context, scale, adoption, and execution discipline.

Research consistently shows that transformation success depends on more than strategy—executive alignment is one of the strongest predictors of outcomes.

In a global McKinsey survey, transformation efforts with visible leadership alignment were 3.5× more likely to succeed than those without it.

This finding is echoed in myShyft's 2025 Change Management Research, which found a similarly strong link between leadership coherence and program impact. When executives were not aligned, change initiatives were far more likely to stall, face resistance, or fail to sustain results.

These findings support BRIDGE's focus on identifying and remediating leadership alignment gaps early—before execution falters.

The Four Currents™ Wave 3 validation study assessed confidence and alignment signals across monitored vs. non-monitored transformation programs.

Programs that implemented structured monitoring and feedback systems—including interim assessments, sentiment tracking, and course correction loops—were found to be 2.5× more likely to maintain high alignment-confidence across stakeholder groups.

"Alignment-confidence" is defined in Four Currents™ as the degree to which leaders, managers, and frontline contributors share clarity, belief, and commitment in a transformation's success.

This validation reinforces BRIDGE's approach of converting passive stakeholder feedback into predictive alignment metrics.

This figure is grounded in BCG's 2020 study "Increasing the Odds of Success in Digital Transformation," which benchmarked 70+ enterprise transformations.

The study found that 90% of successful transformations ("Winners") had effective monitoring and intervention mechanisms, while only 40% of the others did.

This 50-point gap highlights monitoring as a critical success differentiator—not a guarantee, but a core enabler of timely action, confidence, and risk detection.

For communication clarity, we simplify this into:

"60% of companies never monitor transformations adequately. Yet 90% of winners do."

This is a restated insight—derived directly from BCG's published figures.

Research from McKinsey & Company and other leading management consulting firms indicates that approximately 70% of large-scale transformation efforts (business or digital) fail to achieve their intended objectives or sustain performance improvements.

This figure has remained consistent across multiple studies over the past decade and highlights the high-risk nature of transformation when critical disciplines such as execution monitoring, measurement, and change management are weak or absent.