I'm wondering whether the phrase '70% of change efforts fail' is down to not knowing how to get from a design to an implementation – so things stall at the point of a detailed, tested concept design. The 30% that don't fail may have cracked the process of a) planning to get safely from current to designed state and b) getting there. (Whether 70% of change fails is largely unproven but that hasn't stopped people thinking that is the case).
The topic came to mind when someone sent an email asking me to run a session with project managers where we 'delve deeper into the tools of change' which (in a previous workshop) I'd suggested included: incentives, policies, symbols, feedback, communication, education and development.
He asked 'from your experience what has worked, what's not – why to both, how can you use the tools in the project world, both internally to the project team (i.e. incentives to drive performance/change in behaviours, are there any lessons we can learn from the Agile delivery?) but also to the products of the projects'.