In today’s fast-paced and competitive environment, organizations must be adaptable, flexible and innovative to achieve success. However, change efforts often falter because individuals overlook the need to make fundamental changes in themselves. Recent McKinsey research and client experience suggest that half of all efforts to transform organizational performance fail either because senior managers do not act as role models for change or because people in the organization defend the status quo, i.e. they cannot foresee themselves in the future state, and they have deep purpose in the present state.

Digging deeper into why change programs fail reveals that the vast majority stumble on employee attitudes and management behaviour. Conventional change management does not address the subconscious, unknown and subtler psychological aspects of an individual. The same McKinsey research indicates that if companies can identify and address pervasive mind-sets at the outset, they are four times more likely to succeed in organizational-change efforts than are companies that overlook this stage.

Instead of focusing on the technical aspects of a new model, leaders and managers need to link strategic and systemic interventions to genuine self-discovery and self-development. This is a far better path to embracing the vision of the organization and to realizing its business goals.

QDS proposes that by linking employees work to a Unity of Purpose (UP), and framing a change or transition along a deeper work purpose, in addition to providing staff with the tools to grow and mature within the organization, sustainable transformation may be imbibed within the culture. In the same way that the field of economics has been transformed by an understanding of uniquely human social, cognitive and emotional biases, so too the practice of change management is in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of the irrational (and often unconscious) nature of how humans interpret their environment and choose to act.