Too Many Change Initiatives Is Often a Prioritization Failure, Not a New Office Problem

McLean & Company, in a Yahoo distributed item, says 70% of organizations report challenges managing change and names too many concurrent initiatives as the leading cause. It also says only 19% of leaders are highly effective at change management, then recommends an HR led change management office to coordinate and align initiatives. My read is narrower than the proposal: this is a credible prompt to inspect change governance, but not yet a reason to stand up another institution.

The diagnosis matters. If the main failure is poor sequencing, weak sponsorship discipline, and no hard trade off process, a new office can become a traffic controller for demand that should have been reduced upstream. For organizations that adopt a change office, the risk is that they improve visibility without improving choice. You get better reporting on overload, while the overload remains. Speed without diagnosis scales waste.

What I would want to know before approving a new structure is small and concrete. Which initiatives are colliding at manager level, where are the same teams being asked to absorb multiple changes at once, who can stop or defer work, and what evidence shows that coordination capacity, rather than portfolio discipline, is the binding constraint. That is a proportionate evidence test. A CHRO or transformation lead does not need a long business case first. They need one quarter of data on initiative volume, overlap by population, sponsor behavior, and manager load.

There is a real use case here. In organizations where change activity is already fragmented across functions, where no one owns enterprise sequencing, and where business leaders will actually submit to common prioritization rules, an HR led office may help. McLean & Company itself cautions that this is not a default answer for every organization, and that limitation should shape the decision. The proposal establishes a management option, not long term ROI, and not proof that HR ownership is superior in every context.

So the decision call is simple. If you are a CHRO, do not start by funding a permanent office. Start with a time bound governance test owned jointly by HR and the enterprise change or transformation lead: one intake rule, one prioritization forum, one manager capacity view, and explicit authority to pause lower value initiatives. If that reduces collisions and improves execution, then you have earned the right to decide whether a standing office is necessary.