Closing the Change-Readiness Gap Report by PMI

The report, published by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Agile Alliance, explores the change-readiness gap which is the distance between an organization’s strategic aspiration to adapt and its actual capability to realign people, decisions, structures and work as conditions change. While leaders often evaluate readiness based on the clarity of their high-level strategy, project professionals experience it through the context, authority, structures and trust provided to them. As artificial intelligence and global disruptions accelerate the pace of business, organizations must bridge this gap by maintaining strategic coherence without losing their agility.

Key Insights 

• 72% of executives believe their organizations have a clear sense of purpose and vision that guides adaptive strategy execution.
• Harvard Business Review found that while 82% of employees, managers, and executives report strategic agreement across their companies, just 23% could actually describe that strategy.
• Bain & Company found that 88% of leaders were confident their reorganization would yield results, but only 36% of employees felt the same.
• An Axios report estimated the cost of workplace misalignment and poor communication averages $15,000 per employee each year.
• PMI CEO Survey data shows the top executive-cited challenges to achieving reinvention at speed include a disconnect between planning and execution (35%) and failing to continuously upgrade talent to be future-ready (34%).
• PMI research on project success shows projects with a clearly defined vision achieved a net project success score of +41, compared to -18 when there was no clear vision.
• 77% of respondents reported that business acumen’s most important contribution was facilitating strategic decision-making during project execution.
• PwC research notes that AI-exposed junior roles are 7 times more likely to require senior skills like leadership and strategic thinking.
• 61% of project professionals report value loss due to organizational complexity.
• 22% of executives say empowering decisions at the edge is the most difficult principle to achieve or sustain in their operating model, while 18% said it would have the greatest positive impact on enterprise agility.
• 34% of complex projects experienced delays due to stakeholder decision-making bottlenecks.
• 93% of CEOs say they must rethink and challenge their operating model assumptions at least every five years, with 72% citing AI and automation as the top driver.
• Deloitte found that 48% of companies have adopted AI without changing their processes or structures.
• Microsoft found that 65% of organizations implementing AI fear falling behind if they fail to change, but 45% say it is more comfortable to stick to current objectives.
• McKinsey research showed that 89% of surveyed organizations were still primarily using traditional, hierarchical structures (business unit/holding company, matrix management, or functional organizations).
• Successful transformations leave 33% of maximum financial benefit on the table and see a 30% gap between strategy potential and actual delivery due to poor operating model fit.
• Only 41% of executives agree their operating model supports rapid reallocation of capital and talent, and only 55% believe the same of their governance structure.
• Executives cite leadership alignment and empowerment (43%), linking KPIs to collective outcomes (40%), and evolving the business or operating model (34%) as key accelerators for executing change.
• 23% of complex projects suffer from operational inefficiencies.
• Gallup data shows only 27% of employees strongly agree that their opinions count at work.
• EY’s 2024 Global Integrity Report found that more than half of employees who reported concerns felt pressure not to use internal reporting channels.
• 86% of executives agree that collaboration and transparency are essential agile values, but only 29% supported “optionality over efficiency at all costs”.

Conclusion

Closing the change-readiness gap requires a shared commitment where leaders establish enabling conditions and practitioners bring them to life through everyday actions, decisions, and relationships. Enterprise agility emerges as a collective capability when purpose, authority, structure, and trust function together cohesively as an integrated system. Ultimately, organizations that intentionally tackle signal loss, unclear decision rights, structural friction, and a lack of psychological safety will successfully transform disruption into long-term advantage.

You can check out the full report here.