Change is hard, and harder still when you’re not listening to those tasked with making it. Digital transformation, despite being a buzz term in logistics for more than a decade, is generally failing, and 76% of logistics transformations never fully succeed, according to a recent survey by analyst firm Gartner, Inc.

Often, these projects fail to meet critical budget, timeline or key performance indicator metrics, because leaders are not taking team resistance seriously. The survey findings show that effectively responding to team resistance, and incorporating feedback increased the odds of transformation success by 62%.

“We were trying to identify the root causes of what was making it challenging,” says Snigdha Dewal, senior principal researcher in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice. “We didn’t start by looking at team resistance, but that emerged as one of the main things that was getting in the way.”

Instead of doubling down, deploying a “get with the program” attitude, leaders should engage their teams from the start of the process, embrace the areas of resistance as a resource, not a problem, and act on feedback in order to fine-tune transformation plans and how they are implemented, Dewal advises. “Harvesting the collective wisdom of their teams can lead to dramatically improved odds of success,” she says.

Gartner's definition of digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. In logistics, this usually involves automating and synthesizing multiple dispersed logistics management and data-gathering functions into a single system.

According to Dewal, the Gartner survey reveals two broad approaches to digital transformation in logistics operations. The majority involved establishing a sense of urgency, whereas about a fifth focused instead on recognizing collective wisdom, and listening to the causes of resistance from team members. The latter was far more successful, Dewal says.

“Establishing a sense of urgency might make sense, because you’re doing something big and expensive and you need to get it over the finishing line,” she says. “But there’s a negative impact, too.” Steamrollering towards a goal without taking note of objections and problems encountered by the team in charge of the digital transformation actually ends up grinding the whole thing to a halt, in a majority of cases.

Resistance to transformation has several causes, Dewal says. First off, many logistics professionals already feel slammed, and don’t welcome the idea of new work. “It can feel like an add-on, creating competing priorities,” she says. Then there’s a fear-based resistance to the perceived complexity of the new tasks involved. “It’s too complex and we don’t have the right skill sets to be able to execute on them,” she says, describing this mindset. “Collectively, let’s call it the fear of failure, of getting it wrong.” Finally, there’s the familiar human tendency to prefer sticking with the status quo. “That can hide variations underneath it,” Dewal says. “Sometimes the team is not even sure why the transformation is needed. Sometimes, they feel like they’re not getting enough support in terms of executing it.”

Further, the survey dug into two types of resistance – productive and unproductive. Productive resistance is the type that comes from on-the-ground knowledge and expertise that relates to the implementation itself. Dewal says logistics leaders often fail to properly gather this. Then, unproductive resistance takes the form of fears or anxieties that may not be rooted in flaws in the transformation plan itself, but will still get in the way if they are not acknowledged and addressed.

Leaders who avoided a top-down, change-or-die approach, and instead focused on communication and collaboration, had much better chance of success, the survey found. “The messaging needs to be, ‘We want you to consider yourselves co-creators of this transformation. We want suggestions early on, including from frontline workers,’” Dewal says. “Good leaders are listening to the squeaky wheels, and encouraging candid feedback. They actually want to hear the discomfort and the pain points.”

Aside from listening, and adjusting plans accordingly, leaders of successful digital transformations in logistics operations also encouraged their teams to experiment with small-budget projects with limited scope. That way, failure is not a disaster; more of a learning opportunity, providing fresh insights to feed into other projects. Dewal describes this as a “progress over perfection” philosophy. “Team members really responded to that,” she says. “The low stakes mean you’re not betting a million dollars. That gives team members a lot of confidence.”

In the end, the survey clearly shows that what’s really important is being intentional in dealing with team resistance, by identifying the sources of resistance, listening, and then addressing it. This intentionality can be coupled with a sense of urgency, but racking up the pressure too much tends to jeopardize the whole transformation project, Dewal says. “This idea of urgency isn’t wrong; there is a time and place for urgency, because there’s a lot at stake,” she advises. “But for transformation, which is by definition foundational, urgency alone will not suffice.”

Gartner surveyed 306 logistics professionals from organizations across the globe with $500 million or more in enterprise-wide annual revenues. The survey, conducted from November to December, 2023, found that more than 80% of respondents had attempted four transformations in fewer than five years, averaging almost one a year. Internal change resistance played a greater role in obstructing the success of their transformation initiatives than outside pressures.