William Bridges Transitions Quotes

We resist transition not because we can't accept the change, but because we can't accept letting go of that piece of ourselves that we have to give up when and because the situation has changed.

The transition's of life's second half offer a special kind of opportunity to break with the social conditioning and do something really new and different.

In other words, change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work, because it doesn’t “take.

transition always starts with an ending. To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now; to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now; and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old

All transitions are composed of an ending, a neutral zone and a new beginning

Those who honestly mean to be true contradict themselves more rarely than those who try to be consistent. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR., AMERICAN JURIST   So

The real difficulties, in short, come from the transition process. It

Every organizational system has its own natural “immune system” whose task it is to resist unfamiliar, and so unrecognizable, signals. That is not necessarily bad.

You can’t follow the thread of your life very far before you find “the past” changing. Things that you haven’t remembered in years reappear, and things that you’ve always thought were so turn out to be not so at all. If the past isn’t the way you thought it was, then the present isn’t, either. Letting go of that present may make it easier to conceive of a new future.

Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. GIUSEPPE DI LAMPEDUSA,

There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow. CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, AMERICAN WRITER   6.

slow and gradual that it is hard to see that anything important is happening?

rule number four: first there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between.

It can also be a step toward our own more authentic presence in the world.

Transition renews us.

Renewal is much more like going from fall through winter to spring than it is like taking a vacation from school or work or treating ourselves to something special.

GRASS: Guilt, Resentment, Anxiety, Self-absorption, and Stress. These are the five real and measurable costs of not managing transition effectively.

Author says change emphasizes what is happening TO us while transition emphasizes opportunity for growth within.

The Gods have two ways of dealing harshly with us—the first is to deny us our dreams, and the second is to grant them.

Yesterday’s ending launched today’s success, and today will have to end if tomorrow’s changes are to take place.

Given the ambiguities of the neutral zone, it is easy for people to become polarized: some want to rush forward and others want to go back to the old ways.

In fact, many endings represent the only way to protect the continuity of something bigger.

Plans are immensely reassuring to most people, not just because they contain information but because they exist.

Beginnings establish once and for all that an ending was real.

Yet beginnings are also scary, for they require a new commitment.

The second warning is not to overwhelm people with a picture that is so hard for them to identify with that they become intimidated rather than excited by it.

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof. JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, AMERICAN ECONOMIST   The

People’s anxiety rises and their motivation falls. They feel disoriented and self-doubting. They are resentful and self-protective. Energy is drained away from work into coping tactics.

Renewal is possible only by going into and through transition, and transition always has at least as much to do with what we let go of as it has with whatever we end up gaining in its place.

When he was fifty, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most famous American writer of his day, went back for a visit to his hometown of Portland, Maine. While there, he wrote a poem called “Changed”;

Reorientation, personal growth, authentication and creativity: What these four things have in common is that they all require that you let go of the way that you have experienced your work and yourself.

Some people fight transition all the way and bewail their fate, while others come to recognize that letting go is not defeat—that it may, in fact, be the start of a whole new and rewarding phase of their lives.

Whether that kind of transition is gradual or sudden, we find that our old life no longer makes sense or gives us the satisfaction that it used to. In that realization, the emotional connection to our old life is broken.

Endings occur more easily if people can take a bit of the past with them. You are trying to disengage people from it, not stamp it out like an infection. And in particular, you don’t want to make people feel blamed for having been part of it.

Yesterday’s ending launched today’s success, and today will have to end if tomorrow’s changes are to take place. Endings are not comfortable for any of us. But they are also neither unprecedented breaks with the past nor attempts by those in power to make people’s lives miserable.

One thing that the reorientation function doesn't account for is that in reorienting ourselves, we also have the chance—although it is optional whether or not we seize it—to take a step forward in our own development by letting go of a less-than-adequate reality and an out-of-date self-image. So the second function of transition is personal growth.

Transition, on the other hand, is the process of letting go of the way things used to be and then taking hold of the way they subsequently become. In between the letting go and the taking hold again, there is a chaotic but potentially creative "neutral zone" when things aren't the old way, but aren't really a new way yet either. This three-phase process—ending, neutral zone, beginning again—is transition.

So is the so-called midlife transition, and so is any profound shift to a new way of experiencing the world. Such awakenings can occur at any point in life—whenever one comes to a gradual or a sudden realization that one's career or marriage or lifestyle is no longer satisfying. A developmental transition can even be triggered simply by the recognition that there actually are alternatives to the status quo.

This positive-thinking stuff is crap," she said to me one evening as I sat on her hospital bed. "But then, so is negative thinking. They both cover up reality—which is that we just don't know what is going to happen. That's the reality we have to live with. But it is easy to see why people take refuge in optimism or pessimism. They both give you an answer. But the truth is that we just don't know. What a hard truth that is!

In such cases, however, there is no change to serve as a signal that something important has happened. Because the challenge we face is purely subjective, it is not likely to call forth a plan the way an external change does. So we lack a road map by which we can track our progress. We do not have anything to prepare for or any future to adjust to. We have only the gradual (or sudden) discovery that our lives, as we have been living them, aren't workable or livable as is any longer.

Through reorientation, personal growth, authentication, and creativity, our lives decompose and then recompose around a new theme or idea. Reorientation refers to that process as a turning in the way we go through life. Personal growth refers to the way reorientation brings us into a new and more adequate relationship to the world around us. Authentication refers to the inner face of growth, where the result is not just appropriate but is also some way of being that is truer to who we really are, rather than to a persona or a

There is also a fifth function that the tribal groups, with their walkabouts and vision quests, would have said was central to the whole rite of passage experience, but which many modern people find it difficult to talk about or even believe in when they encounter. That is the spiritual function of transition. The religious historian Mircea Eliade was speaking of this function when he said that tribal groups believe that passage rituals connected their participants with a timeless state out of which the world emerged—a state that Eliade called The Sacred.1 It is in the neutral zone that we can most readily encounter The Sacred.

such times, after being more or less the same person for months and years, it occurs to us one day that something has happened inside us. We may try to account for it by chalking it up to some event or blaming it on a change in someone else. But if we are honest with ourselves we can only say that things that used to mean a lot to us don't mean so much anymore, or that something that was once only a shadowy presence in our minds has taken the stage of our attention and demands our attention. We begin to wonder what life would be like if we did thus-and-so. We puzzle over we how we got to this point in our lives, what we really want out of life from this point forward.

In the ending, we lose or let go of our old outlook, our old reality, our old attitudes, our old values, our old self-image.2 We may resist this ending for a while. We may try to talk ourselves out of what we are feeling, and when we do give in, we may be swept by feelings of sadness and anger. Why is this happening to me? My friends aren't troubled by such things! •​Next, we find ourselves in the neutral zone between the old and new—yet not really being either the old nor the new. This confusing state is a time when our lives feel as though they have broken apart or gone dead. We get mixed signals, some from our old way of being and some from a way of being that is still unclear to us. Nothing feels solid. Everything is up for grabs. Yet for that very reason, it is a time when we sometimes feel that anything is possible. So the in-between time can be a very creative time too. •​Finally, we take hold of and identify with some new outlook and some new reality, as well as new attitudes and a new self-image. When we have done this, we feel that we are finally starting a new chapter in our lives. No matter how impossible it was to imagine a future earlier, life now feels as though it is back on its track again. We have a new sense of ourselves, a new outlook, and a new sense of purpose and possibility.

1 = Very important. Do this at once. 2 = Worth doing but takes more time. Start planning it. 3 = Yes and no. Depends on how it’s done. 4 = Not very important. May even be a waste of effort. 5 = No! Don’t do this. Fill in those numbers before you read further, and take your time. This is not a simple situation, and solving it is a complicated undertaking. Possible Actions to Take ____ Explain the changes again in a carefully written memo. ____ Figure out exactly how individuals’ behavior and attitudes will have to change to make teams work. ____ Analyze who stands to lose something under the new system. ____ Redo the compensation system to reward compliance with the changes. ____ “Sell” the problem that is the reason for the change. ____ Bring in a motivational speaker to give employees a powerful talk about teamwork. ____ Design temporary systems to contain the confusion during the cutover from the old way to the new. ____ Use the interim between the old system and the new to improve the way in which services are delivered by the unit—and, where appropriate, create new services. ____ Change the spatial arrangements so that the cubicles are separated only by glass or low partitions. ____ Put team members in contact with disgruntled clients, either by phone or in person. Let them see the problem firsthand. ____ Appoint a “change manager” to be responsible for seeing that the changes go smoothly. ____ Give everyone a badge with a new “teamwork” logo on it. ____ Break the change into smaller stages. Combine the firsts and seconds, then add the thirds later. Change the managers into coordinators last. ____ Talk to individuals. Ask what kinds of problems they have with “teaming.” ____ Change the spatial arrangements from individual cubicles to group spaces. ____ Pull the best people in the unit together as a model team to show everyone else how to do it. ____ Give everyone a training seminar on how to work as a team. ____ Reorganize the general manager’s staff as a team and reconceive the GM’s job as that of a coordinator. ____ Send team representatives to visit other organizations where service teams operate successfully. ____ Turn the whole thing over to the individual contributors as a group and ask them to come up with a plan to change over to teams. ____ Scrap the plan and find one that is less disruptive. If that one doesn’t work, try another. Even if it takes a dozen plans, don’t give up. ____ Tell them to stop dragging their feet or they’ll face disciplinary action. ____ Give bonuses to the first team to process 100 client calls in the new way. ____ Give everyone a copy of the new organization chart. ____ Start holding regular team meetings. ____ Change the annual individual targets to team targets, and adjust bonuses to reward team performance. ____ Talk about transition and what it does to people. Give coordinators a seminar on how to manage people in transition. There are no correct answers in this list, but over time I’ve

And although it may be hard to think about larger issues while you are in the immediate turmoil of a transition, you must finally deal with them if you are to understand not only what is happening, but why, when, and how it is happening. In other words, I am not telling you to stop bailing - just to cast an eye over the map and think about where your little boat is heading.

If you cry, “Forward,” you must make clear the direction in which to go. Don’t you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely the opposite directions? ANTON CHEKHOV, RUSSIAN WRITER

Selling problems is, in fact, the investment that pays long-term dividends by making people more ready for particular organizational transitions—and for a world of continuous change in general.

The most important fact is not that there are one or three or four or six identifiable periods of crisis in a lifetime; rather, adulthood unfolds its promise in an alternating rhythm of expansion and contraction, change and stability. In human life as in the rest of nature, change accumulates slowly and almost invisibly until it is made manifest in the sudden form of fledging out or thawing or leaf-fall. It is the transition process rather than a thing called “a mid-life transition” that we must understand.

What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an editor can improve a manuscript: pruning, shaping, clarifying, tidying a hundred inconsistencies of tense and pronoun and location and tone, noticing all the sentences that could be read in two different ways, dividing awkward long sentences into short ones, putting the writer back on the main road if he has strayed down a side path, building bridges where the writer has lost the reader by not paying attention to his transitions, questioning matters of judgment and taste. An editor’s hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writer’s words.

CONSIDERING THAT WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH ENDINGS all our lives, most of us handle them poorly. This is in part because we misunderstand them and take them either too seriously or not seriously enough. We take them too seriously by confusing them with finality—that’s it, all over, never more, finished! We see them as something without sequel, forgetting that they are the first phase of the transition process and a precondition of self-renewal. At the same time, we fail to take them seriously enough. Because they scare us, we try to avoid them.

It’s always ugly in the middle. At the root of transition is “transit,” a voyage from one place to another. As in any voyage, there is a departure, a disorienting time of travel and, finally, a destination. Transitions guru William Bridges calls the time between endings and new beginnings the “neutral zone,” a “neither here nor there” psychological space where identities are in flux and people feel they have lost the ground beneath their feet.

Even though we are all likely to view an ending as the conclusion of the situation it terminates, it is also the initiation of a process. We have it backward. Endings are the first, not the last, act of the play.

loss is a subjective experience, and your “objective” view (which is really just another subjective view) is irrelevant.

Managing the Neutral Zone: A Checklist Yes No   ___ ___ Have I done my best to normalize the neutral zone by explaining it as an uncomfortable time that (with careful attention) can be turned to everyone’s advantage? ___ ___ Have I redefined the neutral zone by choosing a new and more affirmative metaphor with which to describe it? ___ ___ Have I reinforced that metaphor with training programs, policy changes, and financial rewards for people to keep doing their jobs during the neutral zone? ___ ___ Am I protecting people adequately from inessential further changes? ___ ___ If I can’t protect them, am I clustering those changes meaningfully? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary policies and procedures that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary roles, reporting relationships, and organizational groupings that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I set short-range goals and checkpoints? ___ ___ Have I set realistic output objectives? ___ ___ Have I found the special training programs we need to deal successfully with the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I found ways to keep people feeling that they still belong to the organization and are valued by our part of it? And have I taken care that perks and other forms of “privilege” are not undermining the solidarity of the group? ___ ___ Have I set up one or more Transition Monitoring Teams to keep realistic feedback flowing upward during the time in the neutral zone? ___ ___ Are my people willing to experiment and take risks in intelligently conceived ventures—or are we punishing all failures? ___ ___ Have I stepped back and taken stock of how things are being done in my part of the organization? (This is worth doing both for its own sake and as a visible model for others’ similar efforts.) ___ ___ Have I provided others with opportunities to do the same thing? Have I provided them with the resources—facilitators, survey instruments, and so on—that will help them do that? ___ ___ Have I seen to it that people build their skills in creative thinking and innovation? ___ ___ Have I encouraged experimentation and seen to it that people are not punished for failing in intelligent efforts that do not pan out? ___ ___ Have I worked to transform the losses of our organization into opportunities to try doing things a new way? ___ ___ Have I set an example by brainstorming many answers to old problems—the ones that people say we just have to live with? Am I encouraging others to do the same? ___ ___ Am I regularly checking to see that I am not pushing for certainty and closure when it would be more conducive to creativity to live a little longer with uncertainty and questions? ___ ___ Am I using my time in the neutral zone as an opportunity to replace bucket brigades with integrated systems throughout the organization?

All too often, people and organizations that are confronted with change find themselves struggling and don’t know why. They’ve applied every practical solution, quantitative method, and technical approach to managing change, and they’re at a loss for why it’s not working. And then they learn about the Bridges transition model and realize that change and transition are very different animals. They finally come to grips with the fact that the human element, the wonderfully unpredictable part of business and leadership and life that academics and experts so often overlook, is the difference between success and failure, between transformational growth and painful decline.

Depression—feelings of being down, flat, dead; feelings of hopelessness; being tired all the time. Like sadness and anger, depression is hard to be around. You can’t make it go away, however. People need to go through it, not around it.

Do whatever you can to restore people’s sense of having some control over their situation.

No pain, no gain,” they say. But many change efforts fail because the people affected experience only the pain. The company may gain, but for employees it seems to be all loss. Trying to talk them out of their feelings will get you nowhere.

The question to ask yourself is this: What can I give back to balance what’s been taken away? Status, turf, team membership, recognition, roles? If people feel that the change has robbed them of control over their futures, can you find some way to give them back a feeling of control?

They already know. We announced it.” Okay, you told them, but it didn’t sink in. Threatening information is absorbed remarkably slowly. Say it again. And find different ways to say it and different media (large meetings, one-on-ones, email, a story on the company website, Tweets) in which to say it.

The single biggest reason organizational changes fail is because no one has thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people. Naturally concerned about the future, planners and implementers all too often forget that people have to let go of the present first. They forget that while the first task of change management is to understand the desired outcome and how to get there, the first task of transition management is to convince people to leave home.

When endings take place, people get angry, sad, frightened, depressed, and confused. These emotional states can be mistaken for bad morale, but they aren’t. They are the signs of grieving, the natural sequence of emotions people go through when they lose something that matters to them.

One of the biggest problems that endings cause in an organization is confusion. Things change, and obviously the organization won’t do some of the things it used to do.

Old weaknesses, previously patched over or compensated for, reemerge in full flower.

In the neutral zone, people are overloaded, they frequently get mixed signals, and systems are in flux and more unreliable. It is only natural that priorities get confused, information is miscommunicated, and important tasks go undone. It is also natural that with so much uncertainty and frustration, people lose confidence in the organization’s future and turnover begins to rise.

It is for these reasons that managing the neutral zone is so essential during a period of enormous change. Neutral zone management isn’t just something that would be nice if you had more time. It’s the only way to ensure that the organization comes through the change intact and that the necessary changes actually work the way that they are supposed to.

Lacking clear systems and signals, the neutral zone is a chaotic time, but this lack is also the reason the neutral zone is more hospitable to new ideas than settled times. Because the neutral zone automatically puts people into Bessemer’s situation, it is a time that is ripe with creative opportunity.

The task before you is therefore twofold: first, to get your people through this phase of transition in one piece; and second, to capitalize on all the confusion by encouraging them to be innovative.

What the neutral zone is and why it exists can be seen in figure 4.1. It is a time when all the old clarities break down and everything is in flux. Things are up in the air. Nothing is a given anymore, and anything could happen. No one knows the answers: one person says one thing and someone else says something completely different.

you enter a state of affairs in which neither the old ways nor the new ways work satisfactorily. People are caught between the demands of conflicting systems and end up immobilized

Beyond these specific losses, is there something that is over for everyone? Is it a chapter in the organization’s history? Is it an unspoken assumption about what the employees can expect from their employer? Is it something that the organization stands for? Whatever has ended might be described with a phrase like one of these: “We take care of our people.” “We are a cutting-edge, high-tech company.” “We won’t settle for finishing second.” “We won’t be undersold.” “We will always act ethically.” “We promote from within.

As for the rest of the emotions grieving people feel, treat them seriously, but don’t consider them as something you personally caused. Don’t get defensive or argumentative.

We don’t know all the details yet ourselves, so there’s no point in saying anything until everything has been decided.” In the meantime, people can get more and more frightened and resentful. It’s much better to say what you do know, say that you don’t know more, and provide a timetable for additional information. If information isn’t available later when it’s promised, don’t forget to say something to show that you haven’t forgotten your promise.

One of the most important leadership roles during times of change is that of putting into words what it is time to leave behind. Because talking about making a break with the past can upset its defenders, some leaders shy away from articulating just what it is time to say good-bye to. But in their unwillingness to say what it is time to let go of, they are jeopardizing the very change that they believe they are leading.

Don’t just talk about the endings—create actions or activities that dramatize them.

Never denigrate the past. Many managers, in their enthusiasm for a future that is going to be better than the past, ridicule or demean the old way of doing things. In doing so they consolidate the resistance against the transition because people identify with the way things used to be and thus feel that their self-worth is at stake whenever the past is attacked.

Be careful that in urging people to turn away from the past you don’t drive them away from you or from the new direction that the organization needs to take. Present innovations as developments that build on the past and help to realize its potential. Honor the past for what it has accomplished

A corollary to this idea is that the past, which people are likely to idealize during an ending,

What is the problem? What is the situation that requires this change to solve it? Who says so, and on what evidence? What would occur if no one acted to solve this problem? And what would happen to us if that occurred?

Some people really respond to the picture. Once they get it in their heads, they find a way to reach the destination that has captured their imagination. Many executives and planners fall into this group, and because they don’t feel as much of a personal need for a plan that spells out the details of the route from here to there, they underestimate how much others need such a plan. For many operationally minded people, the picture is interesting, but the real question is, “What do we do on Monday?

the plan for the changes, not the transitions. The plan we are talking about outlines the steps and schedule in which people will receive the information, training, and support they need to make the transition. It lays out the nature and timing of key events that mark the phases of the transition: a ceremony marking the disbanding of a group, the formation of a transition monitoring team, the scheduling of a visit to another site, an all-hands question-and-answer session with the site manager, and the start of a training program.

The transition management plan differs from the change management plan in several ways. First, it is much more detailed, addressing the change on the personal rather than the collective level. It is much more person-oriented because it tells José, Stella, and Ray how and when their worlds are going to change. Second, it is oriented to the process and not just the outcome. It lays out the details of what’s going to be done to help those individuals deal with the effects of the changes. It tells them when they can expect to receive information and training, and how and when they can have input into the planning process.

The purpose, the picture, and the plan all omit something: a part for them to play. Until that is provided, many people will feel left out and will find it difficult to make a new beginning.

You also need to give people a role in dealing effectively with the transition process itself. The easiest way to do this is to be sure that everyone has some role on one of the planning task forces, climate survey groups, problem-solving circles, or transition monitoring teams.

Giving people a significant part to play in the transition management process facilitates the new beginning in five ways: 1.​It gives people new insight into the real problems being faced by the organization as it comes out of the neutral zone and redefines itself. When people understand problems, they are in the market for solutions. 2.​By sharing these problems, you align yourself and your people on one side and the problems on the other. The polarity is not between you and them; you are allies, not adversaries.

Giving people a part brings their firsthand knowledge to bear on solving problems. Joint decisions are not necessarily better than unilateral ones, but including people makes their knowledge available to the decision-maker, whoever that may be. 4.​The knowledge thus provided is more than the facts about the problem—it also includes the facts about the self-interest of the various parties affected by the situation.

Finally, everyone who plays a part is, tacitly at least, implicated in the outcome.

Rule 1: Be Consistent The first form of reinforcement is consistency of message. Every policy, procedure, and list of priorities sends a message, but if you aren’t careful, your messages will be conflicting ones.

The second form of reinforcement is a particular kind of consistency: the consistency of your own actions. Regardless of the confusions surrounding a new beginning—and you’re sure to have your own share—you have one reliable point of leverage in moving people out of the neutral zone: the example of your own behavior.

You won’t manage to hold a new beginning for long: •​If you talk about teamwork and then reward individual contributions •​If you advocate customer service and then reward “following the rules” •​If you encourage risk-taking and then reward “no mistakes” •​If you request feedback and then reward “no criticism” •​If you champion entrepreneurship and then reward “doing your job” •​If you preach decentralized authority and then reward hands-on management

The neutral zone takes a heavy toll on most people’s self-confidence because it is a period of lowered productivity and diminished feelings of competence. It may also, if it resonates with past difficulties in a person’s life, activate serious problems of low self-esteem. For that reason people are likely to need some fairly quick successes if they are to return to their former effectiveness.

Finally, take time to celebrate arriving in the Promised Land. Just as you marked the endings at the start of transition, you need to mark the beginning at the finish of transition. The timing may seem a little arbitrary because there are always loose ends to be tied up. But when you feel that the majority of your people are emerging from the wilderness and that a new purpose, a new system, and a new sense of identity have been established, you’ll do well to take time to celebrate that the transition is over.

transitions will need to make sense to people, for otherwise people will resist them and make it far harder for the organization to grow as it must.

What is called “innovation” usually represents a new Dream.

Purpose You can explain the basic purpose behind the outcome you seek. People have to understand the logic of it before they will turn their minds to work on it. Picture You can paint a picture of how the outcome will look and feel. People need to experience it imaginatively before they can give their hearts to it. Plan You can lay out a step-by-step plan for phasing in the outcome. People need a clear idea of how they can get where they need to go.

Part You can give each person a part to play in both the plan and the outcome. People need a tangible way to contribute and participate.

Second Law of Organizational Development: the successful outcome of any phase of organizational development triggers its demise by creating challenges that it is not equipped to handle.

Third Law of Organizational Development: in any significant transition, the thing that the organization needs to let go of is the very thing that got it this far. Discovering that law is painful, especially when you feel that you owe everything to the people, the culture, the style of management, or the strategy that “got you this far.