It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions.
Nothing so undermines organizational change as the failure to think through the losses people face.
Change is an event but a transition is the process that you go through in response to the change.
All transitions are composed of an ending, a neutral zone and a new beginning.
Faith is the soul’s adventure.
It is when we are in transition that we are most completely alive.
GRASS: Guilt, Resentment, Anxiety, Self-absorption, and Stress. These are the five real and measurable costs of not managing transition effectively.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, many endings represent the only way to protect the continuity of something bigger.
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.
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.
Plans are immensely reassuring to most people, not just because they contain information but because they exist.
Yesterday’s ending launched today’s success, and today will have to end if tomorrow’s changes are to take place.
Yet beginnings are also scary, for they require a new commitment.
Beginnings establish once and for all that an ending was real.
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.
The real difficulties, in short, come from the transition process. It.
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.