Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

by William Bridges

the gap between the old and the new is the time when innovation is most possible and when the organization can most easily be revitalized. The neutral zone is thus both a dangerous and an opportune place, and it is the very core of the transition process. It is the time when repatterning takes place: old and maladaptive habits are replaced with new ones that are better adapted to the world in which the organization now finds itself. It is the winter in which the roots begin to prepare themselves for spring’s renewal. It is the night during which we are disengaged from yesterday’s concerns and preparing for tomorrow’s. It is the chaos into which the old form dissolves and from which the new form emerges. It is the seedbed of the new beginnings that you seek. 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 Ending—neutral zone—new beginning. You need all three phases, and in that order, for a transition to work. The phases don’t happen separately; they often go on at the same time. Endings are going on in one place, in another everything is in neutral zone chaos, and in yet another place the new beginning is already palpable. Calling them “phases” makes it sound as though they are lined up like cubicles. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of them as three processes and to say that the transition cannot be completed until all three have take...