Managing Transitions Quotes

“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.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Plans are immensely reassuring to most people, not just because they contain information but because they exist.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Beginnings establish once and for all that an ending was real.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Yet beginnings are also scary, for they require a new commitment.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“In fact, many endings represent the only way to protect the continuity of something bigger.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Yesterday’s ending launched today’s success, and today will have to end if tomorrow’s changes are to take place.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“GRASS: Guilt, Resentment, Anxiety, Self-absorption, and Stress. These are the five real and measurable costs of not managing transition effectively.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. GIUSEPPE DI LAMPEDUSA,”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Author says change emphasizes what is happening TO us while transition emphasizes opportunity for growth within.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions

“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.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Change is situational: the move to a new site, a new CEO replaces the founder, the reorganization of the roles on the team, and new technology. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological; it is a three-phase process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the details of the new situation that the change brings about.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“We have learned how self-defeating it is to try to overcome people’s resistance to change without addressing the threat the change poses to their world.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“the results you are seeking depend on getting people to stop doing things the old way and getting them to start doing things a new way. And since people have a personal connection with how they work, there is just no way to do that impersonally. And, second, transition management is based on some abilities you already have and some techniques you can easily learn.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Transitions: “Chaos is not a mess, but rather it is the primal state of pure energy to which the person returns for every true new beginning. . . .” In”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“During such times, a leader might be tempted to take short cuts, or to focus on new tactics for accomplishing quick results. We caution against that.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“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”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“loss is a subjective experience, and your “objective” view (which is really just another subjective view) is irrelevant.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Transition is different. The starting point for dealing with transition is not the outcome but the ending that you’ll have to make to leave the old situation behind. Situational change hinges on the new thing, but psychological transition depends on letting go of the old reality and the old identity you had before the change took place. Organizations overlook that letting-go process completely, however, and do nothing about the feelings of loss that it generates. And in overlooking those effects, they nearly guarantee that the transition will be mismanaged and that, as a result, the change will go badly. Unmanaged transition makes change unmanageable.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“In companies that have successfully institutionalized the practice of “continuous improvement,” procedures are constantly being changed to increase productivity, maximize efficiency, and reduce costs. Little transitions are going on all the time. Without some larger, overarching continuity, everyone’s world would feel like chaos. But what does not change in even the most constantly evolving environment is the expectation that every status quo is just a temporary expedient until a better way to do things has been discovered. Every one of those little improvements, though it may cause transitions, reaffirms the unchanging values and procedures that underlie “continuous improvement.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“every previous level of change comes to be called “stability.” Seen in this light, what people today call “nonstop change” is simply a new level of what has always existed. It isn’t pure chaos—simply a new experience. When people adjust to it, they will look back upon it as “the stability that we used to enjoy.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“The only way to prepare for the unexpected is to build into all of your plans a contingency clause that suggests what you would do if the unexpected happened. In that way you will have alternative routes ready to take in case the main route is closed unexpectedly, as well as established procedures for changing your plans with a minimum of chaos if they are undermined by unforeseen events. There is a further advantage to worst-case scenarios: if everyone else, as the Macrae quotation suggests, is going the way you were planning to, the worst-case scenario becomes a forecast that may be accurate simply because it is based on something other than commonly accepted assumptions. “Contrarian” investment strategies are based on precisely this approach.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change