Managing Transitions Quotes

“POSTPONE “EXTRA” CHANGES Even after you’ve clustered the changes under a few headings, you’ll find that you have too many of them to manage effectively. You simply have to cut out some of them. Now, you can’t keep the external world or other parts of your organization from affecting your part of the business, but you can often postpone or sometimes cancel incidental changes that are unrelated to the larger shift you have to deal with. The gains from those incidental changes are seldom large enough to compensate for their disruptive effects, and a crucial large change can be jeopardized when smaller changes are thoughtlessly piggy-backed on top of it.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“The hardest thing to deal with is not the pace of change but changes in the acceleration of that pace. It is the acceleration of the pace of change in the past several decades that we are having trouble assimilating and that throws us into transition. Any change in the acceleration of change—even a deceleration—would do that: if change somehow suddenly ceased today, people would have difficulty because the lack of change would itself be a change and would throw them into transition.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Whether you do it this way or in some other way, you have to find a few larger patterns that integrate and make sense out of all of the specific changes.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“The first thing you’re going to need in order to handle nonstop organizational change is an overall design within which the various and separate changes are integrated as component elements. In periods of major strategic change, such a design may have been announced to the organization by its leadership. When that happens, you’re fortunate. Even if you don’t entirely agree with the logic of the larger change, you benefit from the coherence it gives to the component changes.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Executive teams we have worked with can often, in hindsight, lay out a clear chronology of the stages of their organization’s development and the events that triggered the transition from one stage to the next. But in the moment these same people found it very difficult to describe exactly what was happening.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Transition is more than just the human side of change, the psychological process through which people go when a change occurs, or the way people reorient themselves to do things a new way. It is also the experience people have when an organization is moving from one stage of its development to the next. Often at such times no specific change has occurred to connect the transition to. All people know is that things “feel different” around the organization. As with the coming of a new season, the weather of everyday activity may slip back and forth for a while, and you may be unsure whether the new season is really at hand. But in a little while the early signals turn into unmistakable signs, and everyone can recognize that a significant change is at hand.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“But remember: in your communications you need to speak to wherever people are now, not to where you want them to go, and they need your help, not in getting to the destination you want them ultimately to reach, but in taking the next step in the transition they find themselves in because of your big change.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“What is this new beginning going to require of us and of others in the organization? The sooner you start embodying the behaviors and attitudes that fit the new beginning, the sooner others in the organization will have the leader they need.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“The impatient leader is likely to want to Redream the Dream and Recapture the Venture Spirit and get the renewal-generating organizational infrastructure in place and working tomorrow!”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Wise leaders, understanding that example is the most powerful tool they can employ, start with themselves: “What part of my identity—of the way I come across, and even the way I experience myself—do I need to let go of if we are going to enter the Path of Renewal?”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“It is important for leaders to comprehend the implications of what they are trying to achieve and not to let their understanding that renewal is essential blind them to the painful transitions that will be necessary to make things turn out as intended. It is also important for the HR and OD specialists who advise the leaders to recognize that transition management must be built into the very fabric of organizational renewal efforts.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Next, the organization must Recapture the Venture Spirit; that style was natural to the young and just-launched organization, but now it is locked away in the past.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Renewal must begin with Redreaming the Dream on which the organization is based. The new Dream might be the idea of becoming a service business (IBM) or reinventing the idea of leadership (the U.S. Army). It might involve getting into entirely new business areas or simply redefining the organization’s approach to existing ones. But in some significant way, organizational renewal always involves getting a new central idea around which to build the organization’s activities and structures.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Such conflicts are reminders of the Fourth Law of Organizational Development: whenever there is a painful, troubled time in the organization, a developmental transition is probably going on.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

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

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

“the First Law of Organizational Development is evident: those who were most at home with the necessary activities and arrangements of one phase are the ones who are the most likely to experience the subsequent phase as a severe personal setback. They will talk about it as a “strategic mistake,” as “dumb,” “unnecessary,” and “too expensive.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“Looking at each of these cases as simply “innovation” underestimates the challenge they faced. What innovation’s champions are actually doing is creating a new organization, and to do that they must go back to the start of the life cycle. What we call “an innovation” is really a new Dream.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

“What is called “innovation” usually represents a new Dream.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

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

“Transitions are the dynamic interludes between one of the seven stages of organizational life and the next. Their function is to close out one phase, reorient and renew people in that time we are calling the neutral zone, and carry people into the new way of doing and being that is the beginning of the next stage.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

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

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

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

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

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

“Finally, everyone who plays a part is, tacitly at least, implicated in the outcome.”
― William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

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

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

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