Quotes from William Bridges

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.

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

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.

Os verdadeiros começos começam dentro de nós, mesmo que suscitados por oportunidades externas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purposes are critical to beginnings, but they are rather abstract. They are ideas, and most people are not ready to throw themselves into a difficult and risky undertaking simply on the basis of an idea.1 They need something they can see, at least in their imaginations. They need a picture of how the outcome will look, and they need to be able to imagine how it will feel to be a participant in it.

This picture in people's heads is the reality they live in, and one of the losses that takes place during the ending phase of a transition is that the old picture—the mental image of how and why things are the way they are—falls apart. Much of the pain of the neutral zone comes from the fact that it is a time without a viable organizational picture.

Capitalize on the break in normal routines that the neutral zone provides to do things differently and better. In the neutral zone the restraints on innovation are weakened. With everything up in the air anyway, people are more willing than usual to try new things, and should be encouraged to do so.

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

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.

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.

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.

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