Quotes About Transition

In the neutral zone, be wary of any arrangement or activity that shows a preference for one group over others. During this middle phase of transition, people want to feel that "we are all in this boat together"—another good metaphor. They will put up with a lot of discomfort if everyone must do so as well.

Never denigrate the past. Many managers, in their enthusiasm for a future that is going to be better than the past, ridicule or demean the old way of doing things. In doing so they consolidate the resistance against the transition because people identify with the way things used to be and thus feel that their self-worth is at stake whenever the past is attacked.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A corollary to this idea is that the past, which people are likely to idealize during an ending

But immune systems carry a price tag: even good germs get filtered out or killed off. The pre-transition immune system choked off creativity in its own manner, and no matter how loose and free the post-transition way of doing things is, its immune system will also make creativity difficult in some different way. It is during the gap between the old and the new that the organization's immune system is weak enough to let a seedbed for novelty form.