How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, BRITISH DRAMATIST
The other thing to remember and help others to understand is that there are well-tested, effective ways to avoid these difficulties. Many organizations follow the path toward their own collapse simply because they do not know that there is another way.
This is all the more important today, because if we know anything about the future it is that it will be different from the present. Whatever currently exists is going to change. What it will look like is something that the futurists can debate. The only certainty is that between here and there will be a lot of change. Where there’s change, there’s transition. That’s the utterly predictable equation:
Our moral responsibility is not to stop the future, but to shape it . . . to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.
ALVIN TOFFLER, AMERICAN FUTURIST
change + human beings = transition
There’s no way to avoid it. But you can manage it. And if you want to come through in one piece, you must manage it.
Afterword by Steven Kelban
As the executive director of a newly formed foundation, the Andrus Family Fund (AFF), my charge was to help the just-named board create a mission around which a disparate group of fifth-generation family members could coalesce.a
My wife gave me a book she thought might help me move more easily into this new job. That book was Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, by William Bridges. She turned out to be right; the book did, in fact, help me understand and manage my job change after twelve years. The book’s reach, however, turned out to be much more powerful.
Its basic premise—that transition is fundamentally different than change and requires attention to internal processes—emerged as a tool that spoke to the generational transition of the family and ultimately offered a framework for its ongoing philanthropy. Family foundations like ours inevitably face issues of change and transition as the next generation comes to maturity. This book offered cousins on each side of the generational divide assistance in working together.
In retrospect, these applications of Bridges’ theory are not surprising. He wrote the book believing that many people and many organizations could benefit from thinking through the steps of transition and not rushing to embrace change. But as I listened to the individual passions and expressions of interest from individual board members, I had one of those “aha” moments. It occurred to me that Bridges’ theory could be used not only to help individuals and organizations manage change and transition better, but that if we pushed it to its logical end, it also offered a way to think about social change. If it were true that organizations needed to deal with endings and hard work before they could actually succeed in new beginnings, why wasn’t that true also of our efforts to change social conditions? This made huge sense to our board members and me. There was only one logical step left. Did it make sense to Bill Bridges? One of the clear advantages of working in a foundation is that it allows you to believe that other people might take your phone calls. So we called.
We were lucky. We caught Bill at a time when he was thinking about the larger question of how he might extend his transition management work into the area of philanthropy. He had already done several projects with groups that were interested in helping non-profit agencies and organizations handle leadership changes more smoothly. But what he was really interested in exploring was whether the transition model might actually become part of the grant-making process itself.
A few of us were privileged to be invited to Bill and Susan’s house for an exploratory conversation. They listened well and raised many issues. They expressed concerns that we might not be giving due consideration to transitions as a psychological process and some worry that we might be stretching the transition concept to bind the multiplicity of interests expressed by board members. They cautioned us that this might be expecting too much of the framework and that we could risk making it meaningless. Ultimately they saw the value of going forward with us and we moved on to talk about next steps.
We flew home excited by the possibilities and were thrilled to receive an email the next day from Bill to the AFF Board. (I had already given Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change to each board member.) His email laid out very clearly the difference between change and transition and how a philanthropic organization could work with those concepts.
The way that most foundations try to differentiate themselves within the fairly crowded world of philanthropy is to pick out an area of activity that is presently not being well served. But then they take the make-changes-but-don’t-deal-with-transitions approach. To be only marginally successful in a new area is not a very impressive strategy. But what if a foundation sought to differentiate itself not by what it did, but how it did it? In other words, what if a foundation utilized the three-phase transition model to help people to get successfully through the transitions created by the changes that its grants initiated? What if a foundation focused its efforts on helping people with the reorientation, development, and renewal that a successful change always requires?
For nearly fifteen years AFF consciously incorporated Bridges’ Transition Framework into our work. The projects, diverse and far-ranging, helped foster youth transition to independence, provide services and support for foster teenagers becoming parents, and mentoring programs. With Bill and Susan’s insights and support we believe we’re making a difference.
Steven Kelban
Founding Executive Director,
Andrus Family Fund, 2009
aThe fund is the creation of the Surdna Foundation (Surdna spelled backwards is Andrus), which was established in 1917 and is now led by fifth generation family members.
Appendix A:
Assessing Your Transition Readiness
Whenever we start a project with an organization, we do an evaluation of how ready the organization is for the transition it faces. Some organizations seem to function in such a way that transition is taken in stride, while others—which may be just as successful as the first group in most other ways—find that transition disrupts their operations and distresses their people so much that the particular change that put them into the transition is hardly worth the trouble it causes. In some cases, a change that was supposed to strengthen an organization ends up weakening it.
Here’s what we look for when we talk with people while setting up the project and interviewing them in the course of consulting, coaching, or training. These are the questions we ask explicitly, or look for answers to, as we talk with people, read the survey data they have gathered, and review the communications that have been sent out by the leaders.
1.Is there a fairly widespread sense that the change is necessary? Is the change solving a real problem, or do people think that it is happening for some other reason? Nothing is harder to stomach than losses and uncertainty that you believe “didn’t have to happen.”
2.Do most people accept that whatever change is taking place represents a valid and effective response to the underlying problem? A “bad idea” is going to produce a transition that is particularly hard to manage.
3.Has the proposed change polarized the workforce in any way that is going to make the transition more disruptive than it would otherwise have been?
4.Is the level of trust in the organization’s leadership adequate? There are always minor issues on this score, but when the level of trust is low, the leaders have a very hard time bringing the people along with them.
5.Does the organization provide people with adequate training for the new situations and roles that it thrusts them into? An organization that doesn’t do that is likely to find people holding back and resisting the new beginning that will make the transition work as intended.
6.Does the organization tend to blame people if they make mistakes in a new situation? If it does, people are going to wait for others to
make the first move as they start to emerge from the neutral zone, and the organization will stay in transition longer than it needs to.
7.Is the change part of a widely understood strategy that is designed to move the organization in a direction that fits with a fairly clear vision of the future?
8.Have the endings that are implicit in this change been talked about publicly? Do people know what it is time to let go of—and why?
9.Does the organization’s history work in its favor during times of transition, or are there old scars and unresolved issues that surface and make people uncertain and mistrustful?
10.Has the change been explained to those who are going to be affected by it in as much detail as is currently possible?
11.Are there people within the organization who have expertise in the handling of change and transition? Is their assistance available to others in the organization who may need it?
12.Has a clear set of responsibilities been established for seeing that the human side of the change goes well? Do the people with those responsibilities have the resources to get their task done?
13.Do the leaders of the change understand that the transitions will necessarily take considerably longer to complete than the changes? Does the timetable for the project reflect that understanding?
14.Has the organization set up some way to monitor the state of the transition? This would not necessarily be a Transition Monitoring Team, but something more than the everyday reporting relationships in the organization.
15.Does the culture of the organization validate the idea of helping employees deal with the problems they encounter, or are they pretty much on their own?
These fifteen questions, either asked directly or used as an unspoken framework for conversations, will give you a pretty good idea of whether your organization will move through transition without undue difficulty, or whether the change is going to cause the organizational equivalent of a train wreck. The more negative answers these questions generate, the more difficulty lies ahead. While it is very hard to quantify the results, we’d be worried about an organization that generated fewer than ten yeses.
Needless to say, you have to talk to a real cross-section of the organization’s people to answer the questions adequately. The leaders may be so out of touch with the situations that the average employee faces that they will give you very distorted answers. If the HR group is your sole source of information, you may get answers that are slanted by their sources of information and their agenda. The middle managers, the supervisors, the sales staff, the international division, the hourly workers—all of them have their own particular perspective, which will trap you if it is the only one you have. The way to avoid being trapped, of course, is to get your information from as wide a set of sources as possible.
Appendix B:
Planning for Transition
You wouldn’t launch a big change without a plan. You cannot plan for transition as precisely as you can for change, but there are some actions you can take to make sure it goes as well as it can. Here they are:
1.Share the problem—the one that makes the change necessary (or at least wise) before you try to share the change itself. And don’t wait until the change is just about to happen.
2.Collect information about the problem from those closest to it; find out the interests that people are going to try to protect when they are exposed to the change; engage people in the problem-solving process to gain their investment in its outcome; and work to secure the influence of the most effective opinion makers.
3.At the same time—which is usually before the change is publicly announced—do an audit of the organization’s transition-readiness (see appendix A) to discover the strengths and weaknesses that the organization brings to the experience of transition.
4.Educate the leaders about the nature of transition and how it differs from change. Make sure that they understand that an unmanaged transition can very easily make the change chaotic. Help them to recognize that transition can in fact be managed and that leaders have a special role in making it work (see appendix E). Otherwise, they will be focused only on seeing that the change happens and they won’t do what they need to do to bring the people along with them.
5.Get everyone who is planning the change to give serious thought to the question, “Who is going to have to let go of what to make the change work as planned?” Changes require transitions, and transitions require people to let go of how things used to be. Foreseeing and planning how to encourage that process is very important—and the part of transition management that organizations most often forget.
6.Recognize that people will not (because they cannot) move straight from letting go to making the new beginning. In between is the neutral zone, and that is a provisional time in which many things don’t work well. Turnover often rises during that time; some employees become very frustrated and look for ways to “pay the organization back” for what it has done to them; productivity is likely to sag; and communication often breaks down. This is a time for hands-on leadership and the kind of management that people need in uncertain and ambiguous times.
7.The neutral zone is also a time when individuals and organizational units ought to step back and take stock. Find ways to encourage that. This enables people to move forward toward a new future—the one created by the changes—and to modify their strategy and resources in order to do so. It is in the neutral zone that individuals and groups reorient themselves from the old way to the new way. If they do not have the time or resources to do that, the new way simply won’t work.
8.Monitor the progress of individuals and groups through the three stages of transition—using a Transition Monitoring Team or some other formal method of doing so (see appendix C). Pay as much attention to bottom-up communication as you do to top-down, and work to close the gap between decision-makers (who may be nearly finished with their transitions) and employees (who may still be struggling with endings). Encourage groups to move forward through the transition, but do not let difficulty with the transition discourage you.
9.Plan how you are going to explain, encourage, and reward the new behavior and attitudes that the changes are going to require of people. It is fine to talk about “the vision” and “the big picture,” but remember that most people live at a much more practical level that is full of details. That is the level at which they are going to either contribute to the change or get in the way of it. Help them to understand what they can do to contribute to the change at that level.
10.All along the way, keep track of what helps and what hinders the organization and its people as they go through transition. At one level, this will help you to modify anything about the organization that makes transition harder to manage. At another level, it will provide you with some useful information about what works and what doesn’t when you are trying to help people through the three stages of transition. Given the frequency of change today, such learning is guaranteed to come in very useful—and probably sooner than you imagine that it will.
Appendix C:
Setting Up a Transition Monitoring Team
No matter how carefully you prepare for a transition, there is no way to foresee all of the effects of the change or all of the reactions to it. That’s why a Transition Monitoring Team (TMT) is so useful. The size of the team should be about 7–12 and it may be better to set up several teams for different parts of the organization than to put too many people on one team (or stretch members too thin).
There are several ways to set up a team, each with its advantages and disadvantages. Where there are many groups to be represented, it may be most useful to appoint people to the team so that you get the best possible cross-section of the company, coverage of levels, shifts, long-term and new employees, and so on. The drawback, of course, is that the handpicked team may be seen as management favorites. So the selections could include one or two who are known to be management critics. (This has the side effect of educating those people about the realities o
f the change.)
If it is more important to get people who are interested in the project than it is to get a carefully crafted cross-section, you can explain the task and ask for volunteers. You can also combine the two methods by having management choose from a pool of volunteers or by having different groups nominate candidates for the team, with management making final selections.
However the team is chosen, it has to be educated. Part of the education is about transition, because this is not a general feedback channel but a way to find out the effects that transition is having on people. Are any groups getting forgotten in the rush toward the future? Is the communication getting through—and is it being believed? Are any groups having particular trouble letting go of the old way of doing things? Are there any policies, practices, or structures that are impeding transition? What information, skills, or assistance do people need?
The team must also be educated about its area of responsibility, which is to operate as a monitoring team, not a management team. They may otherwise believe that they have been selected to lead the change project. The group should remain clear that its purpose is feedback.
The team should meet as long as there are transition issues to keep track of, although if that time extends beyond a year or so, it is probably a good idea to phase in new people gradually to replace the original members. (Phasing in new people also has the advantage of getting more people involved in and knowledgeable about the monitoring process.) The team must meet regularly and frequently enough to be able to deal with issues while they are still fresh. Many teams find that meeting every two weeks is about right, but sometimes events call for more frequent meetings. As the change winds down, the meetings can be held less frequently.
Managing Transitions Page 17
