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The Bridges Transition Model

William Bridges · Managing Transitions (1991)

A reorganization happens on a date. The transition happens in people afterwards, and it runs on a slower clock than the announcement does.

Change is not transition

The whole model rests on one distinction, and it is the part most often skipped.

Change is situational. The new structure, the new manager, the smaller team, the new tool. It has a date. It arrives in an email.

Transition is psychological. It is the process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. It has no date. It starts when the change is announced and ends, if it ends, some time later.

Organizations plan the change and assume the transition comes free with it. Bridges' argument is that this is the most reliable way to make a sensible change fail. Not because the plan was wrong, but because nobody managed the part that happens in people.

It also explains a familiar experience. The restructure is finished on paper and the team is still not working. On this reading, the change is complete and the transition has barely started.

Phase one: ending, losing, letting go

Transition starts with an ending, not a beginning. The ordering is deliberate, and it is the opposite of how most announcements are written.

Before anyone can take up a new way of working, they have to let go of the old one. Letting go involves real loss: of a manager they trusted, of competence they had built, of colleagues, of a picture of their own future, of territory, of identity. Someone who was the person who knew how this worked is now a person who does not.

Bridges' instruction is to name the losses out loud instead of selling the upside. Say what is ending. Expect a reaction shaped like grief, anger included, and read it as grief rather than as insubordination. Treat the past with respect, because people who hear that what they built was worthless also hear that the years they spent building it were worthless.

The common error here is speed. The announcement is framed entirely as opportunity, the losses go unmentioned, and the team's quiet verdict is that whoever is in charge has not understood what just happened to them.

Phase two: the neutral zone

This is Bridges' most original contribution, and the phase organizations do not plan for at all.

The neutral zone is the in-between. The old way is gone and the new way is not working yet. Formally the change has happened. Practically, nobody is fluent. Output sags, old resentments resurface, people are tired for reasons they cannot point to, and the ones most likely to leave are the good ones, because they have options and ambiguity is unpleasant.

It is also the only genuinely creative stretch in the sequence, because for a short while nothing is settled.

The advice is to equip people for it rather than rush them through it. Short-term goals, so there is something to succeed at. More communication than feels necessary, including repeating what is not changing. Honesty that it is temporary, without pretending to know exactly when it ends.

And the highest-leverage move: say what you do not know. People in the neutral zone fill silence with the worst available story. A manager who says "I do not know yet, and here is when I expect to know" removes more anxiety than one who projects certainty they do not have.

Phase three: the new beginning

A beginning is not a start date. The start was months ago.

A new beginning is the point at which people identify with the new arrangement rather than endure it. Bridges says it cannot be scheduled, only enabled: by making the purpose clear enough that someone could restate it, by giving people a part to play in it, and by letting early wins be visible.

Two things reliably block it. One is a purpose nobody on the team can repeat back. The other is that nobody ever said the transition was over, so everyone is still half braced for the next announcement.

Where the model comes from, and how far it stretches

William Bridges was an American consultant who began as a professor of American literature and turned to organizational transition after his own career change. Transitions (1980) was about individual life change. Managing Transitions (1991) applied the same three phases to organizations, and is the one managers read.

The fair criticism is that this is a practitioner framework, not an experimental finding. There is no controlled trial behind the three phases, and the phases are not as tidy in life as on the page. People move backwards and forwards, and two people on the same team can be in different phases on the same morning.

What it is good for is noticing. It gives a manager a name for the period after the announcement when everything is technically fine and visibly not fine, and it predicts the specific mistake most managers make, which is to treat the announcement date as the finish line.

Reading on

• Managing Transitions — the original, organized around the three phases.
• Transitions — Bridges' earlier book, on personal rather than organizational change.
• The Way of Transition — written after his wife's death, and the model turned on his own life.

The questions this produces

Knowing the three phases is not the same as using them. These are five of the nineteen questions LeaderWise draws from this model, each tied to one phase.

Ending and losing

The last time someone left, what did the people who stayed hear from you?

Ending and losing

If costs had to come down on your team, what would you try before losing people?

The neutral zone

Have you told your team what is not changing?

The neutral zone

When something changed on your team, how long did people wait to hear what it meant for them?

The new beginning

After the last change on your team, did anyone say when it was over?