“Dealing Effectively with Change” Q&A with William Bridges 
By Melissa Delin and Meghan Tranos

Introduction

For over twenty years, William Bridges & Associates has provided consulting and training to help people and organizations deal with change.  Recently, Linkage, Inc. proudly entered into an exclusive partnership agreement with William Bridges & Associates to deliver a powerful, three-day, train-the-trainer program: The Certification Program for Leading Organizational Transition, which certifies professionals to deliver two workshops:1) Managing Organizational Transition; and 2) Individual Transition in Organizations. 

We sat down with Bill Bridges to talk about his work in leading and managing organizational and individual transition, reflect on the kinds of changes that people are coping with in the business world today, and discuss how we can better manage change in our own lives.

Q&A with Bill Bridges

Link&Learn: You are widely credited as the ultimate change guru.  How did you get involved with helping people manage personal and organizational transitions and change?

Bill Bridges: I have been working with the transitional aspects of organizational change for over twenty years, but I originally started by helping individuals with all kinds of life transitions.  I wrote Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (1980) about that work.  The book was picked up by organizations that were just starting to enter the first round of mergers, reorganizations, and strategic shifts that dominated the last quarter century.  They asked me to come in and train their managers on how to get people through the changes that they were making¾because they found that if they didn't deal with the transitions, morale fell, and people became unproductive, and the changes didn't work.  I suppose you could say that I got into managing organizational transition in response to client demand.

Link&Learn: How did you develop your fundamental three-phase transition process?

Bill Bridges: In 1974, I had made a career change and moved to the country.  It was a change I had looked forward to and planned very carefully, but I found myself much more upset and confused than I expected to be, almost as though I were grieving over leaving my old life behind.  I wondered if I had made a bad decision and if my feeling meant that I should go back to my old life.

At just about that time, I was reading an anthropology book called Rites of Passage, which describes the rituals that tribal societies had used to get people through big developmental "crossover" points in their lives; e.g. the end of childhood, becoming an elder, marriage, dying, etc.  There, I read that these traditional people believe that when you make such a shift in your life, you need to die and be reborn as a new person.  The rituals were symbolic death-and-rebirth experiences to help you do that.  I decided that what I was going through was an "unritualized rite of passage" and that the emotional, mental, psychological transformation had the same three phases that such rituals used to have.

1.   I was "dying" out of my old life-that's why I was so miserable and full of grief.
2.  Next I went through a time in between an old life and a new one that, in Rites of Passage, they called "The Neutral Zone."
3.  And then¾I hoped¾I'd be able to start a new life on the basis of the discoveries I had made in The Neutral Zone.

1) Ending.  2) Neutral Zone.  3) Beginning.  I decided that these were the three phases of the life transition that I was going through.

Because I was looking for a new career, I decided to see if I couldn't use this approach to work with people who were in transition because of divorce, retirement, returning to school, changing careers, geographical moves, having a new baby, losing a loved one, getting a new job, or being fired.  I found that the three-phase model fit in all of these different situations.

Link&Learn: What are the biggest changes people are wrestling with nowadays in the business world?

Bill Bridges: I'm not sure that the big changes change so much over time.  Organizationally, they are merger, reorganization, changes in leadership; individually, they are death, birth, changing careers.  The changes are age-old.  What has changed is the amount of underlying change that people are trying to manage.  The problem they have is that the new manager in the accounting department may seem to the CEO like a small matter, but layered on top of a whole pile of other changes, it can push the people in that department over the edge of their ability to assimilate it and stay productive.

What is "big" is the load that people are carrying, plus the fact that society lacks the old rituals to help them.  Plus the mechanistic image we have of people -- that we expect them to just "adjust" and do it quickly, the way a mechanism could but a person can't.  Plus our lack of good support systems to "hold" us while we go through these times of transition.  Plus our exposure to a much wider range of changes (SARS, international terrorism, currency fluctuations overseas) than people used to be exposed to.  Plus our society has an economy that depends on change; think of how each merger and reorganization that is announced is greeted as an improvement!  No wonder we are up to our ears in change!

Link&Learn: Do you have any tips on how we can manage personal change without letting it negatively affect our work?

Bill Bridges: You really can't, if the change is a big one.  The best you can hope for is to move through it as quickly as possible, giving each of transition's three stages its due, and letting it do its work on you.  You have to decide what it's time to let go of (and what it isn't necessary to let go of), then get yourself through the neutral zone and look for ways to use its ambiguity, fluidity, and amorphousness to your advantage.

A transition will disrupt your life, but it will also provide you with a way to reorient and renew yourself, and it will provide you with an opportunity to re-pattern your life creatively.  The disruption, in other words, can be turned to your advantage.  It is also possible to redesign certain things about the organization so that it is more "transition-friendly."  That's worth doing.

Link&Learn: Why did you choose Linkage to take over the facilitation of your highly successful training programs?

Bill Bridges: I chose to work with Linkage for four primary reasons: 
1.   Linkage has a lot of experience running professional development programs.  I knew that it would be done well.
2.   The Linkage people I have worked with are good people with real integrity.  And they "get it"¾they see the program's rationale and its promise.
3.   Linkage has the kind of broad marketing capability that my firm has always lacked.
4.   Finally, my program has such a strong track record within the organizations that used it.  I wanted a partner that was ready to carry that heritage on.

Link&Learn: With over twenty years of experience helping people deal with change, how has your work impacted your thoughts on how to initiate and lead change?

Bill Bridges: As to leading, I am seeing more and more clearly that leaders need not only to be able to bring about a "change," but also to lead people through transition.  That means that they need to understand what people in each of transition’s three phases need from a leader.  This isn't something to be delegated to the middle managers because "they are closer to the people" or assigned to HR people because they are "good with people."  It is something that leaders themselves need to be engaged in.  People need certain kinds of support when they are making an ending.  They need to go through the neutral zone without rushing the process.  And they need to make a real new beginning after they have done those other two things, not on Day One when the CEO tells them to hit the ground running.

As for initiating the change, transition resources need to be part of the planning from the very start¾not added on later, when the wheels are threatening to fall off.

Link&Learn: What is your greatest passion? What keeps you going?

Bill Bridges: I suppose it is to take an idea, like transition¾or later, the concept of "de-jobbing" work¾and use it to clarify people's experience for them, to give them a handle on it, so that they feel more in control of their lives.  Although I'm an idea person, I have little patience with purely abstract ideas.  I want my ideas to be tools, to give people the leverage in their life situations that they need, and to make a difference in their lives.  I love to hear from someone that my ideas¾or the strategies based on them¾really took a difficult time in their life and gave them some footholds and handholds for getting through it.

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This issue of Link&Learn was published in December 2007, by Linkage, Inc. (http://www.linkageinc.com). Please direct copyright and additional questions and comments to editor@linkageinc.com