Organization Align

Bridges Transition Model

The Bridges transition model follows the psychological path through an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning.

The questionWhat are these people being asked to give up, and how far along are they in letting go of it?

Process · William Bridges, 1980, 1991

1
Ending Letting go of what is lost
2
Neutral zone Old way gone, new way not working yet
3
New beginning People act in the new way

The three phases of transition. Groups often sit in different phases at the same time.

When to use it

A reorganization, merger, or system cutover has a date, and the plan has communications and training workstreams but nothing that deals with what people are losing.
Productivity drops after go-live and the sponsor reads it as resistance.
Managers have to announce new roles or reporting lines and want to know what to say first.
Different groups affected by the same change are reacting in opposite ways, and leaders are puzzled that one group is ready and another is angry.

When to avoid it

Few people are affected, or what they lose is trivial. A transition program is overhead for a minor change.
The pushback is a well-founded objection to a flawed design. Treating it as grief delays the fix.
The open question is what to change, not how people experience it. Use a decision or diagnostic tool first.
The sponsor needs measured evidence of readiness. This is a practitioner model, so pair it with survey or usage data.

Overview

The Bridges model separates a change from the transition people go through to absorb it. The change is an event with a date: a merger, a new reporting line, a system cutover. The transition is the inner reorientation that follows, and it runs on its own schedule. The model supports one choice: how much of the plan’s time and attention goes to letting people close out the old situation before asking for commitment to the new one.

Bridges described three phases: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning. In practice the phases overlap, and people in the same unit sit in different ones. Leaders often reach the new beginning first, because they have lived with the decision longest, which is why their pace is a poor guide to everyone else’s.

The three phases

Ending

Transition begins with what is lost, not with the new thing. Losses include roles, relationships, routines, status, a place, and the feeling of being competent at the old job. Some look small from the sponsor's chair and large from the floor. Signs include anger, withdrawal, and a sudden attachment to a process nobody cared about last year. The work is to say what is ending, what is staying, and to give people a way to close out the old situation.

Neutral zone

The old way is gone and the new way is not yet working. Bridges treated this as the center of the process. Output often dips, rumors grow, and people are anxious, but it is also the period when new working patterns get built. The work is temporary arrangements, short-range goals, frequent two-way information, and resisting the urge to hurry people through it.

New beginning

People start acting in the new way and identify with the new role or purpose. It cannot be scheduled from the project plan, and the launch date is a different thing from the beginning. Bridges's advice, as the publisher summarizes it, is that people need a purpose, a plan, and a part to play.

What it is not

A schedule that people follow in step with the project plan. Groups are in different phases at once, and leaders who have lived with the decision longest are usually ahead of everyone else.
The Kübler-Ross grief curve. The two are often drawn on one slide, but they are separate models with different origins and different phases.

The steps

Separate the change from the transition

Write the change as an external event with a date and an owner. Then list, for each affected group, what that event takes away from them. The sponsor's plan usually covers the first and omits the second. What comes out is a loss inventory, one list per group.
Find who loses what

Interview a few people in each group and ask what they did yesterday that they will not do after the change. Listen for roles, relationships, expertise that will no longer count, and places. Include informal status. The result is a short list of specific losses, ranked by how many people feel them.
Mark the endings

Say plainly what is ending, what is staying, and why. Give each ending a handover, a retrospective, or some other way for people to close it out. Do not sell the new state in the same meeting. What comes out is a set of dated actions with owners, one per significant loss.
Plan the neutral zone

Expect a dip and plan for it. Put in temporary roles and short-range goals, set a regular two-way channel for problems, and agree checkpoints at which the plan can change. Resist pressure from above to measure the new state before people are in it. What comes out is a set of interim arrangements with a review date.
Check where each group is

Listen to how people talk. References to how it used to work point to the ending. Questions about who does what and when this will be over point to the neutral zone. Volunteering for new tasks points to the beginning. Check the leaders too, because they are often well ahead. What comes out is a map of groups and phases, repeated every few weeks.

In practice

Eight weeks after two regional claims offices were merged into one center, the new workflow was live and handling times still had not recovered. The sponsor read this as resistance and asked for more training. Interviews told a different story. Adjusters from the closed office had lost their supervisor and the colleagues they used to ask about odd cases. Adjusters at the surviving office had lost the quiet floor they liked. Both groups kept using the retired tracking spreadsheet, because it was the one thing that still felt like their own work.

The consultant split the response by phase. For endings, the closed office held a handover session, and one named person took over the questions the old supervisor used to field. For the neutral zone, a rotating floor lead was added, a weekly list of fixed problems went out, and the spreadsheet's retirement date was set with the people who used it. The training budget went mostly unspent.

What you leave with

A loss inventory for each affected group, with what stays as well as what goes.
Dated actions for each significant ending, with named owners.
Interim arrangements for the neutral zone, including temporary roles, short-range goals, a feedback channel, and a review date.
A current read of which groups and which leaders sit in which phase.
Changes to the project plan in dates, staffing, or targets, made because of what the check found.

Failure points

Go-live treated as the end of the transition

The change date is a project milestone. People finish letting go earlier or later than that, and often start the new way only after the support team has gone. A plan that ends support at go-live ends it where the neutral zone begins.

Selling the future in place of an ending

Sponsors present the new state with energy. People who have not finished losing the old one hear it as dismissal and conclude that nobody noticed what they gave up.

Hurrying the neutral zone

Managers read ambiguity as a problem to solve and push for early results. People revert to the old methods, work around the new system, or leave.

Treating all pushback as grief

Some objections are correct points about design, cost, or safety. Check each against the facts before calling it a feeling. Otherwise the model gets used to dismiss good information.

Support with no change to the plan

Workshops produce empathy, but the schedule, staffing, and targets stay as they were. People notice that the plan did not change, and the sessions lose credibility.

The failures above are usually Presence: the framework was sound, but the attention of the stakeholders was not held.

Origin

William Bridges was a former English professor who moved into transition consulting in the mid-1970s. His 1980 book Transitions was about personal life changes such as a new job, a move, or the end of a marriage, and it set out the three phases. Managing Transitions, first published in 1991, applied them to organizational change. Later editions of the second book were updated in 2003 and 2009.

The model rests on Bridges's observation and workshop practice. There is little controlled research testing the three phases as stated. William Bridges Associates, the firm that carries on his work, sells training and assessment tools built on the model and publishes its own graphics. This note describes the ideas in other words and does not reproduce those materials.