 ORGANIZATIONAL RENEWAL
William Bridges
A whole book could be written on the way that repeated changes are today sapping the energy and confusing the purpose within corporations and public institutions. Many of the initiatives launched by leaders—initiatives that are intended to lead to organizational renewal—all too often simply add to the burden of change. The new strategic, structural, and or cultural plans are all meant to bring new life to the organization. But few of them do justice to the natural renewal sequence of letting go, embracing and exploring the time between realities, and then setting off on the chosen path to the future.
Like individuals, organizations can repress the future just as they repress the past. Repressing the past creates subjects that cannot be discussed, so it creates problems that cannot be addressed. Repressing the future blocks the organization's path to its destiny and leaves it buffeted by constant change.
Organizational leaders fail to appreciate these problems because they went through their transitions back when the organization was first trying to come to terms with its challenges. The decision to make whatever change the organization is making was for them the last stage of their transition. That decision and the first steps taken to implement it are their beginning, but the for the people who haven't to this point been in transition, that same decision and those same steps represent an ending to the way things were.
If leaders do not understand and compensate for how far ahead of people they are, their followers will have an especially hard time with transition and the change itself may be jeopardized. For a change can work only if the people affected by it can get through the transition it causes successfully.
Organizations In Transition, Vol 13, #3
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