I’m two weeks into an eight-week self-study on the philosophy and practice of change. Each week, I pair one philosopher with one framework. Week one was Heraclitus against Parmenides, with Lewin caught in the middle. Week two moved to another question: not whether change is real, but what it’s actually made of.
The guiding question: does change move toward something, or just away from something?
I want to start with a city near Paris, not with Aristotle. A few years ago I worked with a local town’s on a reorganisation touching 2,000 people. They were born out of years of poor communication and collaboration between services. Before we’d even sat down properly, I kept hearing the same sentence. Almost everyone was telling me: “we don’t want an audit, we want a sociological inquiry.”
Good thing they called a sociologist then, I told myself.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand that sentence wasn’t really about method. Ten years earlier, someone had come in, produced a report that only listed dysfunctions, and left. The teams never forgot it. So by the time I arrived, “change” and “audit” had become the same word in people’s mouths, and audit meant one thing: someone is coming to catalog what’s wrong with us.
You see, this is the part change management theory tends to skip. William Bridges has a line I keep circling back to: people are reacting to the losses, the piece of their world that is being lost. They are not reacting to change.
Not the reorg itself. Not the new reporting line. The loss sitting underneath it, half-named, still raw from the last time.
Bridges spends most of Managing Transitions on this distinction, and I’m only in chapter two, so I’ll say plainly: I like this book more than I expected to. He separates change, the external event, from transition, the internal work of actually getting through it. Three phases: an ending, a neutral zone, a new beginning. You need all three, in that order, even when nobody names them out loud.
Small aside, because I can’t not mention it: the man wrote the definitive book on managing transitions and his last name is Bridges. I didn’t choose that detail. I just noticed it, on a plane somewhere, and now I can’t unsee it.
Which brings me to the plane, actually. There’s a reason the safety briefing tells you to put your own oxygen mask on before helping the person next to you. I think about that instruction more than is probably normal, in the context of a reorg. Because before I can help 2,000 people through a loss they can’t fully name, I have to be honest about what I’d be losing, in their position. Status, maybe. A team you built by hand. The version of competence that made sense five years ago and doesn’t quite anymore. Compassion, in this job, is a sharp tool. Not a soft one. It’s the thing that tells you where to look.
This is also, practically, why I score impact before I touch anything else: 1 to 3, for every group affected, not by guessing but by asking what’s actually changing for them. A move to a shinier building means nothing to someone who’s changed offices six times already and everything to someone who’s worked from the same desk for twenty years. Same event, completely different transition, and if you build one action plan for both of them you’ve already lost the second person.
Aristotle, writing 2,300 years before any of this had a name, would say none of it is coincidence. Change, for him, is the actuality of what is potentially so, insofar as it is potentially so. A pile of bricks is not yet a house, but it’s potentially one, and the moment it starts being built, it’s neither the raw materials anymore nor the finished house yet. It’s the potential, actively becoming real. That in-between, materials turning into house, is what change actually is.
Which means the 2,000 people in that reorg were never being asked to become something arbitrary. Whatever the organization became on the other side of it was already somewhere in what they were before. Our job wasn’t to install something foreign onto them. It was closer to what Bridges is describing without the Greek: help them let go of what needed letting go, sit through the part where the old way is gone and the new one doesn’t feel real yet, so what was already possible in them could actually take hold.
I still don’t have a clean answer to what that city actually thought it was losing, underneath the word “audit.” Ten years of an old report living in people’s memory is not something you undo with a good workshop. I’m not sure it’s something you undo at all. Maybe you just build the plane’s oxygen mask into how you show up, every time, and trust that the neutral zone, however uncomfortable, is doing what Bridges says it does.
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