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Les méthodes  de William Bridges
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  It takes some time and repeated experience for the practitioner to understand why Bridges's methods work.  Using the methods with clients, some of whom were in very difficult situations, and seeing the successful results at first brought pleasurable amazement, but not total understanding.  The penny dropped while I was reading Karl Weick, who has studied High Reliability Organizations (such as those in the Nuclear Power Industry) and some disasters of human organization such as the Bhopal disaster in India.  The methods work because Bridges is addressing not only the educated minds of the participants, but also the human need to make sense out of what is going on, and that is a need  which goes back to the foundations of our world.   If man had not felt the need to make sense out of his surroundings, would civilization exist ?  If an organization deprives human beings of their right to make sense of a changing environment it cannot thrive.

William Bridges has understood that there is an effective way to keep the disruptive effects of organizational change to a minimum: the Management of Organizational Transition.  But before organizational and individual transitions can be managed a solid change plan has to be in place.  What is the difference between change and transition ?  Consider the case of a married couple working for the same employer in their hometown.  The company announces it has to close the office and move its operations to another part of the country.  The couple have the "choice" between a generous separation package or taking a job with the same company in its new location.   They like working for the company.  After much heartsearching, and some emotional outbursts from their teenage children who do not want to lose their friends, they decide to move to the new location.  The change happens quickly.  The removal  men come early one morning and everything is packed and moved.  They find themselves in a strange city, with new job titles, with new colleagues, living in a rented apartment until they can buy one of their own, with their children in a new school.  The change has taken place according to schedule.

From the outside, everybody can see that the change has taken place : the couple have moved.  But nobody can see the emotions, the internal transition, the endings that are taking place, the relationships that have been lost.  Why did it feel like their own funeral when they said goodbye to their parents and their friends?  Now, they feel that they will never be able to get acquainted in this new town where everybody seems so stand-offish compared to back home.  The kids brood and complain about their new school.  The parents are afraid they haven't received the right training for their new jobs.  Each member of the the whole family begins to cross his or her personal wilderness, they don't understand and they don't have a vocabulary to describe what is happening to them.   They wonder if they did the right thing, there is a lot of fingerpointing, of suppressed anger which suddenly flares.  They want to quit the company and the school and move back to their hometown where life seemed so easy.   In fact, for the first few months they spend many weekends going back, but with each visit back they feel more out of the loop.  That is when they start to say they made the biggest mistakes of their lives, they have lost everything.  And then, little by little they see their children making friends, they begin to find their way to stores where they find the same sort of service they used to get at home, the new house begins to feel familiar, the new colleagues at work begin to appear genuinely friendly, their weekends begin to fill and they just can't seem to find time to go back to the old town.  The couple and their children begin to feel that maybe things will work out, that just around the corner is a new, worthwhile beginning.  It has taken them many, many months to go through the natural stages associated with transition.  Transitions, even successful transitions, do not take place according to schedule.  They can be said to be successful when they have finally made sense.

How to implement effective change thanks to the ideas behind "Leading and Managing Organizational Transition" can be delivered to leaders and managers in a number of ways.  These ways fall into three basic categories: 

• facilitating 

• training 

• consulting. 

All methods of delivery will be tailored by Syre Consulting to the objectives of your organization and will be up of  materials and resources developed by William Bridges & Associates. People being coached or participants at training seminars will develop Transition Management Plans they can begin to implement immediately after the course.

Leading Organizational Transition Seminars

The transition described above was successful, but it would probably have taken less time and been less painful if the couple had been coached up-front, if they had been told what to expect and been suggested successful strategies for handling the process.  Similar changes, as many international companies know, have meant expensive repatriation of families who did not make it through the transition, who refused the emotional endings or who could not stand the anguish of the wilderness before the new beginning.  Even changes which seem very positive to the external observer, such as promotions or new responsibilities, can provoke painful transitions.  William Bridges's methods provide a framework and a vocabulary which allow companies and their employees to handle transition more efficiently than if people are just left to discover the whole, painful process and the solutions for themselves.   The purpose of the training and coaching programs shown in the following pages is to show (1) how to to make sure that the foundations for change are effectively communicated and (2) that transition plans and programmes minimize the effects of non-stop change on people and organizations.  The time saved by managing transition successfully translates into cost savings which drop straight to the bottom line. 

Yes, as Bridges writes "This is a time full of changes in strategy, technology, product mix, and culture. With many of them come reorganization and redeployment. As in the past, all too many of these changes will be planned with little concern for how they will affect people or for what people will have to do to make them work. It will simply be assumed that if the changes are necessary, people will adjust to them. But experience suggests that the psychological process initiated by change is more like distress and disruption than adjustment."

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http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/L2L/spring2000/bridges.html : William Bridges discussed change and transition with Susan Mitchell.

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