I have worked as a psychologist and consultant since the mid-90s, and have found that the majority of work I do is change work. Traditionally when the term “change” is mentioned, the usual association is people resisting, being inflexible, being closed to change. While doing some of the Gestalt side of my training in the early 2000’s, I remember a helpful distinction being made between technical focus areas and relational ones. In managing change, I have found most organisations focus primarily on the structural and technical elements, with very little focus on the human “relational” side.
A main focus on structural and technical changes, with little or no focus on emotion associated with change, is false economy. Emotions bubble through in confusion, misperception, corridor talk (what I refer to as dirty data), and preoccupation with individual fears. In fact, fear becomes one of the biggest obstacles to constructive change.
The Change Curve
Many people in organisations have heard of the change curve. It is a very useful way of understanding what is happening in the emotions and relational side of change. Psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross is famous for her work with people confronting either their own pending death, or that of those dear to them. Across thousands of cases she was famous for identifying the stages, and human processing of death into: denial; anger; bargaining; depression and acceptance.
Kübler-Ross’s original grief model has been adapted for organisational contexts by various theorists. Schneider and Goldwasser, mapped a predictable pattern: shock, denial, frustration, depression, experimentation, decision, integration. Elrod and Tippett’s meta- analysis of 20 change models confirmed that this curve manifests across industries, cultures, and levels of seniority. Performance dips before it recovers, and the depth and duration of that dip depends on leadership behaviour.
This is not an inflexibility or personality problem. It is a very human emotional response to perceived loss.
Cameron and Green indicated that leaders who treat resistance as information rather than opposition create conditions for faster, more sustainable transitions.
William Bridges’s Notion of Change versus Transition
In 2009 Bridges drew a useful distinction between change and transition. Change is external and situational — a new strategy, a restructured team, a merged division. Transition is internal and psychological — the process of letting go, navigating confusion, and eventually finding footing in something new. Change fails when the transition goes unmanaged — when people are expected to show up in a new structure without being supported through the internal journey of getting there.
Bridges describes three phases. Firstly, before people can embrace anything new, they need to let go of the old: old competencies, old relationships, old professional identities, old routines. Secondly, a neutral zone follows — a disorienting territory between old and new, marked by confusion, lowered morale, and heightened vulnerability. New Beginnings emerge last, carrying new energy and identity, but only when the earlier phases have been properly processed.
In my Gestalt training, we work with a parallel principle: the paradoxical theory of change. This holds that transformation happens when people fully embrace what is, rather than straining toward what should be. Rushing people through endings creates what Gestalt practitioners call unfinished business — and it resurfaces later as cynicism, passive resistance, or disengagement.
What this Looks like in Practice
Across change processes, I have often found well-meaning senior directors having a new plan or structure, developed offline, with which they one-directionally inform employees.
Instead, I have found it immensely helpful to enable employees to hear clean, clear information of the context for the change (this really reduces the need for rumours and corridor conversations, and we will pick up again in a later blog on effective communication during change). Employees then need to emotionally process this information, and the best way to do this is in sub-groups. It is much easier to speak in a group of 5-7 people than it is to speak in front of a large group.
The Pattern across Sectors
It is not unusual that different sectors get stuck at different points on the change curve. Manufacturing organisations tend to linger in denial, insulated by legacy processes. Financial services teams often rush past the emotional work to reach “the answer” skipping the processing phase entirely. Government departments can oscillate between resignation and false urgency.
In our work at Thornhill Associates, this pattern shows up consistently in 360-degree feedback data. Leaders who score well on empathy and emotional awareness lead teams that move through change curves faster. They create the psychological conditions for transition. The leaders who score poorly on these dimensions tend to produce surface
compliance that collapses under pressure.
The Uncomfortable Implication
If your people are stuck, the first question is not “how do I get them moving?” It is “what loss have I failed to acknowledge?”
That question requires courage. It means sitting with discomfort rather than reaching for a project plan. It means accepting that the timeline in your head may not match the emotional reality of the people who have to live through the change.
But here is what I have learned, repeatedly, across every sector I have worked in: the organisations that take time to honour endings and hold space through the neutral zone arrive at new beginnings faster than those that try to skip the grief.
The change curve is not an obstacle to your timeline. It is an investment in the success of the change process, and change itself is a necessary positive adaptation skill in the era we live in.