Break on Through

Why Change Is More Than a Moment

Soon, we'll do something parents spend years preparing their children for and no time preparing themselves for.

We'll help our son leave for university.

There'll be nerves, boxes, unfamiliar walls and a final trip back to the pad for something we forgot. Then we'll drive home without him.

His room will still be his. Except it won't be, quite. (I floated turning it into an office in jest, and the Kubrick stare I got from his Moms in return nearly knocked me over.)

Our family will still be our family. Except it won't be that, quite, either.

The move will take a day. Crossing into what our family will become will take longer.

What Liminality Teaches Us About Organizational Change

Over a century ago, French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep noticed that rituals surrounding major human transitions often followed the same three-part pattern: separation from an old identity, a threshold period when you are no longer what you were but not yet what you will become, and incorporation into a new place in the group.

Victor Turner later spent much of his career exploring that unsettled middle: liminality. William Bridges eventually translated the same human pattern for organizations: an ending, a neutral zone and a new beginning. And it's been standard change management material for decades.

Even if we don't always follow it.

Societies didn't simply declare someone an adult, spouse or leader. They built a passage from one identity to the next. They understood that becoming requires more than a red letter date in your calendar.

Most organizations know this too, at least on paper. Plenty of leaders have sat through the training.

Why Organizational Change Often Stalls After Launch

Knowing it and building it are different things. Organizations announce change as though the announcement is the change.

You're launching a new brand or starting a new service. There's a town hall, a news release, a launch vid, and maybe even some cake. Monday morning rolls around and everyone's just expected to be living in the future.

When they're not, we call it resistance. Sometimes it is. And sometimes we've given people a clear destination but no way to cross.

We spend months and money finding the right leader, then almost no time preparing the organization to receive them. Six months later, the new exec has the title while hard decisions still travel through old loyalties and legacy power centres.

We unveil a new brand while the old decisions and habits underneath it go untouched.

The logotype crosses. The organization doesn't.

Effective Change Management Helps People Cross

Real change asks so much more of us. It means naming what's ending without pretending it never mattered, and holding the uncertain middle without rushing to fill every silence with cringy false certainty. It means giving people room to practise the future before expecting them to perform it perfectly.

That new reality has to become unmistakable. Not through another email, but through what gets rewarded, what gets repeated and what stops being tolerated.

The Human Side of Change and Transition

This is true of organizations. It's also true, I'm discovering in real time, of families.

My son's not the only one leaving an old identity. He'll become a university student living away from home. We'll become parents whose son no longer lives down the hall. The shape of our family will change, even though its love never will.

Only one of us gets the rez key. The crossing belongs to all of us.

Our job isn’t to make the middle painless. It’s to stay close enough that none of us mistakes its awkwardness for failure. To understand that some of the mess is the process working, not proof it's broken.

A launch date is when the new thing begins.

The crossing is when people start belonging to it.