AFF GRANTS EMPHASIZE TRANSITION
By William Bridges
"...I believe that AFF's innovative approach has a better chance of creating and sustaining social change."
– William Bridges
Any foundation intends for its grants to change things: to expand educational opportunities for some group or to stop environmental degradation in some geographical area or to provide treatments for some group suffering from a particular medical condition. Not surprisingly, many foundations define their mission and focus their efforts entirely on making their particular kind of change happen.
The Andrus Family Fund has its own particular areas of focus, of course – the particular social issues where it wants to help change happen. But it also has another focus, one which I think makes it different from other foundations. That other focus is on transition. Anyone who is interested in working with the AFF should understand that focus and why it exists.
Too many efforts at change within organizations or societies at large go through some version of this cycle:
i) dream
ii) initiative
iii) effort
iv) failure
v) discouragement
The typical change effort then falls back, studies the situation, and then tries again. Sometimes the sequence is repeated several times. Everyone – the grantors, the grantees, and the target population alike end up so confused and frustrated that it is hard to make change stick.
As I have studied this situation, I have concluded that such efforts share a common difficulty: they focus on change and overlook transition. Change is logical and situational. It starts by establishing a goal and then decides what steps are necessary to reach the goal. Transition, on the other hand, is the psychological reorientation, development, and renewal process that takes the people who were adjusted" to the old way that things were, and turns them into the people who will fit with the new way that things are going to be.
To put matters simply, most efforts to solve societal problems fail to work because they focus exclusively on the change and imagine that the transition will take care of itself. To deal with the transition, such programs would need to build in ways to help their target population reorient itself from the old way of doing and being to a whole new way of doing and being.
Whatever the content of the particular social change that a social effort involves, the transition that it puts people into has three phases to it:
1. People need to end and to let go of the old way - not only in terms of behavior, but also in terms of attitudes, self-image, assumptions, beliefs, and the hopes and fears that motivate behavior. To let go of those things is to experience a loss, even though the old ways may have been (from some points of view - including even their own) bad, hurtful, or unpleasant. The easiest way to check whether a particular program is taking into account the transition as well as the change is to ask whether there is an effective way built into the program to manage the ending and the sense of loss that it will create in people.
2. Even though the new way – whatever it is – may start with a bang on the first day of the program, people not only have to let go of the old way to get with the new one; they also have to get through an uncomfortable in-between time, when the old way is gone, but the new way doesn't yet wholly work or feel comfortable. This "neutral zone," as we call this in-between time, is a very confusing time. But it is also a very creative one. Everything is in flux, so it is a time when people can work out innovative ways of doing things. Everything is up for grabs anyway, so there is less holding people back than at other times. At the same time, people are likely to feel lost and even discouraged about the very change that sounded so good only a little while earlier. The second question to ask, when you are trying to determine whether a program deals with transition, is what provision it makes for helping people through this in-between-time, this neutral zone.
3. The final phase of transition is the new beginning: not the "start," which may occur the very day the new program is announced, but the "beginning," which occurs when people (having ended the old and traversed the neutral zone) are actually emotionally ready to do things a whole new way. Like a birth – the archetype of all new beginnings – this third phase of transition happens on its own schedule. Things can start on the day that you say that they will, but the beginning will happen when people are inwardly ready. And that will take a while, so transition always takes longer – sometimes much longer – than change does. There are things you can do to encourage people to leave the neutral zone and make a new beginning, but you cannot do them on Day One of your undertaking. You have to have taken care of the ending and the neutral zone first.
To understand how transition fits into social-change efforts, consider these examples:
*Most change-oriented programs on teen-age pregnancy try to reach the goal of reduced pregnancies, but they usually do not contain ways to extinguish the old behavior or help people during the uncomfortable time when neither the old or the new way of acting feels natural.
*Change-oriented programs that help new populations go to college usually focus on the students' learning new study skills and how to succeed in the college-application process, but they do not give people the support they need if they find that their new dream estranges them from their old friends.
*Change-oriented environmental programs may teach why traditional ways of farming or building damage the environment and how the new ways of doing these things will reduce erosion; but they do not address the loss of the satisfaction and confidence that people used to receive from doing things the way that their parents and grandparents had done them. It is no wonder that so many of these programs don't work.
How transition fits in to specific social changes varies from situation to situation, so let's just illustrate with two very different examples. Your own area may be far-removed from both of them, but if you understand the way that change and transition are related in these two cases, you are going to find it easier to see the relation in your own situation.
The first was a program for developmentally retarded individuals. The state laws governing assistance to such individuals had recently been influenced by the consumer movement, so that the people being helped by the program were now called consumers rather than patients. The regulations had also been changed, so that they now required the professional social workers and medical specialists who worked with these consumers to act as consultants to the individuals and their families rather than as professional experts. These consultants were to help the consumers understand the possible treatment and lifestyle options they faced and choose from among them. They were to stop prescribing the particular course of action that they believed to be the best one.
Now, there are all kinds of reasons - social, political, and professional - for changes of this kind, but as long as they are mandated with arguments based on the changes, there is a whole aspect of the situation that remains hidden. The hidden issues involve the loss experienced by the professionals in this system – people who had built their self-images and self-esteem around being the-ones-who-knew-best, being the experts, being the ones whose insight and experience carried weight within the system. But now it was the consumer calling the shots. And that very term - the professionals gagged on it! - made it sound to them as though the service being delivered was on a par with grocery shopping or rug-cleaning. This change had far-reaching transition consequences, and no one was dealing with them.
The second example comes from a center for abused women and their children. The leaders at the center were very talented and forward- looking group, and they moved the center's work with families to a social-systems pproach in which the whole family was the client. From a change perspective, such theory and the treatment modalities it made possible were a long step forward from the days when abusers were simply shamed and punished. But from a transition point of view, the systems theory (which insisted on looking at everyone within the system as part of the solution and of the problem) forced traditional Women's advocates to let go of their simplistic picture of the bad abuser and the good victim. Without the ability to understand people's reactions as a product of transition, the "new approaches" were fought over moralistically and fought to a stalemate.
In either of these examples, it would have been easy to build education about transition and some resources to facilitate transition right into the program from the beginning. Those who resisted the change could have been helped to let go, instead of being treated like closed-minded people who didn't understand the need for change. And in both of these cases, there could have been built-in strategies for getting people through the neutral zone – a time when people often lose faith in their leaders – instead of simply turning up the heat under people until many of them left the programs.
I am excited that the Andrus Family Fund has incorporated transition into its grant making strategy. As a result, I believe that AFF's innovative approach has a better chance of creating and sustaining social change.
To learn more about the Transition framework and the ways that our grantees are working with it, please see www.transitionandsocialchange.org.