The Transition Cycle, the next level

By: Jakob van Wielink and Leo Wilhelm

For over ten years we – and by now many others who have joined us – have been working with the Transition Cycle in organizations and teams, implementing it in leadership development and customer guidance. Our own experiences and developments in academic research have produced a treasure of new insights and growth. It is now high time to take the Transition Cycle itself to the next level.

Foundation of the model

The basis for the Transition Cycle was established by the American psychologist, hostage negotiator and leadership professor George Kohlrieser. Partly based on the work of John Bowlby, he introduced the Bonding Cycle in his groundbreaking bestseller about leadership, Hostage at the table. In the Netherlands, Piet Weisfelt and Wibe Veenbaas introduced the cycle as Contact Cycle. Riet Fiddelaers-Jaspers alongside Sabine Noten used the circle under the name Loss Cycle”, elaborating further on the cycle.

Toward a new name: Transition Cycle

Both George Kohlrieser and William Bridges (Managing transitions) can be acknowledged for their introduction of the transition theme – change at the identity level – in organizational and leadership contexts on an international level. Inspired by their work and insights, some five years ago we discovered the importance of naming the model Transition Cycle. This evidences that all the mentioned themes play a role in change: they are all equally important. The focus also becomes clearer, as transition is about recognizing all the themes in their mutual connection. The crossbars we placed against the names show that too.

Five years further, a new step

Thanks to our practical experience with the power of the Transition Cycle with people and organizations as well as to copious research, we are now ready for the next step – a step we are taking by expanding and further elaborating on the themes. This expansion is not only of a supplementary nature, it is primarily about focusing of a theme and thus about the direction of our guidance of people and organizations. In this article we will briefly discuss these expansions.

With Denise van Geelen-Merks we applied the Transition Cycle extensively and recorded many of our experiences and insights, for example in books that we wrote together.

The essence

Let us start by briefly explaining the essence of the Transition Cycle: the way in which we relate to other people and to matters that are important to us form a cyclical pattern. Although we are often used to laying out our life experiences linearly in time, the way in which we engage in relationships and connect to each other is made up of repeating patterns. In each new relationship themes from previous relationships repeat, and in each relationship our earliest experiences resonate from back when we formed our very first relationships. These themes have their place in the Transition circle, because when there are changes there is always loss and parting, which challenge the themes underlying our relationships.

Contact and Welcome

Each new contact points back to our very first contact – with the world, our parents, friends, work, in-laws, our boss, the team, etc. That contact thus also refers to the first welcome and to how we experienced it. Being welcomed, feeling welcomed, form the basis for every relationship, professional as well as personal. Without welcoming there is no contact, without contact there is no welcoming. These are fundamental and inextricably linked. They are a precondition for personal and organizational growth and development.

Attachment and Resilience

Attachment is primarily the largely unconscious way in which people seek closeness and security in available others. This theme builds on the groundbreaking work of the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby. As children, and later as adults, we shape our attachment style on the basis of our experiences of security and availability with our first attachment figures and secure bases.

A secure base is a person, place, goal or object that provides a sense of protection, safety and caring and offers a source of inspiration and energy for daring, exploration, risk taking and seeking challenge. (ref. George Kohlrieser in: Care to Dare)

Our hankering for attachment is a neurological need, and our attachment style forms an underlayer for each new relationship we enter into. With the development of our attachment style our resilience, our capacity to deal with adversity and disappointment, also takes shape. These effects, which are also determinant to the way in which we deal with stress, can be found in the formation and development of our nervous system and at a genetic level.

Bonding and Intimacy

As we have seen, our attachment style is about the underlayer of the way in which we shape relationships. Bonding is about our deliberate choice to deepen the relationship and invest our emotions in it. This automatically makes this theme also about the vulnerability and the dialogue that are part of searching for intimacy and letting it in. This vulnerability traces back to our experiences with previous actual bonding as well as rejection – experiences that are stored in the deeper layers of our brain. At the level of our attachment style these unconscious memories have an impact every time we consciously reach out to another person. Every attempt to bond also affects this largely unconscious yet fundamental fear of rejection.

Loss and Separation

Everything we are attached to and everything we have bonded with in this life is finite, just like we ourselves are also finite. This applies to our most intimate relationships at work and in the private sphere, and equally to perhaps less tangible matters such as the team, money, social position, health, a home, familiar working habits, the company logo, etc.

So we lose people as well as (sometimes intangible) things. This is exactly where the Transition Cycle comes in with new, often-uneasy perspectives for many employees and their leaders in organizations. The loss of our connections with secure basestests our capacity to connect and reconnect. It is one thing to lose, but saying farewell is different. Recognizing loss and the willingness to let go, together with others, opens up the possibility for the following themes on the Transition circle.

Grief and Integration

Let us start with a definition:

Grieving is dealing with a totality of feelings, thoughts, physical perceptions and behavior that can arise when, willingly or forcibly, we bid farewell to something or someone we have maintained a significant relationship with.

Do people in organizations grieve? Yes, a lot, about things small and large: lost projects, dissolved teams, managerial personnel who left (after a nasty conflict), promotions one didn’t make, status, bankruptcy, a brand name that disappeared, etc.

Grieving has the duality of an orientation toward loss (“the past”) and recovery (“the future”), between which we swing back and forth. Here, where our attachment is torn, we are invited and sometimes challenged to address our resilience – a resilience that at times is also overcharged. Grieving demands an integration of the loss in our life and our work. Who are we now that we’ve been taken over and the name has been taken off the fa?ade? Will I allow myself to experience the pain about the manager who left after 15 years, who I went through so much with, and thanks to whom I was able to grow? Grieving is, as it were, the lost “integration” in our story that continues. Here one also speaks of continuing bonds. There isn’t enough awareness around for leaders and coaches in terms of the right order in this theme – or as George Kohlrieser says, 'first the pain, then the benefit'

Meaning and Calling

Loss and grief demand we rewrite our personal or organizational story in order to create a new order: one that has meaning for us, for our unique situation, for our unique loss. This meaning is ours to give by reshaping our story again, including the fissure of the loss, preferably by sharing our story with others who will hear us, see us and ask us questions.

The story continues. And whereas the loss in itself may be and remain senseless, we can respond to the challenge that the loss imposes on us: what do we do in the new continuation of our story? Wherever our old story, the one from before the loss, may no longer be sufficient – failing to provide the answers for this new situation – we have to stick to our calling, which is the why of our existence.

In this sense, a mission is also what Simon Sinek, together with authors like Stephen Covey and Viktor Frankl, calls the “Why”. This is about the larger focus of your life, about what you have to do and about not getting hijacked by circumstances, experiences and emotions.

With experiences of loss we probably become “sadder but wiser”. Our partner, the team, the children, the organization: they invite us to set things up in such a way that we are actually able to make new contact, experience and give a new welcome, and in this way bond again. Time and again.

Sequel

The Transition Cycle expands and is further elaborated upon. We look forward to deploying these themes with the right balance of caring and daring within and outside an organization in order to address the resilience of all individuals, teams and their leaders. Within this process we are curious as to how it will contribute to your organization and to your personal and professional relationships. We will keep sharing our experiences and discoveries. We would also love to hear your story, and look forward to anything you wish to share.

Jakob van Wielink is an international educator, author and coach in the field of (personal) leadership, transition and grief. He is initiator and co-founder of De School voor Transitie. As an executive coach, he is affiliated with the (Advanced) High Performance Leadership Program by professor George Kohlrieser at IMD Business School in Switzerland. He is also a staff member at the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition in the United States, led by professor Robert A. Neimeyer.

Leo Wilhelm is an author, executive, and coach. Leo has worked in the corporate world and is currently working for the Dutch government. Leo is a certified grief counsellor, has many years of hospice experience, and provides both personal and group-based support for cases of loss and transition. He is advisor to De School voor Transitie.

References

- Bridges, W. (2011). Managing Transitions. Making the Most Out of Change. London: Nicholas Brealey.

- Kohlrieser, G., Goldsworthy, S., & Coombe, D. (2012). Care to Dare: Unleashing Astonishing Potential Through Secure Base Leadership. John Wiley & Sons.

- Kohlrieser, G. (2006). Hostage at the Table: How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict, Influence Others, and Raise Performance. John Wiley & Sons.

- Wielink, J. van, Wilhelm, L., & Geelen-Merks, D. van (2017). Professioneel begeleiden bij verlies. Amsterdam: Boom.