Transitions Aren’t Transformations
We often conflate transitions with transformations, but they aren’t the same. Depending on their complexity, transitions can require energy, attention, and a myriad of tasks, but they don’t require becoming something different.
Some typical personal transitions are moving or changing jobs. Transitions like these can feel overwhelming at times and produce anxiety, as well as optimism about the state of living someplace or working somewhere different in most cases, which doesn’t rise to the level of transformation. This is not to say that some personal transitions don’t become transformative with much deeper impact and meaning. Someone who leaves a career as a hedge fund manager to be a missionary will experience life changes beyond doing different work. Someone who moves from an urban high-rise to living off the grid in a remote part of the world isn’t just changing addresses. As illustrated by these two examples, transitions have to be outliers to reach the level of being transformative, which they typically don’t.
From a company perspective, most transitions also don’t reach the level of being transformative. Company transitions often include moving from one software product to another or opening an additional market with the same offering. Yes, there is change, and yes, it can be challenging, but unless the organization is reimagining what it does, why it does it, and how it does it, most company transitions are different from business as usual but not transformative. Netflix is a good example of a company that has transformed. For those too young to remember, Netflix started with mail-order DVDs. It, of course, is now the best-known and largest streaming service. That is a company transforming. It rarely happens, and most who try to make this kind of transformative leap don’t make it to the other side.
We elevate transitions to feeling like transformations because we want the effort, time, and energy expended on transitions to be more consequential than just a transition. We want our angst or optimism around a change to be elevated to the highest level to substantiate our feelings. This is also why transformations are rare. Transformations require a level of commitment, understanding, and disruption that goes beyond transition feelings. Transformations are less about feelings than they are about survival and then thriving. People, companies, or communities going through a transformation know all the transition feelings will be there, but the feelings get processed and dealt with before a transformation because a transformation can’t begin until there is an acknowledgment by the transforming person, organization, or community that the transformation is necessary. Transformations require a mental, emotional, and often physical threshold to be crossed before a transformation can begin. Transitions can happen with a checklist. Transformations happen with a gut check.
Transitions have temporary excitement and work. Transformations are long-lasting and deeply meaningful. Transitions are transactional, keeping us occupied for a period of time until we settle into the new situation, after which we might find ourselves longing for another transition. Getting on a transition treadmill is not unusual. Transitions keep us distracted from doing the hard work we know to be what we want. Only transformations can give us this level of satisfaction and gratification that isn’t fleeting.
