People during organisational change

Sarah had been good at her job for eleven years. Knew the systems, knew the shortcuts, knew which conversations needed to happen in person and which could be an email. Then the restructure happened - new teams, new processes, a new way of recording everything - and within a fortnight she was asking colleagues how to do things she could previously do with her eyes closed.

Nobody talked about that part. The project plan had timelines for system migration and process redesign. The communication plan had key messages about the exciting future ahead. The training plan had dates for upskilling sessions. What none of them had was any acknowledgement that a significant number of capable, experienced people were about to feel like beginners again - and that this feeling would shape how they experienced everything else about the change.

This is one of the least discussed aspects of organisational change. Not the logistics or the communication or even the resistance - but what it feels like from inside it. What happens to people when the ground shifts beneath work they'd built their confidence on.

The gap between changing and transitioning

William Bridges drew a distinction in the early 1990s that still holds: change is external, transition is internal. The change is the restructure, the new system, the merger. The transition is what happens psychologically as people make sense of it, let go of what came before, and find their footing in something new.

Most change plans focus almost entirely on the first. The project milestones, the rollout phases, the training schedule - all of that addresses the change. Very little of it addresses the transition. And it's the transition where people get stuck.

Bridges' model describes three phases that overlap rather than neatly following each other. First, an ending - the recognition that something familiar is being left behind. Then a neutral zone - an in-between period where the old way is gone but the new way hasn't settled. And finally, a new beginning - where people start to feel oriented again.

What's interesting is that every transition starts with loss. Not because organisations are doing something wrong. But because even positive change involves giving something up - routines, relationships, competence, sometimes identity. When someone who's been a regional manager for a decade becomes a "programme lead" in a flatter structure, they haven't just changed title. They've lost a set of reference points for who they are at work.

What change feels like from the inside

There are a few experiences that show up consistently when organisations go through significant change, and they're worth naming because leaders who recognise them can design for them. Research published in BMC Public Health in 2024 found that organisational change is a significant source of psychosocial risk for employees - not because change is inherently harmful, but because the conditions surrounding it often fail to account for the human experience.

Temporary incompetence. This is the one from the opening. People who were skilled and fluent in the old way find themselves clumsy and slow in the new one. New systems, new reporting lines, new ways of making decisions - all of it requires learning, and learning involves a period of not being very good at something. For people who've built their professional identity around being competent, this is more than an inconvenience. It's disorienting.

The performance dip that organisations see in the months after a major change isn't a sign that the change was wrong. It's a sign that people are learning. But it's rarely framed that way. It's framed as an implementation problem, a training gap, or - worse - evidence that certain people "aren't getting on board."

Loss of belonging. Restructures break up teams. People who'd developed working relationships over years find themselves separated, reporting to someone new, sitting in meetings with people they don't yet trust. The informal network - who to call when something goes wrong, who knows the history, who can explain why things work the way they do - gets disrupted.

This matters more than most change plans account for. Julia Balogun and Gerry Johnson's research at the University of Bath found that when people go through organisational change, they make sense of it primarily through informal conversations with people they trust - not through the official communications. The water-cooler conversations, the quiet chats after meetings, the "what do you reckon this means?" exchanges between people who know each other well. When a restructure breaks up those networks, it doesn't just disrupt relationships. It disrupts the organisation's ability to make sense of its own change.

This means the organisation doesn't just feel different during a transition. It works differently - often less effectively for a period - until new networks form and people find new people to think with.

Uncertainty about meaning. During stable periods, most people have an implicit understanding of what matters here. They know what the organisation values, what gets rewarded, what counts as good work. Change disrupts that understanding. The new strategy might say one thing, but the signals people are reading - who got promoted, which projects got funded, what the senior team seems to pay attention to - might not yet match.

This gap between stated direction and lived signals is where a lot of change anxiety lives. It's not that people can't handle ambiguity in the abstract. It's that they're trying to do good work and they're not sure what "good" means anymore.

Identity questions. Perhaps the deepest impact - and the one most organisations overlook entirely. Work isn't just what people do. For many, it's part of who they are. A restructure doesn't just change someone's role. It can change how they see themselves. The expert who's moved into a generalist position. The team leader whose team no longer exists. The specialist whose specialism has been automated.

These aren't dramatic crises. They're quiet recalibrations that people navigate alongside everything else the change demands of them. And they rarely show up in a project plan.

What the experience tells leaders about conditions

Here's where the shift happens. Most guidance on "managing people through change" treats these experiences as problems to be solved - with better communication, more training, stronger leadership presence. All of which help. But they address the symptoms without asking a more fundamental question.

What are the conditions that make it possible for people to navigate this well?

When someone is experiencing temporary incompetence, the question isn't just "have they been trained?" It's "is there enough psychological safety for them to be bad at something for a while?" In organisations where mistakes get punished, where there's pressure to demonstrate competence at all times, the learning period becomes painful rather than productive. People fake confidence rather than asking for help. They find workarounds that maintain the illusion of competence while quietly keeping the old way alive.

When belonging is disrupted, the question isn't just "have we announced the new teams?" It's "have we created the conditions for new relationships to form?" That means time, proximity, shared work, low-stakes interaction. It means recognising that trust is built slowly and can't be mandated through a team-building day.

When meaning is unclear, the question isn't just "have we communicated the strategy?" It's "are the signals people are reading consistent with what we're saying?" Organisations send hundreds of signals every day through the decisions they make, the behaviours they reward, the things they measure. If those signals don't match the stated direction, no amount of communication will fill the gap.

This is the difference between managing people through change and creating the conditions where people can genuinely adapt. The first is something done to people. The second is something done with and around them - reshaping the environment so that transition becomes possible, not just expected.

The conditions that matter most

Across the work we do with organisations navigating significant change, a few conditions consistently make the difference between transitions that land and transitions that stall.

Space to be in between. Bridges called it the neutral zone. Most organisations treat it as a problem - the awkward period between old and new that needs to be shortened. But the neutral zone is where the real work of transition happens. It's where people process, experiment, make sense of the new reality. Trying to rush through it doesn't speed up transition. It drives it underground.

Permission to grieve what's ending. This sounds more dramatic than it needs to. It's not about memorial services for the old org chart. It's about acknowledgement. Recognising that people had built something in the old way - expertise, relationships, identity - and that letting go of it is a real thing, not a failure of attitude. When organisations skip this, the grief doesn't disappear. It shows up as cynicism, disengagement, or the kind of quiet resistance that's almost impossible to address directly.

Coherent signals. When the strategy says "collaboration" but the incentives reward individual performance, people notice. When the leadership says "we trust you" but the new process requires three approvals for a decision that used to need none, people notice. When the change programme celebrates innovation but the culture punishes failure, people notice that too.

Creating conditions for transition means aligning these signals - not perfectly, because perfect alignment is impossible during a period of change - but enough that people can navigate by them. When the signals are broadly consistent with the stated direction, people can make their own judgements about how to adapt. When the signals contradict each other, people freeze, hedge, or default to what they know.

Relationships, not just structures. New org charts create new reporting lines. They don't create trust. Organisations that invest in the relational fabric during change - time for people to work together, opportunities for informal connection, visible leadership presence - find that transitions happen faster and stick better than those that rely on structural logic alone.

Designing change that accounts for people

None of this means change should be slow, or cautious, or endlessly consultative. Some changes need to happen quickly. Some decisions can't be made by committee.

But understanding what people go through during change - and designing the conditions that help them through it - is not a soft extra. It's not the "people side" bolted onto the real plan. It is the difference between a change that lands on paper and a change that lands in practice. Between an organisation that's restructured and an organisation that's transitioned.

The leaders who navigate this well tend to share one characteristic: they've thought about the change from the inside as well as the top. They've asked not just "what needs to change?" but "what will this feel like for the people living through it?" And they've shaped the conditions accordingly - not to remove difficulty, but to make difficulty navigable.

That's a different kind of change leadership. And it starts with understanding that what happens to people during change isn't a side effect of the plan. It's the plan.