Change, Transition and The 90-Day Action Cycle
Change can be announced in a single meeting. The transition inside each of us keeps its own time. What I watched happen in a room of women leaders this week.
If change is the river, the harder question is how we cross it.
This week I facilitated a workshop born of exactly that pressure: an organisation needing to change in order to meet a changing world. We met online — a gallery of faces from kitchens and sitting rooms across Europe, plants on the windowsills, afternoon light, a small flurry of apologies for lateness and unruly technology.
I asked these leaders to step back and consider what was genuinely meaningful to them, and the chat filled in seconds: warm, generous words, one after another.
Then I asked the harder question — what they would actually begin to do, through something new to them called a ninety-day action cycle — and the rhythm changed. The words came more slowly now. Someone slipped away to family for a moment; the rest of us sat with it.
It was uncomfortable. Fear was there. Doubt was there. Uncertainty about what to change, and how. The comfort zone — that warm, familiar place where we tick along — had quietly stopped being comfortable.
Here is what I have come to understand, helped by William Bridges, who spent a lifetime studying the human side of change. Bridges drew a distinction I find quietly profound: change is external — the new strategy, the situation that lands on us. Transition is internal — the slower, more tender process of letting go of what was and finding our way to what’s next. An organisation can announce a change in a single meeting; the transition inside each person keeps its own time.
Change is external. Transition is internal.
Between the old and the new, Bridges says, lies what he called the neutral zone — that disorienting in-between where the old certainties have gone but the new ones haven’t yet arrived. It is exactly where those leaders found themselves. And from the inside, it feels like fear, and doubt, and not-knowing.
But the neutral zone is not a failure of nerve. It is, in Bridges’ words, the seedbed of new beginnings — uncomfortable, and yet the most creative ground we ever stand on.
The task is not to rush through it but to move through it well: in small, deliberate steps, alongside others, marking each early win. By the end of our time together, I watched a little of that fear soften — not into certainty, but into something steadier: a willingness to take one step, and then the next.
Some of us are built to flow, and some to hold the bank — and we don’t all meet the neutral zone the same way.
Roger Hamilton’s Dynamics system, used by entrepreneurs and professionals alike to find their natural strengths, offers a helpful lens. Perhaps you’re one of those who lights up at a blank page — the Creators and Stars, drawn to the new, already three ideas ahead before the rest of us have finished the question. Perhaps you move through people — the Supporters and Deal Makers — needing to talk it through, to feel who’s coming with you before you’ll take a step. Or perhaps you’re the one who goes quiet — the Traders waiting for the right moment, the Accumulators and Lords who will not budge until there’s a system, a plan, and proof the ground will hold.
None of these is braver than another.
The leader who hesitates is not more fearful than the one who leaps — they are simply built to steady, to protect, to ask how? before what if?
In a community that needs both the current and the bank, that range is not a problem to manage but a gift to use.
And it is exactly why a ninety-day cycle serves them all: for the one brimming with ideas, a container to hold the energy; for the one who needs solid ground, a frightening leap broken into small, evidenced steps — until change feels less like risk and more like good sense.
That is what a ninety-day cycle offers. Not a grand leap, but a gentle structure for the neutral zone — a way of turning change that was thrust upon us into transition we choose.
Where in your own life have you mistaken a transition for a failure of nerve?