Riding the Change Curve

Where the curve comes from

The shape you're looking at started as a map of grief. In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published On Death and Dying, describing five stages she observed in terminally ill patients — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Change practitioners later borrowed the model for organizational life, because significant change at work is a loss: of competence, of routine, of status, of the version of the future people had quietly planned on. The seven-stage curve above is one common adaptation.

One honest caveat, which Kübler-Ross herself insisted on: it's a heuristic, not a law. Real people don't march through stages in order. They loop back, skip around, visit Frustration twice before breakfast, and move at wildly different speeds — usually in proportion to how much the change costs them specifically. Use the curve to recognize where someone is, not to schedule where they ought to be.

You can't skip stages — only shorten them

The most common leadership fantasy about change is teleportation: announce well enough, incentivize cleverly enough, and the team will jump straight from the town hall to Integration. It has never happened once. The stages are how humans metabolize loss — you can't delete them, any more than you can skip a fever by being enthusiastic about health. What you can do is shorten them: good support turns a six-month Valley into a six-week one, and bad support does the reverse.

Which is why the right intervention depends entirely on where someone is, not where you want them to be. The same move that's brilliant at one stage is poison at another:

Diagnose first, intervene second. That's the whole discipline — and it's why the classic mistake at every stage is really the same mistake: treating people as if they were at the stage you need them to be at, instead of the one they're in.

Bridges: change is situational, transition is psychological

William Bridges drew a distinction that explains most failed rollouts. Change is the external event — the new org chart, the new system, the go-live date. It happens to people, on a schedule, and it can be project-managed. Transition is the internal reorientation — letting go of the old identity, crossing the uncomfortable in-between, and genuinely starting again. It happens in people, at its own pace, and it can only be supported. The gap between the change schedule and the transition pace is where initiatives go to die: the system launched on time, and eighteen months later everyone is still running the old process in a spreadsheet.

Use this with your team

Here's the move that turns this page from trivia into management: during your next change, plot each team member on the curve — individually. Not the team average; averages lie. On any given Tuesday you'll have one person in Denial, two in Frustration, one in the Valley, and an early adopter already redesigning the process in Decision. Each of them needs something different from you, and the curve tells you what.

In a workshop, do it in the open: give everyone two minutes with Plot mode, then share placements — volunteers first — and ask two questions per person: "What would help you most right now?" and "What should we stop doing to you?" Teams are consistently surprised by the spread, and the conversation that follows does more for the change than any status deck. Meet people where they are. It's the only place you can actually reach them.