The Bridges Transition Model describes the three phases people move through during any organizational change: an ending, where they let go of the old way of working; a neutral zone, where the old way is gone but the new one isn't yet trusted; and a new beginning, where the change actually takes hold. Most OKR rollouts break down in the middle phase.
The three phases of the Bridges Transition Model
William Bridges introduced the model in his 1991 book Managing Transitions, built on a distinction worth keeping precise: change is the external event, a merger, a new system, a new way of setting goals. Transition is the internal process each person goes through because of it. A company can set the date the change takes effect. The transition inside each person runs on its own timeline (Bridges Transition Model, EBSCO Research Starters).
Ending, Losing, and Letting Go starts the moment people learn something familiar is going away: the old planning calendar, the annual target-setting exercise, the manager conversation that used to count as "setting goals." Denial, resistance and a genuine sense of loss are the normal, expected content of this phase, whatever the change happens to be.
The Neutral Zone is where the old system is already gone and the new one hasn't earned trust yet. EBSCO describes it as marked by confusion, impatience and uncertainty, with people absorbing extra work and training on top of everything they were already accountable for. Motivation typically drops here. That drop is a predictable feature of the phase itself, regardless of how well the rollout was designed.
The New Beginning is where energy returns: people feel the new way working, develop a stronger connection to the group going through it with them, and bring real enthusiasm rather than compliance to the next cycle.
Why the Neutral Zone is where OKR rollouts actually stall
Most OKR programs clear the first phase without much trouble. The announcement lands, training happens, the old quarterly target memo quietly disappears. The failure point sits later, in the stretch where teams are running check-ins and writing Key Results but the habit hasn't paid off yet, and the old certainty is already gone. That stretch is the Neutral Zone, and it maps almost exactly onto what Workpath's change-management practice calls a program's "barrier point": the first ADKAR outcome a group has genuinely failed to reach, diagnosed by watching where behavior actually stalls rather than by assuming more training will fix it. Workpath has written separately about ADKAR's five outcomes and how the model compares with Kotter's eight steps, which is the deeper reference for that diagnostic logic.
A team stuck in the Neutral Zone often looks, from the outside, like it has the knowledge and the ability to run OKRs. It attends check-ins. It fills in the template correctly. What it lacks is Reinforcement: proof, repeated across more than one cycle, that the new way actually produces a different and better outcome than the old one did. Workpath's Sceptic Spectrum names this pattern directly as the "silent waiter": a person or team that doesn't push back and doesn't lean in either, watching quietly to see whether the change survives past the launch excitement. Treating a silent waiter as a knowledge problem, with another training session, lands on ground that was never the issue. Treating the same group as hostile, with a top-down mandate, confirms the suspicion that this was never going to be collaborative in the first place.
A program that cannot name this moment tends to respond to it with more process: another workshop, another reminder email, another slide about why OKRs matter. The use case for diagnosing and restarting a stalled OKR program exists because that response usually stretches the Neutral Zone out further. What actually moves a silent waiter is evidence, earned over two or three full cycles, that the new rhythm survives contact with a difficult quarter.
Two models, two altitudes
Bridges and ADKAR are often presented on competing lists of change-management frameworks, as if a program has to pick one. They sit at different altitudes and answer different questions. Bridges describes what a person is feeling and why, in plain human terms: loss, confusion, eventual energy. ADKAR names the discrete, checkable outcome a program lead can actually act on: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement, each one a precondition for the next.
Put together, the pairing becomes practical rather than academic. A Program Lead who sees a team sitting in the Neutral Zone has a feeling to validate (this is the normal, expected confusion of the phase) and an outcome to engineer next (usually Reinforcement, sometimes Desire if the "why" was never genuinely won in the first place). Workpath's OKR journey maps the five ADKAR outcomes onto the actual events of a rollout, which is what turns the model from theory into a working diagnostic:
- The decision and kickoff carry Awareness and Desire: leadership commits, the reasoning becomes public, and the change stops being a rumor.
- Training and drafting carry Knowledge and Ability: people learn the method, then practice it with coaching until they can apply it unassisted.
- Check-ins, reviews and retrospectives carry Reinforcement, repeatedly, because reinforcement earned once at launch decays by the third quarter and has to be re-earned every cycle after.
A team can clear Knowledge and Ability completely, run every check-in on schedule, and still be emotionally stuck in the Neutral Zone, because nobody engineered the recurring proof that Reinforcement requires. That is the gap the barrier-point diagnostic exists to catch: more training fixes a Knowledge gap, but it does nothing for a team that already knows how and is simply waiting to believe it.
Engineering the New Beginning on purpose
The New Beginning takes active engineering, through structured, repeated communication, because awareness and desire fade on their own and have to be re-earned rather than announced once. Workpath's change-management practice plans this across three deliberate modes rather than one launch event:
- 1:Many: company-wide channels (email, town halls, intranet) carrying the "why" and the overall status, owned centrally by the program lead.
- 1:Few: team and project-level settings where the message gets made concrete for a specific group's work, owned jointly by the program lead and local coaches.
- 1:1: manager and coach conversations, where an individual's actual objection or doubt gets addressed directly, because a program office can't run that conversation at scale.
That last mode is the hardest to staff, and it's where Workpath's AI agents do real work beyond drafting assistance: an OKR Coach that flags when a specific team's goals look disconnected from the stated priority, or nudges a manager before a check-in, extends the 1:1 mode to teams a human coach would never reach individually every cycle.
What this looks like across a rollout
Mapped onto the phases: the Ending runs through the decision and kickoff, when the old system is formally retired. The Neutral Zone covers the first one to three cycles of drafting, aligning and checking in, the stretch a well-sequenced rollout treats as the hardest part to design rather than the part that takes care of itself. The New Beginning shows up when a review cycle produces a result a team actually believes came from the new way of working, and the next cycle's drafting session happens on genuine demand, with people asking for the clarity before the calendar even prompts it.
FAQ
What are the three phases of the Bridges Transition Model?
Ending, Losing, and Letting Go; the Neutral Zone; and the New Beginning. Bridges introduced them in his 1991 book Managing Transitions to describe the internal, psychological process a person goes through in response to an external change, as distinct from the change itself.
How is the Bridges Transition Model different from ADKAR or Kotter's 8-step model?
Bridges describes the emotional experience of change at the level of a single person. ADKAR names five checkable outcomes (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) a program can diagnose and act on. Kotter describes an eight-step sequence for leading organizational change overall. The three operate at different altitudes and work well combined: Bridges for empathy, ADKAR for diagnosis, Kotter for sequencing the broader program.
How long does the Neutral Zone typically last in an OKR rollout?
It varies by organization, but Workpath's pattern across rollouts is that it spans the first one to three full OKR cycles, the stretch where the old target-setting habit is gone and the new cadence hasn't yet produced enough repeated proof to be trusted on its own.
What causes a team to get stuck in the Neutral Zone?
Usually a missing Reinforcement outcome: the team has the knowledge and the ability to run the new process, but nobody has engineered visible, repeated evidence that it produces a better result than the old way. Workpath's Sceptic Spectrum calls this group the "silent waiter," and the fix is earned proof across cycles rather than another training session.
How do you know a team has reached the New Beginning?
The clearest signal is that a review or retrospective surfaces a result the team credits to the new way of working, unprompted, and the next cycle's planning happens because people want the clarity rather than because it's scheduled. Energy and ownership visibly shift from compliance to initiative.
Most change frameworks describe one of these altitudes well. Workpath's Strategy Execution Steering Model is built to hold the emotional, diagnostic and operational layers together through a full rollout rather than treating change management as a one-time launch event.
