Navigating a transformational transition requires creativity, flexibility, courage, and an openness to paradoxes and surprises. At first, it appears as a simple and easily understood guide to the next steps, but inevitably, as the transition evolves, this apparent simplicity vanishes, revealing the paradoxical and all-encompassing nature of the process.
The instruction consists of several interconnected layers and cycle stages.
Stages:
• Understanding where we are and how we got here, anticipating the intended future destination and planning a route
• Creating an «expedition» (transition team) and a roadmap
• Transition experiments
• Learning lessons from the experiments, adjusting the vision and roadmap.
Layers:
• Strategic – correlates with Stage 1. Reframing the patterns of thought (the foundation of the system).
• Tactical – consistent with Stage 2. Transforming the system framework
• Operational – corresponds to Stage 3. Changing the items (niches) of the system
• Reflexive – coincides with Stage 4. Rethinking the steps taken at previous levels and stages.
Such instructions can be thought of as a Rubik's cube. They are flexible, adaptable, and endlessly creative. Steps can be repeated, intertwined, synchronized… In the real world, they are carried out in either a strict or random sequence, or in parallel (either partially or fully). With this "freedom," the transition takes between 2 and 5 years.
While the cyclical representation of transition only approximates reality, it is extremely useful because it creates the essential cognitive ordering of lessons and outcomes from the mixture of improvisations and experiments.
It may very well be the typical period of 2 to 5 years in which the focal point shifts from the active layers (strategic, tactical, and operational) to the reflexive layer and back. This periodic shift in focal point could be explained by both external factors (typical funding periods, periods key persons will hold a specific position) and internal factors (the time it takes for the transformation to deliver notable results).
Since the real picture of the transition process is much more complex and nonlinear than in the breakdown described here, this does leave the door open to questions of how the activities taken at different cycle stages and levels actually relate to each other.
Sources: compiled on the basis of (Loorbach, 2007) and (van Raak, 2015, ch. 6)