Change to Transformation to Transition – the next wave

21 October 2025 Reading Time: 5 minutes

Sharon O’Dea:

“We’re not just experiencing another round of “transformation.”

Earlier this month, I attended a talk by Derk Loorbach, a Dutch academic renowned for his work on large-scale societal transitions—think shifts from fossil fuels to sustainability, or from extractive to regenerative economies. His ideas usually get applied to things like energy systems or agriculture — but as he spoke, I couldn’t help thinking how neatly they map onto the world inside organisations too.

Today, we’re not just experiencing another round of “transformation.” The changes reshaping work—digital disruption, climate change, AI, demographic shifts—are colliding in ways that make traditional models of organising, leading, and communicating feel outdated.

And yet we still treat change like a project plan — something that kicks off in October, wraps in March, and can be managed into submission with a tidy comms calendar. But anyone who’s lived through a ‘transformation programme’ knows it never quite works like that. It’s non-linear, unpredictable, and often uncomfortable. Systems resist, adapt and occasionally collapse before something new emerges.

This is where Loorbach’s transition thinking becomes useful. It helps us make sense of the messiness, showing how innovation at the margins can reshape the mainstream, and how crises can create space for renewal. For communicators, it highlights a bigger opportunity: to help our organisations not just survive disruption, but actively steer their own transitions.

What is transition thinking?

Transition thinking is a framework developed by Loorbach and his colleagues at DRIFT, the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions. It explores how complex systems—societies, industries, organisations—change over time, not through neat project plans, but through long, messy cycles of disruption and renewal.

Loorbach describes systems as having three layers:

• Landscape: The big external forces shaping the environment, such as technology, policy, or social movements.
• Regime: The dominant way of doing things—structures, rules, mindsets, and institutions that keep the current system stable.
• Niches: Experimental spaces at the margins where new ideas are tested, often unnoticed by the mainstream.

Change begins when niches gain ground, the landscape puts pressure on the regime, and cracks start to show. Over time, what was once peripheral becomes the new normal. Think of renewable energy moving from fringe to mainstream, or hybrid work becoming an expectation.

Transitions are rarely smooth. They’re full of tension between those invested in the current regime and those challenging it. There’s resistance, experimentation, collapse, and eventually, consolidation into something new. As Loorbach notes, ‘Transition is a process of structural, non-linear systemic change in a dominant regime that takes place over a period of decades.’ So the breakdown of the old isn’t failure; it’s the clearing that allows something better to grow.

Seeing organisations as transition systems

Listening to Loorbach, it’s easy to see the parallels within our own institutions. Organisations are mini social systems, with their own landscapes, regimes, and niches.

• The landscape is the external context: market forces, technology, regulation, or social expectations
• The regime is the organisation’s dominant logic: structures, culture, leadership models, and KPIs
• The niches are the experimental corners: pilot projects, innovation labs, employee networks, or individuals trying new approaches

Viewing your organisation through this lens reveals patterns. You can see how external pressures like automation or regulation reshape the landscape. You can spot where entrenched ways of working hold back innovation. And you can find the niches—small teams or individuals quietly testing ideas that might one day redefine the organisation.

This lens also explains why so many transformation programmes stall: they treat change as something to be implemented rather than something that emerges. They try to replace the old regime wholesale, rather than cultivating conditions for new ideas to grow. In reality, systemic change is less like building a machine and more like tending a garden — unpredictable weather, stubborn weeds and all.

Transition management, as Loorbach frames it, is about recognising where you are in the cycle—from early experimentation to acceleration—and steering accordingly. It’s about creating space for reflection, learning, and iteration, not forcing a plan through to completion. For communicators, this means shifting from explaining someone else’s change to helping the organisation learn its way through one.

The opportunity for communicators

If all this sounds abstract, it really isn’t. Transition thinking gives communicators a new way to understand the shifts happening around us—and to see the part we can play in shaping them.

Communicators occupy a unique vantage point: close enough to leadership to understand strategy and risk, embedded enough in the workforce to hear how change feels on the ground, and alert to external trends. This is exactly the kind of position Loorbach describes as essential for steering transitions—people who can see across the system’s layers, connect signals from the landscape, and turn them into shared understanding within the regime.

All of which makes this an unusually ripe moment for our profession:

• Framing the narrative of transition: Help organisations make sense of where they are in the cycle—what’s breaking down, what’s emerging, and why that’s a necessary phase of renewal. Shift the story from “transformation project” to “ongoing evolution.”
• Creating arenas for dialogue: Design spaces where people can explore new ideas and challenge assumptions safely, across silos, hierarchies, and geographies.
• Amplifying niche innovation: Surface and connect pilots and experiments happening at the edges, turning isolated bright spots into visible proof of what the future could look like.
• Supporting leadership through turbulence: Help leaders speak with honesty and empathy, modelling a learning-oriented tone that builds trust through change.
• Redefining value: Shift the narrative from “more” to “better”—from outputs to outcomes, from reach to resonance, from activity to impact.

Communicators can act as stewards of transition, helping organisations navigate between the old and the new, translating complexity into meaning, and creating conditions for people to participate in change rather than be subjected to it. That’s a far bigger, more strategic view of what communication can be. We’re a core capability for systemic transformation.

And if, as Loorbach suggests, transition is a hopeful form of collapse, then perhaps communicators are the ones helping people spot the hope, and start building what comes next

Practical steps for communicators as transition stewards

So what does this look like in practice? Transition thinking might sound lofty, but its principles can be applied in the day-to-day work of communication and change. It’s not about new tools — just using the ones you already have with a more systemic eye.

1.   Map your organisation’s system: Identify the landscape, regime, and niches in your context. What external pressures are shaping behaviour? Where are the entrenched habits? Where are the emerging practices—pilots, teams, new technologies, or grassroots ideas?
2.   Use communication as sensemaking infrastructure: Instead of just pushing out updates, create ongoing channels that help people interpret change. Regular leadership conversations, employee listening, and honest storytelling turn comms into a feedback loop that helps the organisation learn.
3.   Create “transition arenas”: Design forums where people from different silos or levels can explore big questions together—structured dialogues, town halls that invite debate, or digital spaces for experimentation.
4.   Spot and amplify the niches: Use your channels to showcase small-scale innovations that signal progress—whether it’s a team trialling a new way of working or a sustainability initiative proving what’s possible.
5.   Reframe metrics around learning and value: Swap vanity metrics for signs that the system’s learning — connection, clarity, adaptability.

Communicating the future into being

Transitions are, by their nature, uncomfortable. They involve endings as well as beginnings; there’s the disorientation that comes when old certainties stop working but new ones haven’t yet arrived. But, as Loorbach observes, transitions aren’t simply about decline, but a process of systemic change that, while unsettling, creates the necessary space for renewal and the emergence of something better.

And this, really, is where communicators come in. Our craft has always been about helping people make sense of change. But that role is evolving — from explaining strategy to helping our organisations imagine and articulate the futures they want to move toward.

By articulating what’s shifting, connecting the dots between external pressures and internal experience, and creating spaces for dialogue and learning, we can help people navigate uncertainty with more clarity and confidence. When we do that, we stop merely narrating change and start shaping it — helping to communicate a better future into being.

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Sharon O’Dea is a digital workplace expert and co-founder of Lithos Partners, helping complex organisations design intranets and communications that actually work.

 

 

Written by: Editor