From One-Off Change to Continuous Transformation

From Week 10 of Leading Through Complexity

Most change methods treat transformation as a project, with a start, an end and a "new normal" to settle into. In a complex world there is no settling. Week 10 is about shifting from one-off change to a continuous transformation model, and about building the resilience that lets an organization keep adapting without losing itself.

The Adaptive Cycle

From ecology and resilience science comes a model I find invaluable: the adaptive cycle of change. It's made up of four phases.

1. Growth. Exploiting new opportunities and available resources. Connections are loose and growing, and it's an open, energetic environment.

2. Conservation. Things consolidate. Efficiency rises, connections tighten, and the system becomes more rigid and more vulnerable to shocks.

3. Release. A disturbance breaks the rigid structure apart, often suddenly.

4. Renewal. Resources reorganize and new possibilities emerge, seeding the next growth phase.

The adaptive cycle applies not only to forests and fisheries but very much to our organizations, the complex adaptive systems we all work in. It helps explain why successful organizations become brittle, and why periods of disruption can also be periods of tremendous opportunity.

What Resilience Really Means

Resilience is often confused with toughness or bouncing back quickly. In resilience thinking, it has a more precise meaning: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function, structure and feedbacks. In short, it's about an organization maintaining its identity.

Resilience is the capacity to undergo dramatic change without crossing a critical threshold into a different, often less desirable, regime. And while speed of recovery matters, the ability to recover from disturbance is primary.

For change leaders, this changes the goal. We're not only trying to deliver a change. We're trying to build an organization that can keep sensing, experimenting and adapting, which is exactly what the Complexity Leadership Model is designed to do.

Bringing It All Together: The Four Shifts

By Week 10, participants have worked through the whole CLM. So we step back to the macro view, the universal change framework that runs underneath every sequence. I repeat it often because I want people to internalize it to the point where they don't have to think about it:

"Shared understanding, shared intention, aligning your actions, transforming relations. Burn it into your brain."

Because if that's all you do, you're way ahead.

The Simplest Description of the CLM

People sometimes ask me to describe the model in one breath. Here's the progression I offer.

We collect stories and discuss the current-state patterns. We seek actionable insights from those patterns. We choose constraints we can change (we can't change them all, but we can probably change many). We make those changes, watch what happens, adjust and repeat.

Even simpler: narrative → patterns → constraints → probes → monitor → repeat.

And simplest of all:

"We simply determine where we are, we try lots of small things and then we monitor and adjust and then we repeat."

Five Ingredients for Fast, Resistance-Free, Sustainable Change

Week 10 also distills the course into five key ingredients:

1. Clarify the complex adaptive challenge and convene a requisitely diverse, cross-system team to resolve it.

2. Create places of potential where attention, intention and agency align. That's code for your generative change event.

3. Design an innovation sequence that integrates the past, present and future in the same conversation.

4. Expose, amplify and integrate difference. This is where most traditional change methods fall down.

5. Develop a self-awareness of self and others.

If that were the only slide in front of you as you approached a complex challenge, you'd realize faster change, largely resistance-free change and results that sustain longer term.

"If you do all those, I promise you great things will happen."

Proof from Practice

In the course we also review a full case study from my own practice, in which more than 200 stories were gathered through Spryng dialogue interviews and anecdote circles from a highly diverse group across multiple departments. The patterns that emerged from those stories shaped the experiments that followed. It's the whole model, end to end, in a real organization.

Try This

Where is your organization, or your team, in the adaptive cycle right now: growth, conservation, release or renewal? What does that suggest about the kind of change it can absorb, and the kind it needs?

Watch the Short

Watch on YouTube: Faster Change, No Resistance, Lasting Gains

Subscribe to Echoes From the Edges for more: Echoes From the Edges on YouTube

More From This Series

• Why Old Patterns Keep Coming Back: Attractors and Culture

• Failure's Okay: Safe-to-Fail Probes and the PEARL Flywheel

• More Like This, Less Like That: Find a Direction of Travel

Keep Learning

Want a practical starting point? Download the free Hybrid OD e-book and see how diagnostic and dialogic methods combine to tackle complex change.

Ready to go deeper? Leading Through Complexity is our live 12-week program for OD, change and transformation leaders. The next cohort begins in 2027 and is limited to 50 participants. Join the waitlist.

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