Change curve
A model claiming that people react to organisational change in stages resembling grief: shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, then experimentation and acceptance, with morale and performance dipping before they recover.
What drives it
It gives leaders a way to expect and tolerate resistance instead of punishing it, and it legitimises the feeling of loss that change causes. That is its real use: permission and patience, not prediction.
How it shows
Work
In a leader: “they’re just in the anger phase, they’ll get there” used to dismiss legitimate objections, or a rollout plan with a scheduled date for acceptance. In a team: real reactions are less tidy; some people are relieved from day one, some never accept the change and leave, many switch between anger and engagement week to week, and objections that look like resistance are often accurate information about what will break. As the leader: use the model to remember that change involves loss, then listen to the content of the resistance instead of diagnosing its stage.
Relationships
Family transitions such as a succession, a sale, or a founder stepping back involve real grief, and family members will not move through it in order. Treating a relative as ‘stuck in denial’ usually deepens the conflict.
Self
You catch yourself placing someone on the curve to avoid engaging with what they are actually saying. Or, going through a change yourself, you notice that your reaction does not follow any sequence.
What tells it apart
Grief (complicated, disenfranchised, anticipatory): Grief research finds varied paths, most commonly resilience with little prolonged distress, and no required sequence; the change curve imposes a single sequence on organisational reactions.
Psychological reactance: Reactance is a reaction against threatened freedom that fades when choice is restored; change-curve ‘resistance’ is assumed to be a phase that time alone will resolve.
Resilience: Resilient people show little dip and keep functioning; the curve predicts a universal trough, which many people do not show.
A test
Track several people’s reactions over the change; if they do not follow a common sequence, drop the stages and use the model only as a reminder that change involves loss.
Questions to carry
- Over the course of the change, which reactions did each person actually show, and in what order?
- What did I lose in the last big change at work that no one named?
How strong the research is
weak. Adapted by management consultants from Kübler-Ross’s five stages of dying, a model drawn from clinical interviews that later research on grief has not supported as a fixed sequence; there is no good evidence that employees move through change in predictable stages.
Where it comes from
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969 (On Death and Dying); adapted to organisational change by consultants from the 1970s and 1980s; William Bridges, 1991 (Managing Transitions) as a related model