It’s like medical doctors treating stomach ulcers for years by telling you it was stress. Turns out that most of them are caused by a bacteria (Helicobacter pylori). Stress made things worse after you got infected, and maybe contributed to not being able to fight it off in the first place. But it wasn’t the cause. Doctors spent years hurting people. Even after Barry Marshall and Robin Warren found the bug, doctors refused to believe them. (They later won the Nobel prize.)

I’ll also confess that the title made good copy and I couldn’t resist.

To answer Paul’s and Dawn’s requests, Andrew Olivier has written several case studies about people going through transitions.

I think that Paul could elaborate more on the ideas of the requisite stimuli (hint! hint!). You may go through the transition but not master it.

Andrew has also written quite eloquently about the metaphor of the transition, comparing it to a Quest. I’ll talk about that in a later post.

I’m glad this sparked some thoughts.

On one hand the development curves are considered as absolute and deterministic. However, they are probability distributions, each curve is a bellcurve-mountain ridge. So one would appear to be stuck on one’s particular ridge.

Since most development curves cross levels, some transition is implied. Since the curves are probabilities,, any transition will be passed over time.

However I have seen both Elliott and bioss people showing charts indicating that people might not be using their capability, working at a lower level. What I have heard said at such presentations is that having a manager with requisite capability above you can and will give you tasks that will help you to transition and will coach you in that process.

The implication of that would be that the transitions are there but a requisite stimulus might aid the transition.

Life transitions come in many forms, and a change in level or (as I suspect to more significant) domain, will bring all the normal risks. So does moving house, being made redundant, death of a partner or child, facing serious illness, getting divorced etc etc. This is not to diminish the impact of changes experienced by people who grow quickly, but to remind our community that many folk suffer.