The breakthrough experience

This outline of the Breakthrough concept comes in response to clients who heard us mention it while working with them.  They wondered if it had a meaning for the way we worked.  The short answer is that it has a profound meaning for us and we are delighted to share it.

Breakthrough is the reverse side of breakdown whether it concerns individual personality, organisational order or communication and relationship in a team.

At Breakthrough we focus on what is breaking through in turbulent or unsettling events and experiences rather than what is breaking down.  This focus is central to the way we understand learning and development, leadership, conflict transformation and organisational change. 

Development and change tend to appear as breakthroughs or quantum leaps rather than incremental and continuous flow or acquisition of learning.  There tends to be sudden and sometimes surprising bursts of insight, forward movement or of things falling into place.  Then we often experience a plateau or period of consolidation at the new level - or sometimes even a regression to the earlier state or failure to consolidate.

We often miss the discontinuity between these breakthroughs, small transformations or stage transitions because they happen continually in personal, team and organisational life around us.  As a result, we tend to expect continuous progress and fail to appreciate the need for plateau or consolidation.  Alternatively we can come to expect that all development is like the slow build up we experience when consolidating a breakthrough. 

In the latter case, we fail to recognise and appreciate the disorientation, chaotic, or disturbing nature of breakthroughs and stage transitions.   It can feel like breakdown - things falling apart, but it has the potential for breakthrough to a new higher level of understanding, relationship, order and performance.

The transformational journey of the chrysalis-caterpillar-butterfly is a useful metaphor for breakthrough or stage transition.  It mirrors the change in form of a single living entity and the leap in energy, perspective and capability that accompanies it.  It would have been difficult to predict that the beautiful airborne butterfly would emerge from the earth bound caterpillar if you had not witnessed it. 

We experience a similar leap when we cognitively reframe our understanding, when a win-loose conflict transforms into a win-win scenario for antagonists, or when we create an uplifting vision that transcends structural conflict in organisational or team functioning.  Similarly, before we make the breakthrough we often cannot conceive and predict the nature or form of the later state with its expanded potential.

Making a distinction between developmental breakthrough and continuous consolidation learning helps to understand why growth and change can be so difficult at times.  Knowing which one we need or which one we are engaged in can help to set our expectations and enable us to adapt our approach to maximise the benefit from these very different kinds of experience.

Breakthrough learning can take us well outside our familiar mindsets and comfort zones whereas consolidation learning tends not to challenge our fundamental assumptions and beliefs.  Nor can breakthroughs be planned for, timed or achieved at will like consolidation learning.  Breakthrough often begins to occur when our current belief, ways of making meaning or behaving is no longer sufficient for the complexity of the challenges we face.  There usually needs to be a readiness or a pressure to change before we engage in the transition and that can be brought about by our personal growth or by external circumstances.

The experience of transition or breakthrough can be likened to a turtle that has grown too big for its shell and has to discard it and grow another one.  Its shell will restrict the turtle's growth if it does not discard it.  Yet discarding the shell in favour of growth leaves it in a most vulnerable state, for a time, before the interaction with the seawater firms up the new more ample shell.  In going through a breakthrough or stage transition we usually feel vulnerable and exposed and this accounts for some of the reluctance to face these challenges.  The good news is that, like the turtle, we get better at them with practice.

Our knowledge of breakthrough and developmental stages, our experience of going through them ourselves, and our experience of supporting others through such transitions underpin our work at Breakthrough.  The process of development and change is as natural as the evolution of the butterfly - it seems to have a momentum of its own.  We trust that developmental imperative in people and organisations.  We help create the conditions that facilitate and support breakthrough and transformation but we cannot make it happen.

Like the servant in Herman Hesse's  Journey to the East we would love to accompany you on your travels.