What I've learned about transformation design thus far #45

Some moments divide life into before and after. The diagnosis that reframes everything. The conversation that shifts a relationship permanently. The insight that dissolves a problem carried for years. The experience that rewrites what seemed possible.

These defining moments share a quality: they do not merely add to experience; they reorganise it. The new information, feeling or understanding does not sit alongside what was already there. It restructures the whole. The past looks different from the other side. The future opens in ways previously invisible.

Psychologists call this “accommodation”, Piaget’s term for the process by which existing mental structures are transformed to incorporate new experience. Assimilation, by contrast, fits new experience into existing structures, leaving them unchanged. Most experience is assimilated. Defining moments force accommodation: the structures themselves must change.