The Metamorphosis Cycle: Why Resilient Leaders Never Stop Changing
There is a version of resilience that most people aspire to: the ability to get through difficult things and return, more or less intact, to the previous state. To bounce back to who you were.
My definition of resilience rejects this specifically. "Springing Forward with Learning" is not a recovery strategy. It is a permanent operating mode. The leader who has genuinely developed their resilience does not return to where they were after a difficult period. They emerge from it different — more capable, more informed, more specifically equipped for what comes next. Not because adversity is welcome, but because the practice of learning from it has been deliberately built.
Research on strategic organisational resilience has a name for this continuous process: the metamorphosis cycle. The term comes from Morais-Storz and Nguyen’s (2017) work on what separates organisations that become genuinely more resilient from those that simply survive. The metamorphosis cycle is the continuous, interlocking process of unlearning outdated patterns and learning new, more fitting ones — driven not by crisis but by proactive, deliberate choice.
What the Cycle Actually Involves
The metamorphosis cycle has two phases, and both are essential. The first is unlearning: the deliberate identification and release of beliefs, habits and patterns that no longer serve the leader or the organisation. The second is learning: the acquisition, development and embedding of new capabilities that are more fit for the current and emerging context.
The cycle is not linear. It does not complete and then stop. Resilient leaders and organisations are always somewhere within it — either actively releasing something that has become a constraint, or actively building something that will become a new capability. The metamorphosis is not an event. It is the permanent condition of development.
What distinguishes this from simply "being open to change" is the proactive, structured nature of the practice. Evenseth et al. (2022) found that the most resilient organisations identify the early warning signs of when change is needed — what they call a "web of symptoms" — and begin the cycle of unlearning and learning before the need for change has become urgently obvious. Waiting for crisis to force the metamorphosis means the learning happens under the worst possible conditions. Building the practice in advance means the capability is available when the pressure peaks.
“Resilience is not the ability to stay the same through difficult things. It is the practice of changing in the right directions because of them.”
How do you decide to change your behaviour and axctually do it? Photo Vitaly Gariev Unsplash
The Resilience Wheel as the Metamorphosis Map
The seven dimensions of The Resilience Wheel provide the structure for the metamorphosis cycle in practice. Each dimension has a current state and a developmental direction. Each dimension can accumulate patterns that were once functional and have become constraining. Each dimension is a site for both unlearning and learning.
The Attitude dimension is the most foundational. The settled beliefs and habitual interpretations that live in the Attitude dimension are the patterns most likely to require unlearning as the leader’s context and role evolve. A belief that was genuinely adaptive early in a leadership career — about what makes a good leader, about what success looks like, about how to manage difficult situations — may become the primary constraint on the next stage of development.
The Meaning dimension is where the metamorphosis cycle becomes either possible or impossible. The story a leader tells themselves about who they are determines whether change feels threatening or generative. Leaders whose Meaning dimension frames development as continuous and valued find the metamorphosis cycle energising. Those whose Meaning dimension is more fixed — where identity is more tightly bound to existing capability and style — find it destabilising, even when the change is clearly needed.
The Purpose dimension provides the direction. Without a clear sense of what they are building and why, the metamorphosis cycle has no compass. Leaders who know their purpose can use it to evaluate which patterns need releasing (those that no longer serve the purpose) and which capabilities need developing (those that would serve it better). Purpose makes the metamorphosis intentional rather than reactive.
The Third Leader Responsibility and the Metamorphosis Cycle
The third of the three leader responsibilities — taking genuine ownership of your own Leadership Resilience Wheel development — is essentially a commitment to the metamorphosis cycle as a personal practice. Not development as an occasional event. Not learning as something that happens in programmes. The continuous, deliberate practice of identifying what needs releasing and what needs building, guided by honest self-assessment and supported by structured reflection.
The leaders who do this most effectively are not those who find change easiest. They are those who have built the reflective practice, the developmental relationships and the psychological safety with themselves to engage honestly with the cycle, consistently, over time.
The Leadership Resilience Diagnostic is a starting point for mapping where you currently are in the cycle — which dimensions are well-developed, which are constraining, and where the most generative unlearning and learning would produce the greatest forward momentum.
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