ABSTRACT
Small groups, like any system, evolve and transform themselves continuously. Processes of transformation can be seen as going through recognizable stages. Awareness of these stages allows for better understanding of the processes and even their regulation. This chapter explores these conceptual stages here, using a case from our experience as consultants. The work of the consultant, therefore, consists primarily in identifying and interpreting the affects that emerge in the group in order to better understand the evolution of the process of transformation. The work of the consultants also consists of accompanying the group's manager in regulating the transformation. In the case of a group, the breadth, the number, the frequency, the turbulence, and the duration of zig-zags that form the path of the process of transformation are closely related to the human (and sometimes financial) cost of its transformation. In effect, transformation goes trough a black box, whose obscurity contains segments of the passage taken by the group.
