What, then, is transformation? In an era obsessed with change—where “transformation” has become a preferred slogan of consultants, reformers, and business leaders—it's tempting to reduce it to an algorithm, a toolkit, a process flow. But this is a profound category mistake. Just as David Bosch refused to let “mission” be captured by a singular definition, true transformation—whether of a life, an organisation, or a society—remains an essentially open and indefinable event. It's a horizon, not a formula; a call, not a command.

In Bosch’s theology, mission is both transforming (active, changing the world) and being transformed (always in flux, re-formed by history, encounter, and Spirit). So too, in the genuine logic of business, social, or personal transformation, we find ourselves implicated in a dynamic that cannot be reduced to either willfull action or passive reception. Transformation is always a double movement: we're called to act—and in acting, we are ourselves changed by what exceeds our control or foresight.

Organisational change begins with this admission of ontological humility. The firm, the leader, the community: all are sites of participation in a reality that is more than their structures, models, or intentions. Transformation is not the implementation of a plan, but the navigation of a field of tensions: between continuity and rupture, identity and becoming, stability and transcendence.

To transform, then, is not to “manage” change, but to undergo conversion. It is a shift in the very structures that ground how we make sense of ourselves and our world. It is not a technical project. It is existential, ethical, and—at its depth—spiritual. In every paradigm shift, what is really at stake is not just new strategies, but a new sense of purpose, a new mode of participation in the Real.

Bosch cautioned: we may never “delineate mission too sharply and too self-confidently.” The same is true of transformation. All attempts to enclose it in methodologies—agile, lean, “transformation offices”, purpose statements—miss its living core. Transformation is a path rather than a blueprint; it is an invitation to pilgrimage, marked by risk, suffering, and emergence of new possibility. The most radical “business transformations” do not just alter process—they rewire the meaning of value, power, and identity.

Transformation, then, is not about achieving a final state. It is a lifelong, communal, and often paradoxical process—a “pluriverse” of becoming, where danger and opportunity intertwine, and where each moment invites us to participate in something greater than ourselves. In this, as in the best of mission, the only certainty is the invitation: to step forward, knowing that the horizon will always recede, that the journey itself is the point, and that, as we walk, both we and our world are being remade—together, in mystery.

The real work is to remain open: to encounter, to be unsettled, to become new.

References:

Bosch, D.J., 1991. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.