When observing a transition from one epistemic state to another from the outside, without knowing details about the underlying belief change mechanism, it is not obvious how the change was performed and which formal postulates were satisfied or violated in the process. In this paper, we explore whether and how an arbitrary transition between epistemic states, represented by total preorders or ranking functions, respectively, can be realized via different kinds of belief change operations. This corresponds to coming up with an explanation for the belief change, enabling the investigation of arbitrary epistemic belief changes from a formal perspective. We consider iterated belief change operations in the popular AGM framework, and also point out connections to Hansson’s framework of descriptor revision.