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Lewin's Change Toolkit: Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze and Force-Field Analysis
Principles of Management · Chapter 6: Leading Organizational ChangeSection 6.5 · lesson 29 of 11713 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Unfreeze-change-refreeze and force-field analysis.
- Describe Lewin's 3 stages and what each requires
- Conduct a force-field analysis for a change
- Explain why removing restraints beats adding pressure
- Assess the model's strengths and its criticisms
Transcript
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Leading Organizational Change
Lewin's Change Toolkit
Before anything in an organization moves, something has to loosen. That idea sits at the heart of Kurt Lewin's work. This section covers the two tools Lewin left managers. The first is a three-stage model of change. Unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. We'll look at what each stage genuinely requires, and at what goes wrong when one is skipped. The second is force-field analysis, a way of diagnosing why a situation stays stable. Along with it comes Lewin's central insight, which runs against most managers' instincts. And we'll close with the criticisms the model has drawn, and the honest response to them.
Lewin's Model
Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze
The psychologist Kurt Lewin proposed that change proceeds through three stages. Unfreezing creates readiness for change, by disturbing the existing equilibrium. Changing moves the organization, or the individual, to a new state. And refreezing stabilizes that new state, so that it holds. If this sequence feels familiar, it should. The model names a sequence that was already implicit, in the planned change process from Subchapter six point four. It's worth reading the two side by side. Unfreezing corresponds roughly to recognizing the need for change, and diagnosing the problem. Changing corresponds to designing and implementing the intervention. And refreezing corresponds to institutionalization, the final step of that process.
Unfreezing
The Stage Managers Most Often Skip
Unfreezing requires three specific things to actually occur. An announcement that change is coming is not one of them. First, genuine dissatisfaction with the present state. The people affected must actually experience the current situation as inadequate. Being told it's inadequate isn't the same thing. Second, a sense that change is possible. Even real dissatisfaction produces no movement if people believe nothing can actually be done about it. Third, a reduction in the anxiety that blocks movement. That's the fear of the unknown, of failing at something new, or of losing something valued. Left unaddressed, that anxiety keeps people anchored to the present, however dissatisfied they are with it. Here's the uncomfortable part. Unfreezing is the stage managers most often skip. Typically, they move straight from announcing a change to implementing it. The work of building genuine readiness never happens. So the change effort ends up trying to move people who have not been unfrozen at all.
Changing and Refreezing
Expect the Dip, Then Lock It In
The changing stage is the period when the organization actually moves toward the new state. And it is reliably accompanied by a period of reduced performance. New methods are less practiced than old ones. Coordination is temporarily disrupted. And uncertainty itself consumes attention that would otherwise go toward output. This dip must be planned for explicitly, not treated as evidence that the change is failing. A manager who reads an expected, temporary dip as proof of a mistake may abandon the change at the worst possible moment. By then the organization has already absorbed the disruption cost, without yet reaching the benefit on the other side. Refreezing then stabilizes the new state, through structure, measurement, reward, and routine. Those are the same mechanisms Subchapter six point two named, in its treatment of the people target and alignment. Without deliberate refreezing, people revert to whatever practice their systems still actually reward. Remember the reorganization vignette in that subchapter. The org chart changed, but an unchanged reward system quietly pulled behavior back. So refreezing isn't passive. It doesn't happen automatically once implementation is complete. It needs the same deliberate attention unfreezing does, aimed in the opposite direction.
Table 6.5.1
Each Stage, Its Action, and Its Failure
Table six point five point one pulls the three stages together. For each one, it shows what the stage requires, the manager's action, and the failure that follows when it's skipped. Unfreezing requires dissatisfaction, a sense that change is possible, and reduced anxiety about moving. The manager's action is building a case for change that people actually experience, not just hear announced. Skip it, and the change meets resistance from people who were never made ready to move. Changing requires tolerance for a temporary dip in performance. The manager plans for that dip, and communicates it in advance, rather than treating it as failure. Skip that, and the change is abandoned mid-transition, because the expected dip looks like failure. Refreezing requires structure, measurement, reward, and routine, all aligned with the new state. The manager deliberately updates the systems that reward behavior, rather than assuming the change will hold on its own. Skip it, and people revert to whatever the still-unchanged systems continue to reward.
Force-Field Analysis
Why a Situation Stays Stable
Lewin's second tool is force-field analysis. It's a diagnostic tool for understanding why a given situation is stable in the first place. It rests on one premise. Any current state is an equilibrium between two sets of forces. Driving forces push toward change. Restraining forces hold the present state in place. Neither set alone determines where things stand. The state persists because the two sets are currently balanced. That has a direct practical consequence. Identifying that pressure for change exists tells you very little on its own. To change the state, you have to shift the balance.
The Procedure
Force-Field Analysis in 4 Steps
The procedure runs in four steps. First, state the change under consideration precisely. It has to be precise enough that driving and restraining forces can be identified against it. Second, list the driving and restraining forces relevant to that specific change. Third, estimate the strength of each force, typically on a simple scale. That estimate is explicitly a judgment call, not a precise measurement. These strengths can't be measured directly, the way a physical force can. Fourth, identify which forces are tractable. A tractable force is one the organization's available actions can realistically reduce or strengthen. That last step keeps the analysis practical. A force that's real but entirely outside the organization's control is worth naming. It's not worth building a plan around.
Figure 6.5.1
A Force Field at Harborline Manufacturing
Figure six point five point one applies the tool to a fictional firm, Harborline Manufacturing. The proposed change is a new customer-service system. Three driving forces push toward it. Customer complaints are rising. A new competitor offers faster service. And there's an executive mandate to modernize. Four restraining forces hold the present state in place. Fear of job loss under the new system. Comfort with the familiar old process. Low trust in past change announcements. And the cost and time of retraining. The strongest restraining force is fear of job loss. But notice that it is not marked as tractable. Ordinary management action struggles to address that fear directly. The two restraints marked in gold are comfort with the old process, and the cost of retraining. Both respond more readily to facilitation and support, in the sense Subchapter six point three described. So the strongest force and the most workable force are not the same thing. That's the point of step four.
Lewin's Central Insight
Remove Obstacles Before Adding Pressure
Why does force-field analysis matter beyond simply listing forces? Because of Lewin's central insight. Reducing restraining forces is generally more effective than increasing driving forces. The reason is that adding pressure raises tension, while removing obstacles does not. Pushing harder on the driving side means more urgency, more mandate, more pressure from above. That tends to increase resistance in direct proportion. Restraining forces, especially ones rooted in fear or distrust, often intensify precisely because they're being pushed against harder. Removing or reducing a restraining force works differently. It shifts the equilibrium, without adding the tension that extra driving pressure carries. This is a practical instance of Subchapter six point three's idea, treating resistance as information. A restraining force is very often exactly the kind of resistance that reveals a real cost or concern. Address that concern directly, and the equilibrium tends to move further than if you simply overpower it.
Running the Session
Who's in the Room Decides What Gets Named
A force-field session only produces a useful diagnosis if the restraining forces are stated honestly. That honesty is harder to secure than it might first appear. Naming a restraining force can feel like naming resistance to a decision leadership has already signaled it prefers. That has a direct implication for who must be in the room. Suppose the session includes only the change's proponents. Or only people senior enough to feel little personal risk from the change. Then it will systematically understate the restraining forces that matter most. Particularly the ones rooted in the loss and fear categories that Subchapter six point three named. A genuinely useful session needs two things. It needs people close enough to the change's actual effects to name its real costs candidly. And it needs a climate in which naming those costs is not itself treated as obstruction.
Criticisms of the Model
2 Durable Criticisms, and a Response
Lewin's model draws two related and durable criticisms. The first is that it assumes a stable state to return to. Refreezing implies a new equilibrium the organization can settle into and hold. That fits situations with genuine periods of stability between changes. It fits far less well in organizations facing continuous, overlapping change, with no settled period in between. The second criticism is about language. For organizations that must keep adapting, freezing anything, even a hard-won new state, can seem to work against the adaptability they need. These criticisms are genuine, and they have not been resolved. They reflect a real limit in how well a settle-and-hold structure matches environments of continuous change. But the response deserves stating alongside them. The sequence remains useful as a description of what any single change requires. An organization changing continuously still needs readiness, a managed transition, and some stabilization for each specific change. It simply runs that sequence more often, and perhaps in shorter, overlapping cycles. It doesn't need a different sequence altogether.
Case Vignette
Elena Skips Straight to Changing
Here is a composite case, constructed for instruction. Elena managed a claims-processing team, and needed to move it onto a new processing platform, mandated from above her. She was confident the mandate carried enough authority to secure compliance. So she scheduled the cutover for the following Monday, and announced the date. She spent no meaningful time on why the existing system was actually a problem worth solving. The cutover happened on schedule. But adoption was slow and grudging. Several experienced staff kept exporting data into the old system's format, out of habit, for weeks. And error rates during the transition ran considerably higher than Elena had expected. Looking back, Elena recognized that her team had never been unfrozen. They hadn't experienced real dissatisfaction with the old system on their own terms. And their anxiety about leaving a system many had used competently for years was never addressed. In force-field terms, the mandate supplied a driving force. The restraining forces, comfort with the old system chief among them, were never examined, let alone reduced.
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