By Jason Hreha

Glossary

Lewin’s Change Model

Reviewed by Jason Hreha

Published 5 min read

Management training often explains organizational change with an ice cube. To reshape it, first melt it, then pour the water into a new mold, then freeze it again. The three steps are credited to Kurt Lewin, a German-American psychologist who died in 1947, and the image is presented as the foundation of change management.

The ice cube is easy to remember. It also raises two questions. What did Lewin mean by “freezing”? And did he propose this model at all?

What is Lewin’s change model?

Lewin’s change model, often called the three-step model, describes planned change in three stages: unfreeze, change and refreeze.

  1. Unfreeze: disturb the forces that keep current behavior stable, so that change becomes possible.
  2. Change (Lewin wrote “moving”): shift behavior to a new level.
  3. Refreeze (Lewin wrote “freezing”): stabilize the new level so it does not slide back.

Later frameworks often resemble it. Logan Holdsworth and Todd Bridgman note that Kotter’s 8 steps closely mirror it, although Kotter does not cite Lewin. The steps only make sense, though, alongside the idea behind them.

The idea underneath: forces in balance

Lewin treated a group’s behavior as a quasi-stationary equilibrium. A level of behavior that looks stable, such as a team’s output or a community’s eating habits, is held in place by opposing forces. Some push toward change (driving forces); others push back (restraining forces). The level stays roughly constant because the forces balance, not because nothing is acting on it. Persistence by itself does not reveal which forces are at work, a point the entry on inertia also makes.

In a 1943 essay quoted by Bernard Burnes, Lewin wrote that change requires upsetting the balance that holds the current level, while establishing forces that will hold a new one. In his 1947 article, as Burnes quotes it, Lewin named two ways to shift a level: adding forces in the desired direction or diminishing opposing ones. He added that “as a rule, the second method will be preferable.”

Lewin’s wartime research on changing food habits, as Burnes describes it, led him to stress group decision as a way of reaching a new level and holding it. “Freezing” meant making the new balance of forces secure, so that the change did not fade once the push stopped.

Example: logging customer calls

Consider a hypothetical customer support team that is supposed to log every call in the customer database. Only about half of calls get logged. Managers have sent reminders for a year without effect.

A force field reading lists what holds the behavior at half. Driving forces include manager reminders and a quarterly audit. Restraining forces include a logging screen that takes three minutes, a team metric that rewards short call times, and a team norm of skipping logs during busy hours.

More reminders would add to the driving side while leaving every restraining force in place, the method Lewin thought usually inferior. That may explain why a year of them achieved little. Unfreezing here might mean showing the team the cost of missing logs, such as customers repeating their problem to three agents, and agreeing together on what to do. Moving might mean shortening the logging screen and counting logged calls in the team’s metric. Freezing would mean keeping those changes in place, so the new level is held by the forces rather than by exhortation.

When the steps fit poorly

Change one condition. Suppose the same team’s software, products and call scripts change every few weeks.

There is no stable level to unfreeze: the logging screen the team agreed to shorten is replaced a month later. Freezing the new routine around that screen would lock in a version that is about to disappear. In this setting the useful part of Lewin’s approach is the repeated force field reading, done each time the work changes. The three-stage sequence, read as a one-time project with a frozen end state, misleads.

That is the model’s best-known criticism. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and colleagues, as quoted by Stephen Cummings and colleagues, attacked Lewin’s “quaintly linear and static conception” of change, with “the organization as an ice cube,” as “wildly inappropriate.” Other critics, Cummings and colleagues note, judged the formula unfit for the rapid pace of change at the start of the 21st century. So the familiar ice cube appears in one of the model’s sharpest critiques.

Defenders reply that the criticism fits the textbook version rather than Lewin. Burnes argues that Lewin saw group life as never without change, held only in quasi-stationary balance, and that “it is the conventional representation of Lewin’s Model that is simplistic.”

Did Lewin create the three-step model?

In a 2016 article in Human Relations, Cummings, Todd Bridgman and Kenneth Brown compared what Lewin wrote with how the model is taught. They argue that he never developed a three-step model and that it took form after his death. The idea appears briefly in a 1947 article, in the 24th of 25 subsections, with no empirical evidence or diagram. Lewin describes it as one way that “planned social change may be thought of.”

Lewin never wrote “refreezing,” which they first found in a 1950 paper by his former student Leon Festinger. Ronald Lippitt and colleagues (1958) and Edgar Schein (from 1961) turned the idea into a tool for change agents, and management textbooks made it a foundation of the field during the 1980s.

Burnes disagrees. In a 2020 article in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, he argues that the 1947 terms were new, plain-language names for an approach Lewin had been developing since the early 1920s. That approach was built on field theory, group dynamics (including his research on group decisions) and action research. In his reading, the difference between the 1947 model and that earlier work is “one of nomenclature rather than substance.”

Both sides reject the textbook three-box diagram as a simplification and the picture of Lewin as a simplistic thinker. They disagree about whether the three steps were a deliberate model or a passing formulation that later writers built into one.

What the evidence shows

Neither side of the dispute points to comparative tests of the three-step model as a method, and a 2021 systematic review of change management models in healthcare by Reema Harrison and colleagues found none. Lewin’s model appeared in 11 of its 38 studies. In two nurse-led projects on bedside handover in four Australian hospitals, the model described the projects’ phases rather than guiding them. Baseline data collection was labeled “unfreezing” and follow-up measurement “refreezing.” Across all models, the reviewers wrote, “it was not possible to detect whether the use of a model, method or process contributed to the success.”

The guide to change management models compares Lewin’s model with ADKAR, Kotter and others. On its own, the model is most useful for its underlying question: what forces hold this behavior where it is, and which of them can be weakened? Diagnostic tools such as COM-B can help answer it. The ice cube remembers the steps and forgets that question.

References