By Ritvars Mētra, Founder of ReadinessCompassUnfreeze, change, refreeze. It is the first thing most people are taught about organisational change, it is attributed to Kurt Lewin, and it appears on more slides than any other idea in the field.
There is a problem with it, and it is not the usual complaint that organisations never refreeze.
Lewin does not appear to have proposed it
In Human Relations in 2016, Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman and Kenneth Brown published Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. They compared what Lewin actually wrote about changing as three steps with how it is presented in later work, and argue that he never developed such a model — it took form after his death.
The detail that makes the point vivid: the reference everyone cites is Lewin 1947, the first article ever published in Human Relations — which appeared weeks after he died. What is taught today as Lewin’s three-step model is, on their account, largely a post hoc reconstruction assembled by later writers.
So the most-taught idea in change management is a simplification of a dead man’s work that he did not write and could not review. That is worth sitting with for a moment, because of what it says about how this field transmits knowledge: through repetition and textbook convenience rather than through checking.
What Lewin actually contributed — and it is better
The irony is that the reconstruction is weaker than the original. Three of Lewin’s genuine contributions hold up well, and all three are more useful than unfreeze-change-refreeze.
Behaviour is a function of the person and their environment. Lewin’s field theory expressed it as B = f(P, E). Behaviour is not a property of a person alone; it is what happens when that person meets a particular situation. The practical implication is the one this whole discipline keeps rediscovering: if you want different behaviour, changing the situation is usually more effective than working on the person. Capacity, incentives, tooling and management attention are all E.
Force field analysis, with an asymmetry most people miss. Any situation is held in place by driving forces pushing toward change and restraining forces holding it back. Lewin’s point was not simply to list both. It was that reducing restraining forces is generally preferable to increasing driving forces, because adding pressure raises tension in the system while removing an obstacle does not.
Most change programmes do the opposite. They add driving force — more communication, more sponsorship, more urgency — against restraining forces they have never enumerated. Ask instead what is stopping people, remove two of those things, and the change often proceeds without any additional push.
Group decision beats instruction. Lewin’s wartime food-habits studies compared lectures with facilitated group discussion and decision. The groups that discussed and decided changed their behaviour at far higher rates than those who were told. That finding underpins most of what actually works in adoption, and it is the reason a workshop where people commit in front of peers outperforms a briefing that covers the same content.
What does not hold
| The taught version | The problem |
|---|---|
| Change happens in three discrete phases | Organisations run several changes concurrently at different phases. There is no single organisational state to freeze |
| “Refreeze” to make change stick | Stability now comes from measurement and incentive systems, not from a settling period. Refreezing describes an outcome without naming a mechanism |
| Unfreezing requires creating dissatisfaction | Widely used to justify manufactured urgency. Lewin’s own asymmetry points the other way — remove restraint rather than add pressure |
| The model is a plan | Even taken at face value it is a description of a process, with no guidance on what to do on Tuesday |
Why this matters beyond Lewin
The three-step story is a useful test case for how much of standard change practice rests on citation rather than evidence. It is not an isolated instance. When Steven Appelbaum and colleagues reviewed fifteen years of literature against Kotter’s eight steps, they found no formal studies covering the model as a whole, and concluded its popularity owed more to its usable format than to any scientific consensus.
Meanwhile the constructs that have been tested get less airtime. Bryan Weiner’s theory of organizational readiness separates change commitment from change efficacy — the shared judgement of collective capability, shaped by task demands, resources and situation. That is a more precise instrument than any three-phase narrative, and almost nobody puts it on a slide.
What to take from him
Keep three things and drop the diagram:
- List the restraining forces before adding any driving force. Ask a team what stops them, in concrete terms. Most answers are removable and almost none require a communications campaign.
- Treat behaviour as situational. When people are not doing the new thing, examine the environment before concluding anything about their attitude — which is precisely where individual-level models tend to mislead.
- Let groups decide rather than be told. The commitment produced by a group working out its own answer is not a soft benefit; it is the most reliably replicated finding in the whole tradition.
Eighty years on, the parts of Lewin worth using are the ones that never made it onto the slide. The part that did make it onto the slide appears to have been written by other people.
More on frameworks and evidence in the Change Readiness Hub, or read why no single model explains organisational change.