E5: Learning to Freeze Ice
“If you want to truly understand something, try to change it,”
— Kurt Lewin, pioneer of social psychology and action research.
Kurt Lewin spent years using scientific methods to understand human social behaviors. His work remains prescient today, especially for navigating the twists and turns of organizational change. Long since Lewin passed in 1947, his models remain useful for thinking about how to approach shifting practices or policies in organizations.
To better understand some of Lewin’s ideas, I explored his popular three-stage model of change known as “unfreeze-change-(re)freeze”.
Also, having recently left the door of our chest freezer open all night, I inadvertently field-tested Lewin’s model. (Note: models vary in their usefulness — the popsicles in our freezer did not survive).
Here’s a quick recap of Lewin’s model and what it says about preparing your team and yourself for organizational change.
Unfreeze: At this early stage, the primary task is to understand (or chip away at) organizational practices, mindsets, or existing norms to lay the groundwork for change to occur. We are quite literally “breaking the ice” here. To me, “unfreezing” is analogous to exploring a new practice or policy. It’s when we discuss the pros and cons of making a change and identify some key leaders to serve as change agents, along with skeptics who may be poised to defend the status quo.
This is also the part “before we leap” where we make sure enough of your team or company is ready and motivated to endure some turbulence.
It’s good to know if there’s general consensus that this change is worth it.
Is there sufficient trust in the change process and those leading it?
Is there a clear game plan in place we all see as reasonable and detailed enough to hold ourselves accountable?
Change: This is when the change we are seeking for starts to happen in an organization. At this stage, a mix of fear, confusion, and uncertainty can creep in. We may get rattled. Sound familiar? But it’s critical, according to Lewin, to stay the course at this point. The hard truth is that organizational changes don’t typically happen overnight...they can take months or years to seed and flourish.
This is when we need implementation strategies in place, such as keeping others engaged through relevant and targeted communications, peer-to-peer networking, and the use of data to regularly monitor what’s working out or not. It’s also when it’s good to acknowledge and normalize others’ feelings toward making the change, versus simply charging ahead. Thinking out these strategies in advance can really make a difference when the road gets bumpy.
(Re)freeze: This is when a change or innovation begins to take root throughout an organization and things begin to crystallize anew. It can be when we get comfortable using a new practice, adjust to updated job roles, or adapt to larger institutional norms (think the growth of virtual or hybrid workplaces). Lewin also cautions us, without letting intended changes fully sink in, we may slide back into old habits and practices, or self-sabotage (arg, I’m guilty of this one!). We may also find ourselves or colleagues rushing to just “check boxes” to say we did it. Or, we get “paper” implementation which only exists in a manual or on PowerPoint slides.
So, during the re-freeze stage, it’s critical to anchor changes within an organization (e.g., updating handbooks, and procedures), celebrate important milestones, and ensure feedback loops are in place to catch implementation errors or gaps as we move ahead.
Lewin’s model in practice
For anyone leading, facilitating, or experiencing organizational change, Lewin’s model may be a helpful guide. But Lewin’s contributions to social science were far broader than this single model of change.
In 1946, a year before he died, Lewin published a paper called “Action Research and Minority Problems.” In this and other writings, he called attention to the use of “incorrect stereotypes” and “racism” perpetuated in U.S. society in 1930-40. Lewin was one of the first researchers to conduct studies on intergroup relations (relationships between different groups of people in society) using scientific methods. Still unpacking this work today.
I wondered how Lewin might apply the unfreeze-change-refreeze model to frame questions around addressing racial equity in organizational contexts. I’d invite you to reflect on this question for yourself in the figure below. Below, I applied his model from a school perspective.
Unfreeze: Which parts of the “way things are done in our school” could be inequitable, biased, or experienced as discriminatory by some of our students or families? How would we know if this is the case?
Change: How will we keep educators on board with our new school disciplinary approach that requires daily adjustments in how educators think about student behaviors and consequences?
(Re)freeze: We are seeing improvements in outcomes for our students. Now, what systems, policies, or structures need to be in place for these changes to sustain?
Lewin’s observations and work continue to inspire and challenge me.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Lewin’s writings (1946) published just before he passed. His words seem to ring true as much today as they did then:
In recent years, we have started to realize that so-called minority problems are in fact majority problems, that the Black problem is the problem of the white, that the Jewish problem is the problem of the non-Jew, and so on...A large-scale effort of social research on intergroup relations doubtless would be able to have a lasting effect on the history of this country. It is equally clear, however, that this job demands from social scientists the utmost amount of courage. It needs courage as Plato defines it. It needs the best of what the best among us can give, and the help of everybody.