Org, people & execution
Lewin's Three-Step Model
The oldest change model in the book: destabilise the current pattern of group behaviour, move to the new one, then anchor it so the group does not snap back. Lewin sketched it in 1947; later writers tidied the sketch into the staple that every change model since descends from.
Also known as Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze, Changing as three steps (CATS), Lewin's change model. First set out by Kurt Lewin (sketch); systematised posthumously by later writers in 1947; the primary source is cited in full below.
Where this is contested
Lewin's 1947 paper mentions unfreezing, moving and freezing only in passing and never draws a model. Cummings, Bridgman and Brown (2016) demonstrate that the tidy Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze formulation was substantially a posthumous reconstruction by later textbook writers, so the model should be used on its merits rather than on Lewin's authority.
- Format
- Process / loop
- Level
- Team · Business unit
- Best for
- Plan execution
- Decision stage
- Plan · Execute
- Difficulty
- Introductory
- Time to apply
- An hour to frame a change with it; the change itself runs weeks to months.
Plate · The model
The components
Unfreeze
Destabilising the existing equilibrium: building shared recognition that the current pattern cannot continue, reducing the restraining forces, and creating the safety needed for people to give up what they know.
Signals of strength
People affected can state, unprompted, why the status quo is untenable · Restraining forces are named specifically, including the awkward ones · Those affected are participating in shaping the change, not receiving it · The case rests on shared evidence rather than management assertion
Change
The move itself: the group transitions to the new pattern of behaviour through trial, participation and rapid adjustment, with an expected and openly acknowledged dip in performance.
Signals of strength
A pilot or first mover is running and being adjusted weekly · Problems surface early and get fixed visibly · The performance dip was predicted and is being tracked, not hidden · Supervisors are coaching the new pattern rather than policing the old one
Refreeze
Anchoring the new level: formal structures, incentives and social norms are rewritten so the new behaviour is the path of least resistance, and the group's equilibrium re-forms around it.
Signals of strength
Contracts, rotas, procedures and targets all match the new pattern · Reverting now would require effort; continuing does not · The new way is what newcomers are taught as simply how things work · A review date exists and regression is being measured
When it earns its keep
- The change is planned and bounded with a definable end state, such as a new shift pattern, a system cutover or a site consolidation, and stability afterwards genuinely matters.
- A previous change was announced, trained and celebrated, and quietly reversed itself within six months. The model's refreeze lens usually names the failure.
- You need a simple shared language for managers and a workforce who have never used a change framework, and Kotter's eight steps would be ceremony for the scale involved.
- Group behaviour is the thing that must change. Lewin's underlying claim, that behaviour is an equilibrium held in place by opposing forces, directs attention to the forces rather than to exhortation.
And when it doesn't
- The organisation must change continuously. Where the environment never settles, refreezing is the wrong ambition, and models built for continuous adaptation fit better.
- You need an operational playbook. Three steps is an orientation; for sequenced execution detail use Kotter's eight steps, and for the individual's journey use ADKAR.
- The change is a genuine crisis response measured in days. Unfreezing assumes there is time to build readiness; in an emergency you act first and stabilise later.
- You are tempted to present it as Lewin's rigorously tested theory. It was a sketch, and its provenance is part of what a serious user should know.
How to run it
Before starting, gather the inputs the analysis depends on:
- A clear statement of the current behaviour pattern and the intended new one, at group level.
- A force field analysis: the driving forces for the change and the restraining forces holding the present equilibrium in place.
- Genuine access to the people affected, since participation in shaping the change was central to Lewin's findings and to everything descended from them.
- Management commitment that outlasts the go-live date, because the anchoring phase is where sponsorship usually evaporates.
- A measure of whether the new pattern is actually holding, defined before the change begins.
- 1
Analyse the force field
Lewin's companion tool, and the part modern retellings drop first. Treat current behaviour as a quasi-stationary equilibrium between driving and restraining forces, list both sides honestly, and note his key finding: reducing restraining forces changes behaviour at lower tension than piling on pressure, which mostly produces resistance.
- 2
Unfreeze the current pattern
Destabilise the equilibrium so movement becomes possible: share the disconfirming evidence, let dissatisfaction with the present state surface, and create enough psychological safety that people can let go of it. Lewin's wartime food studies found group discussion and group decision far more effective at this than lectures, and that finding has held up.
- 3
Make the move
Transition to the new pattern through participation, trial and adjustment: pilots, co-design, visible early problems fixed fast. Expect performance to dip before it recovers, and say so in advance, because a predicted dip is tolerable and a surprise dip restarts the argument.
- 4
Refreeze the new pattern
Anchor the new level so it becomes the group's normal: contracts, rotas, procedures, incentives, supervision and social expectation all aligned with the new behaviour. Lewin's point was that a change which merely reaches the new level is unfinished; permanence at that level for as long as intended is the actual objective.
- 5
Watch for regression
Measure whether the new pattern holds, because equilibria are patient. Old behaviour rarely returns by announcement; it seeps back through exceptions, workarounds and quiet local agreements, and the measure defined at the start is how you catch the seep early.
Reading the result
A staged plan for a bounded change: a force field diagnosis, a deliberate destabilisation of the current pattern, a participative transition, and an explicit anchoring phase with a measure of whether the new behaviour is holding.
- The model is read as a discipline of sequence: if the change is failing, locate which step was skipped. Most failed changes were never unfrozen, and most reversed ones were never refrozen.
- Weigh the force field before the plan. If the strongest restraining force is untouched by your design, the plan is a request, and the equilibrium will decline it.
- Treat the three steps as a lens over a change, never as the plan itself. The model tells you what phase you are in and what that phase demands; the operational content must come from somewhere else.
A worked example
A textile mill moves from double-day shifts to a continental shift pattern
A Yorkshire weaving mill employing 140 people runs its looms eighty hours a week on a double-day pattern of earlies and lates. A new contract requires near-continuous running, which means a continental pattern with nights and weekends. The pattern has stood for a generation, childcare arrangements are built around it, and a previous imposed change to break times still poisons the atmosphere. The operations director frames the change with Lewin's model.
- Analyse the force field
- Driving forces: the contract volume, loom utilisation economics, and the credible threat of the work going to a Portuguese competitor. Restraining forces: childcare built around fixed earlies and lates, distrust from the imposed break-time change, and expectations about weekend premiums. The childcare force is the strongest, so the rota design must remove it rather than pay to override it.
- Unfreeze the current pattern
- The books are opened: the contract arithmetic and the competitor quote are shared with the whole workforce, not summarised for them. A joint working group with union reps is formed, and a delegation visits a Lancashire mill already running continental shifts to talk to weavers rather than managers. Within a month the argument has shifted from whether the pattern must change to which variant hurts least, which is what unfrozen looks like.
- Make the move
- One loom shed pilots the new pattern for eight weeks. The working group co-designs a variant with fixed teams, so childcare can be arranged around a predictable cycle, and a weekly adjustment meeting handles problems. Output drops 6 per cent in the first fortnight, as predicted in writing beforehand, and recovers by week six.
- Refreeze the new pattern
- The new rota goes into contracts with a consolidated shift premium, holiday and overtime rules are rewritten to match, permanent team leaders are appointed for each shift, and a six-month joint review with the union is diarised. The premium consolidation matters: while weekend pay remained a separate allowance, every payslip invited relitigating the change.
- Watch for regression
- Absence and shift-swap requests are tracked. At month four, informal swapping is quietly recreating the old earlies-and-lates for a few crews, so rather than banning swaps, the fixed-team variant that made them unnecessary is extended. The equilibrium was probing for a way back and was redirected instead of confronted.
The read. The change holds because the strongest restraining force, childcare, was designed out rather than bought off, and because the refreeze was contractual and social rather than a celebration email. Read honestly, the model contributed sequence and vocabulary; the analytical work was done by the force field diagnosis, which is the part of Lewin most modern retellings leave behind. The mill would have failed at the same speed as its break-time debacle had it treated unfreezing as an announcement.
Pitfalls
- Treating unfreeze as a communications launch. Announcement is not destabilisation; people move when they own the evidence, and Lewin's group-decision findings are explicit about this.
- Skipping refreeze because the next initiative is already queued. The group equilibrium reasserts itself with remarkable patience, and six months later the change exists only in the slide deck.
- Using the three steps as the whole plan. It is a lens over a change, and it carries no operational content about stakeholders, sequencing or communications.
- Adding driving force instead of reducing restraining force. Pressure raises tension and resistance together; removing the reason people resist is cheaper and holds better.
- Applying it to organisations that must change continuously, where freezing the new state is precisely the wrong ambition and a moving-equilibrium mindset serves better.
What the critics say
The model as taught was substantially constructed after Lewin's death. Cummings, Bridgman and Brown show he never presented 'changing as three steps' as a formal model, that the famous 1947 passage is brief and undeveloped, and that textbook writers assembled and progressively solidified CATS to give the young field of change management a distinguished founder. The critique targets the field's use of Lewin more than Lewin himself.
Cummings, S., Bridgman, T. and Brown, K. G. (2016) 'Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin's legacy for change management', Human Relations, 69(1), pp. 33-60.
The model presents a quaintly linear and static picture: organisations treated as frozen states punctuated by discrete episodes of managed change. Kanter and colleagues argued organisations are fluid and change is continuous, so the ice metaphor misdescribes the phenomenon it claims to manage.
Kanter, R. M., Stein, B. A. and Jick, T. D. (1992) The Challenge of Organizational Change. New York: Free Press.
The episodic framing fits only part of reality. Weick and Quinn's distinction between episodic and continuous change implies the model applies where change is infrequent and intentional, and misleads where adaptation is constant, in which case the practical sequence inverts to freeze, rebalance, unfreeze.
Weick, K. E. and Quinn, R. E. (1999) 'Organizational change and development', Annual Review of Psychology, 50, pp. 361-386.
In fairness, the standard critiques attack the caricature rather than the man. Burnes's re-appraisal argues that Lewin's full planned approach, combining field theory, group dynamics, action research and the three steps, is far richer than the three-box diagram bearing his name, and anticipates several of the objections made against it.
Burnes, B. (2004) 'Kurt Lewin and the planned approach to change: a re-appraisal', Journal of Management Studies, 41(6), pp. 977-1002.
Sources and further reading
- Lewin, K. (1947) 'Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Social Equilibria and Social Change', Human Relations, 1(1), pp. 5-41. ↗
- Cummings, S., Bridgman, T. and Brown, K. G. (2016) 'Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin's legacy for change management', Human Relations, 69(1), pp. 33-60. ↗
- Burnes, B. (2004) 'Kurt Lewin and the planned approach to change: a re-appraisal', Journal of Management Studies, 41(6), pp. 977-1002.
- Schein, E. H. (1996) 'Kurt Lewin's change theory in the field and in the classroom: Notes toward a model of managed learning', Systems Practice, 9(1), pp. 27-47.