"Unfreezing" Kurt Lewin

“NEW TRUTHS" / "UNFREEZING CATS" 

Welcome back readers. Who would have guessed that there was considerable intrigue in innovation methods history? With a focus on methods architecture evolution, the search for root processes, when they first appeared and in what form, leads to some interesting papers and scholarly investigative inquiries undertaken by others. 

Happy to share some background paper highlights being digested as part of researching/writing/creating the in-progress Design for Complexity book. The scholarly paper below is one such document..highly recommended for those so inclined. 

Of course there is not one set of discipline roots in the mix of the subject but rather several. Some roots might not be well known to designers accustomed to the pioneers of Arenas 1 or 2. That makes this book-making more complex. Whether we all like it or not, most roots related to this subject connect into applied psychology in one way or another. The change related thread that has connective tissue linked to the work of social psychologist Kurt Lewin (CATS & Action Research) is one such historical root stream. 

From Wikipedia: “Kurt Lewin (1890 – 1947) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. During his professional career, Lewin's academic research and writings focused on applied research, action research and group communication.”

LONG STORY SHORT 

We found this hefty, deeply researched 60 page “Unfreezing” paper by Professors Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman and Kenneth G. Brown to be particularly interesting and directly applicable to better understanding the messy roots of what cascades forward into "Action Research" that in turn cascades into various changemaking approaches being shaped in the direction of Design for Complexity today. 

We include this paper in the sharing here just as an example of how messy the history of methodologies geared for changemaking in Arenas 3 and 4 can be. An analogy would be a giant Russian nested doll set with only the first tiny doll created by the author but all dolls in the set, some created decades later, attributed to that same, esteemed, long deceased person. 

Happy to leave it up to readers to draw their own value from this intriguing paper by Cummings, Bridgman and Brown. 

We loved their suggestion that reexamining/unfreezing old sacred-cow models might aid in forward motion today. For us this "unfreezing" was the most important insight in the paper, beyond the many other revelations. We might borrow that idea as it certainly applies to the Design for Complexity subject. Such unfreezing calls for some courage to be sure. 

Quotes From the “Unfreezing” Paper: 

"Kurt Lewin is widely considered the founding father of change management, with his unfreeze–change–refreeze or ‘changing as three steps’ (CATS) regarded as the ‘fundamental’ or ‘classic’ approach to, or classic ‘paradigm’ for, managing change."

"The study of change management has subsequently ‘followed Lewin’ ‘the intellectual father of contemporary theories’ CATS has subsequently ‘dominated almost all western theories of change over the past fifty years’."

"Academics claim that all theories of change are ‘reducible to this one idea of Kurt Lewin’s’ and practitioners boast that ‘the most powerful tool in my toolbox is Kurt Lewin’s simple three-step change model’ "

THE BUMPY PART

"Lewin never wrote ‘refreezing’ anywhere. As far as we can ascertain, the re-phrasing of Lewin’s freezing to ‘refreezing’ happened first in a 1950 conference paper by Lewin’s former student Leon Festinger (Festinger and Coyle, 1950; reprinted in Festinger, 1980: 14). Festinger said that: ‘To Lewin, life was not static; it was changing, dynamic, fluid. Lewin’s unfreezing-stabilizing-refreezing concept of change continues to be highly relevant today’."

"Initiates to the sub-field of change management are generally shown a progress of consciousness that begins with CATS as a key foundation, the first and now ‘classic’ theory, and culminates in the current ‘state of the art’. Our counter-history aims to ‘unfreeze’ CATS, to show how it takes form and develops into something far more than its author ever intended."

"We examine how its author moves from a minor figure, into a grand founder whose application of science enabled the discovery of the fundamentals of change management, to the well-meaning simpleton who must be improved upon. We follow the formation of the elements after Lewin’s death that would influence our view of CATS as a foundational model for the problematization of change that spiked in the 1980s."

"Then we explore the episteme particular to the 1980s that made possible the form of a new truth of CATS that we see in today. Beyond this, we analyse the reduplication, continued formation and hardening of the historical view of CATS and its author beyond the 1980s, and the development and continuity of many of the questionable interpretations that help maintain today’s belief in CATS as a noble, necessary, but overly simplistic foundation upon which we have built but moved beyond."

"Ronald Lippitt was Lewin’s PhD student. Despite not regarding CATS as worthy of mention in his 1947 tribute to Lewin after his death, Lippitt remembers how important it is a decade later. Lippitt explicitly and frequently cites what he calls Lewin’s ‘three phase’ model (Lippitt et al., 1958: 129) as the basis for his seven phase model (see Figure 2), designed to be used by what are termed, in a new turn of phrase, ‘change agents’, in the book Dynamics of Planned Change. The focus on the model to be used by change agents starts to turn Lewin’s afterthought about change into an instrument."

"Not long after Lippitt’s work was published, other fragments emerged that would reinforce what we now consider to be the basis of change management. The first record we can find of refreezing being used in a management context was by Schein in a 1961 article ‘Management development as a process of influence’."

"In later years, these disparate elements – Lippitt and Schein’s interpretations and the glacial freezing/unfreezing imagery – would accumulate into the historical narrative we accept today. But up until the late 1970s the idea of CATS as a foundational theory authored by the great Kurt Lewin had little influence on the mainstream of management education. In fact, the first comprehensive histories of management either do not men- tion Lewin at all (George, 1968); or mention him, but only in relation concepts other than CATS (Wren, 1972)."

"For a sub-field like change management that sought to map itself onto ‘fractally distinct’ but related subjects like psychology and sociology (Abbott, 2001), Lewin, the social psychologist, was a perfect intellectual ‘father’. The idea that one of the 20th century’s most innovative social scientists, with an outstanding track record of theory development based on solid experimentation and lengthy empirical observation, who the first and best thinkers directly concerned with OD and change based their thinking on, was embraced. That this gem could be polished by making something that Schein, Lippitt and others claimed Lewin had promoted into a diagram with stages that could have been applied prescriptively by prospective change-agents, would provide a fine foundation to build further upon."

"The anti-‘Lewinian/ CATS’ counterpoint is clear that Lewin’s approach ‘has become obsolete. It applies to a world of certainty and predictability . . . and it reflects the environment of those times. It treats change as occasional disturbance in an otherwise peaceful world. However, this paradigm has little resemblance to today’s environment of constant and chaotic change’."

"In short, we argue that CATS has become far more fundamental and instrumental than Lewin ever intended it to be. While the re-interpretation of Lewin’s musing and subsequent facsimiles have produced knowledge by providing confidence in a fledgling sub-field; a historical foundation on which subsequent research can be layered; an appearance of both noble foundations and continual advancement, it is a solid foundation only in the sense that it has hardened through a series of interpretations that have built upon each other, and this sedimentation may now repress other ways of seeing or organizing thinking about change."

"This article has shown that peeling back the layers and re-visiting original sources, rather than relying upon the secondary materials that have interpreted these at particular points in time, can be a worthwhile exercise, not only to reassure ourselves that what we assume to be our foundations are in fact valid, but also because doing so may support and inspire new thinking."

Unquote

CLOSING

Among other things this "Unfreezing" paper helps us with the methods related time-line. Although Kurt Lewin's work was of the 1940s, Era 3, in the Innovation Methods Eras Framework (included in our first book), the visual method models enhanced by others did not appear until later as in the 1970s-1980s. That places the Lewin influenced models spanning Eras 3-6-7.

Many of our readers will know that by the 1970s, several other knowledge communities had operational visual method models in action, in parallel, seldom recognizing each other. In the Lewin stream; what began in text form was rethought, rewritten and eventually evolved into visualized instruments by others. A messy fascinating story.

Big thanks to Cummings, Bridgman and Brown. Download their "Unfreezing" paper here.

END

Note to Readers: This post is just background, not intended to be folded into the Design for Complexity Book. If you have constructive comments related to Lewin and or Action Research feel free to send them to us.

In Reference to Ai: 

We did note: If we compare the human generated explanation of this subject presented in the “Unfreezing” paper to what ChatGPT generates one can see a big difference...in accuracy and in detail. Basically numerous important issues do not appear in the first up ChatGPT version as follows:

"Action Research (AR) on Wikipedia:

Origins & Purpose: Coined by Kurt Lewin around 1944–46, AR is defined as “a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action” and is carried out through a repeating cycle: planning → acting → observing → reflecting, aimed at both change and understanding."..So accuracy and lack of nuance might be important in some problematic contexts.”