Lewin's change model: unfreeze, change, refreeze

Kurt Lewin's three-stage model is the oldest change framework still in everyday use, and the most misrepresented. The "unfreeze, change, refreeze" phrasing was popularised after his death in 1947, and the ice metaphor makes it sound simplistic. The underlying idea is not.

The idea beneath the metaphor

Lewin's real proposition is that any current state of affairs is a quasi-stationary equilibrium — it looks stable, but it is actually the balance point between forces pushing for change and forces holding things as they are. Nothing is still; the forces cancel out.

That reframes the manager's job. You are not moving an object at rest. You are altering a balance of forces.

The three stages

1. Unfreeze. Disturb the equilibrium enough that movement becomes possible. In practice: making the case, surfacing the dissatisfaction that already exists, involving people in examining the problem, and — critically — reducing the forces that hold the current state in place rather than only pushing harder.

2. Change (transition). The messy middle, where people are learning the new way and are temporarily worse at their jobs than they were. Performance usually dips here, and managers who have not planned for the dip conclude the change has failed. This stage needs communication, training, support and visible tolerance of early mistakes.

3. Refreeze. Stabilise the new state so it becomes the default. Update the procedure, the induction, the metrics, the job descriptions and what gets recognised. Without this, people revert the first time they are under pressure.

Force field analysis: the part worth stealing

This is the most practically useful thing in the model, and most articles omit it. Draw the change in the middle, driving forces as arrows pushing one way, restraining forces pushing back, each weighted by strength.

Lewin's finding is the counter-intuitive bit: reducing restraining forces produces change with less tension than increasing driving forces. Pushing harder against resistance raises pressure and creates rebound; removing the obstacle lets the change happen.

A worked example. A GP surgery wants to move repeat prescriptions to an online system.

The instinctive management response is to add driving force: a deadline, a mandate, a partner meeting. Lewin says work the right-hand column instead — protected training time, a named super-user, a paper route retained for patients who need it, and a private conversation with the reluctant partner. Same change, far less conflict, and it sticks.

Applied: the transition dip

A local authority moves its housing repairs team onto a new job-management app. Week one, jobs per day drop 20%, two operatives are openly hostile, and a manager suggests reverting.

Under Lewin, this is the transition stage behaving exactly as expected. The right responses are to have set the expectation of a dip in advance, to have protected capacity for it, to fix genuine defects fast (which converts resistance into buy-in more effectively than any amount of persuasion), and to hold the line on the direction.

Then refreeze deliberately: the app becomes the only route for new jobs, the paper duplicate is withdrawn on a stated date, the induction and the supervisor checklist are rewritten, and the two operatives who adapted first are asked to train the next site.

Criticisms and limitations

• "Refreeze" assumes stability that no longer exists. The strongest criticism. If your operating environment changes every quarter, freezing a new state is planning for obsolescence. Continuous-change theorists reject the third stage outright.
• It is too simple to plan a large programme. Three stages give you no detail on coalition-building, communication or sequencing. That is what Kotter is for.
• It is often attributed unfairly. The tidy three-step formulation was constructed by later writers from Lewin's work; his actual writing is more subtle, and the criticism of the "model" is sometimes criticism of the summary.
• Top-down assumption. Someone decides the change and then unfreezes everyone else. It has less to say about change that emerges from the front line.
• Resistance treated as an obstacle. Framing people as "frozen" invites treating disagreement as an irrational barrier, when it is often well-founded information about why the plan will not work.
• No test of whether the change is right. As with Kotter, the model helps you implement, not decide.

How to evidence this in your ILM portfolio

Change is one of the richest areas for evidence because it produces documents naturally.

Level 3 — Unit 307 Managing and implementing change is the direct fit, with Unit 312 Effective communication for the communication. Suitable evidence:

• A completed force field analysis for a real change, as a workplace document — this is concrete, dated and clearly your own work
• A reflective account structured around the three stages, including what happened during the dip
• Workplace documents — the communication you issued, the training plan, the revised procedure that constitutes the refreeze
• Witness testimony on how you handled resistance

Level 5 — Unit 515 Leading innovation and change, with Unit 504 Leading people and organisational culture where the change touched culture and Unit 513 Managing business risk where you assessed the risk. At Level 5 you should compare Lewin with Kotter or another framework, and take a position on whether "refreeze" was appropriate in your context. Saying it was not, with reasons, is a strong answer.

Remember: skills evidence must be generated in your workplace or a realistic working environment, and must be attributable to you. See how ILM qualifications are assessed.

Where to go next

• Kotter's 8-step change model — the fuller programme.
• Lewin's leadership styles
• Workplace documents as evidence