Unfreeze, change, refreeze. Three words that open most change management courses, attributed to Kurt Lewin, who died in 1947 and is generally described as the founder of the field.
In 2016 three management researchers published a paper arguing that Lewin never proposed it.
The claim
Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman and Kenneth Brown compared what Lewin actually wrote about changing as three steps with how later authors presented it. Their conclusion, stated in the abstract of the Human Relations paper, is direct.
Based on a comparison of what Lewin wrote about changing as three steps with how this is presented in later works, we argue that he never developed such a model and it took form after his death.
The paper's broader argument is about how disciplines construct their own history. Change management emerged as a subfield in the decades after Lewin's death and needed a founding figure with a founding idea. A brief passage about changing as three steps, in work whose main subject was something else, was elevated into a model, given a name, and reproduced from secondary source to secondary source until it became the thing everyone knew.
The authors are explicit that their target is not Lewin, whose reputation they treat with respect. Their target is the uncritical acceptance of a supposed foundation, and their argument is that questioning it opens room for better thinking about change rather than worse.
The reply
Four years later Bernard Burnes published a response in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, arguing that the criticism misreads the relationship between Lewin's early and later work.
Burnes's case is that the three-step model connects directly to Lewin's field theory, the framework he developed for understanding behaviour as the product of forces in a psychological field, and that reading the change writing in isolation from the field theory is what produces the appearance of a gap. The abstract puts the conclusion as the model being a well-thought-out approach to change based on his development of field theory, and describes the difference between the two as one of nomenclature rather than substance.
Between them the two papers set out a genuine disagreement about intellectual history, conducted properly in peer-reviewed journals by researchers who have read the primary material. Neither is obviously right and the dispute is not settled.
Where they agree, and why it matters more
Strip out the question of attribution and the two papers converge on something both take for granted.
Whatever Lewin did or did not write, the version taught today is a simplification. Field theory is a model of behaviour as the resultant of opposing forces in a psychological field, in which a change of state happens when the balance of those forces shifts. That is a considerably more interesting idea than three words in a sequence, and it points at a different intervention.
The three-word version says: destabilise, move, stabilise. The field theory version says: identify the forces holding the current state in place, and work out whether to reduce the restraining forces or increase the driving ones. Lewin's own answer to that question, which does survive in his writing, was that reducing restraining forces produces less tension than increasing driving ones. That is a specific, testable, usable claim, and it is absent from every version of the three-step model in circulation.
The loss in the simplification is also conceptual. Refreezing implies a stable end state, which was a reasonable assumption about organisations in the 1940s and is the single most criticised element of the model today. The field theory framing has no such implication: a field is always in some balance of forces, and a new balance is no more permanent than the old one.
What this means for practice
Three practical conclusions follow, and none of them is that change management is worthless.
Attribution is not evidence. A model does not become better supported because it is credited to a distinguished researcher, and it does not become worse if the attribution turns out to be shaky. The three-step model has the same amount of empirical support either way, which is very little, because it has never been tested as an intervention. Neither has the eight-step model that replaced it in practice.
The simplification cost something specific. Force field analysis, which does come from Lewin, is a usable diagnostic: list what is pushing towards the change and what is holding it back, then decide which side to work on. It is more useful than the three-step sequence and it is what the sequence was abstracted from.
The field has a citation habit. Two of the best known claims in change management, the three-step model and the 70 percent failure rate, have both been traced back by researchers who found something other than what the citation implied. In both cases the chain of secondary citation was the mechanism. That is worth knowing the next time a familiar figure or framework arrives with a famous name attached and no primary source.
Common questions
Did Kurt Lewin create the unfreeze, change, refreeze model? Contested. A 2016 paper in Human Relations argues he never developed such a model and that it took form after his death. A 2020 paper in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science argues it follows directly from his field theory and that the difference is one of naming rather than substance.
Is the three-step model wrong? It has never been tested as an intervention, so it is neither supported nor refuted. The more common criticism is that the refreezing step assumes a stable end state, which fits organisations in the 1940s better than organisations now.
What is force field analysis? A diagnostic that comes from Lewin's field theory: list the forces driving a change and the forces restraining it, then decide which to act on. Lewin argued that reducing restraining forces creates less tension than increasing driving ones.
Why does this dispute matter? Because it shows how a field's foundations get built by repeated secondary citation. The same mechanism produced the 70 percent change failure statistic, which was also traced back and found to rest on nothing.
Should we stop teaching Lewin's model? The attribution question does not change its usefulness either way. Force field analysis is the more useful part of the same body of work and is rarely taught alongside the three steps.
Who was Kurt Lewin? A psychologist, born in 1890 and died in 1947, whose work on group dynamics, field theory and action research underpins much of organisational psychology. His standing does not depend on the three-step model, which is part of what both papers in this dispute are arguing about.
Which change model should we use instead? None of the widely used practitioner models has been tested against a control group. The models are best treated as checklists whose value depends on fit with the change at hand.
Sources
- Cummings, Bridgman & Brown (2016), Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin's legacy for change management, Human Relations 69(1), 33-60
- Burnes, B. (2020), The Origins of Lewin's Three-Step Model of Change, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 56(1), 32-59
- Hughes, M. (2011), Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?, Journal of Change Management 11(4), 451-464
