Planned Approach to Change Essay Example for Free

Planned Approach to convert EssayThe work of Kurt Lewin dominated the theory and practice of change management for over 40 years. However, in the ult 20 years, Lewins mount to change, particularly the 3-Step homunculus, has attracted major criticisms. The key ones are that his work assumed organizations operate in a stable state was unaccompanied suitable for sm all-scale change projects ignored organizational power and politics and was top-down and management-driven. This article seeks to re-appraise Lewins work and challenge the validity of these views. It begins by describing Lewins background and be inhabitfs, especially his commitment to resolving well-disposed conict. The article then moves on to examine the main elements of his Planned border on to change line of products Theory Group Dynamics body process Research and the 3-Step model. This is followed by a brief summary of the major developments in the eld of organizational change since Lewins death which, in tu rn, leads to an exami soil of the main criticisms levelled at Lewins work. The article concludes by arguing that rather than being outdated or redundant, Lewins approach is still relevant to the modern world.INTRODUCTIONFreud the clinician and Lewin the experimentalist these are the two men whose names will stand out before all others in the chronicle of our psychological era.The above quotation is taken from Edward C Tolmans memorial address for Kurt Lewin delivered at the 1947 Convention of the American Psychological Association (quoted in Marrow, 1969, p. ix). To umpteen people today it will seem strange that Lewin should get down been given equal status with Freud. Some 50 years after his death, Lewin is now mainly remembered as the originator of the 3-Step model of changeUSA.Address for reprints Bernard Burnes, Manchester School of Management, UMIST, Manchester M60 1QD, UK (emailprotected).dismissed as outdated (Burnes, 2000 Dawson, 1994 Dent and Goldberg, 1999 Hatch, 1997 Kanter et al., 1992 Marshak, 1993). Yet, as this article will argue, his contri providedion to our understanding of one-on-one and radical behaviour and the role these play in organizations and society was enormous and is still relevant. In todays turbulent and changing world, one susceptibility expect Lewins pioneering work on change to be seized upon with gratitude, especially given the high failure rate of many change programmes (Huczynski and Buchanan, 2001 Kearney, 1989 Kotter, 1996 Stickland, 1998 Waclawski, 2002 Wastell et al., 1994 Watcher, 1993 Whyte and Watcher, 1992 Zairi et al., 1994).Unfortunately, his commitment to extending pop set in society and his work on theater of operations Theory, Group Dynamics and Action Research which, together with his 3-Step model, formed an inter-linked, elaborate and robust approach to Planned change, have received less and less attention (Ash, 1992 Bargal et al., 1992 Cooke, 1999). Indeed, from the 1980s, even Lewins work on chang e was increasingly criticized as relevant allowd to down in the mouth-scale changes in stable rails, and for ignoring issues such as organizational politics and conict. In its maneuver, writers sought to promote a view of change as being constant, and as a political process within organizations (Dawson, 1994 Pettigrew et al., 1992 Wilson, 1992).The purpose of this article is to re-appraise Lewin and his work.. The article begins by describing Lewins background, especially the origins of his commitment to resolving kindly conict. It then moves on to examine the main elements of his Planned approach to change. This is followed by a description of developments in the eld of organizational change since Lewins death, and an evaluation of the criticisms levelled against his work. The article concludes by arguing that rather than being outdated, Lewins Planned approach is still in truth relevant to the needs of the modern world.LEWINS BACKGROUNDFew social scientists can have received the level of praise and admirationthat has been heaped upon Kurt Lewin (Ash, 1992 Bargal et al., 1992 Dent and Goldberg, 1999 Dickens and Watkins, 1999 Tobach, 1994). As Edgar Schein (1988, p. 239) enthusiastically commentedThere is subatomic question that the intellectual father of contemporary theories of applied behavioural science, action look and planned change is Kurt Lewin. His seminal work on leadership path and the experiments on planned change which took place in World War II in an effort to change consumer behaviour launched a whole propagation of research in class dynamics and the implementation of change programs. 978 B. Burnes Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004For most of his life, Lewins main preoccupation was the resolution of social con- ict and, in particular, the problems of minority or disadvantaged hosts. Underpinning this preoccupation was a strong belief that only the permeation of democratic values into all facets of society could prevent the worst extreme s of social conict. As his wife wrote in the Preface to a volume of his collected work published after his deathKurt Lewin was so constantly and predominantly preoccupied with the task of advancing the c onceptual representation of the social-psychological world, and at the same time he was so lled with the urgent desire to use his theoretical penetration for the building of a better world, that it is difcult to decide which of these two sources of motivation owed with greater energy or vigour. (Lewin, 1948b)To a large extent, his involutions and beliefs stemmed from his background as a German Jew. Lewin was born in 1890 and, for a Jew growing up in Germany, at this time, ofcially-approved anti-Semitism was a fact of life. Few Jews could expect to get hold of a responsible post in the civil service or universities. Despite this, Lewin was awarded a doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1916 and went on to teach there. though he was never awarded tenured status, Lewin achieved a growing international re throw offation in the 1920s as a leader in his eld (Lewin, 1992). However, with the reverse of the Nazi Party, Lewin recognized that the position of Jews in Germany wasincreasingly threatened. The election of Hitler as Chancellor in 1933 was the nal straw for him he resigned from the University and moved to America (Marrow, 1969).In America, Lewin found a job rst as a refugee scholar at Cornell University and then, from 1935 to 1945, at the University of Iowa. Here he was to embark on an ambitious programme of research which cover topics such as child-parent transaction, conict in marriage, styles of leadership, worker motivation and performance, conict in industry, free radical problem-solving, communication and attitude change, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-racism, discrimination and prejudice, integration-segregation, peace, war and poverty (Bargal et al., 1992 Cartwright, 1952 Lewin, 1948a). As Cooke (1999) notes, given the prevalence of racism and antiSemitism in America at the time, much of this work, especially his increasingly public advocacy in support of disadvantaged groups, put Lewin on the political left.During the years of the Second World War, Lewin did much work for the American war effort. This included studies of the morale of front-line troops and psychological warfare, and his famous playing field aimed at persuading American housewives to buy cheaper cuts of meat (Lewin, 1943a Marrow, 1969). He was in like manner much in demand as a speaker on minority and inter-group relations Kurt Lewin 979 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004(Smith, 2001). These activities chimed with one of his central preoccupations, which was how Germanys authoritarian and racist civilisation could be replaced with one imbued with democratic values. He saw democracy, and the spread of democratic values throughout society, as the central bastion against authoritarianism and despotism. That he viewed the establishment of democracy as a major t ask, and avoided simplistic and structural recipes, can be gleaned from the following extracts from his article on The special case of Germany (Lewin, 1943b)Nazi culture . . . is deeply rooted, particularly in the youth on whom the . . . future depends. It is a culture which is centred around power as the supreme value and which denounces justice and equality . . . (p. 43) To bestable, a cultural change has to penetrate all aspects of a nations life. The change must, in short, be a change in the cultural atmosphere, not merely a change of a single item. (p. 46)Change in culture requires the change of leadership forms in every walk of life. At the start, particularly important is leadership in those social areas which are unplumbed from the point of view of power. (p. 55)With the end of the War, Lewin established the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The aim of the Center was to investigate all aspects of group behaviour, especially how it could be changed. At the same time, he was in addition chief architect of the Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI). Founded and funded by the American Judaic Congress, its aim was the eradication of discrimination against all minority groups. As Lewin wrote at the time, We Jews will have to ght for ourselves and we will do so strongly and with good conscience. We also know that the ght of the Jews is part of the ght of all minorities for democratic equality of rights and opportunities . . . (quoted in Marrow, 1969, p. 175). In pursuing this objective, Lewin believed that his work on Group Dynamics and Action Research would provide the key tools for the CCI.Lewin was also inuential in establishing the Tavistock Institute in the UK and its Journal, Human Relations ( Jaques, 1998 Marrow, 1969). In addition, in 1946, the Connecticut State Inter-Racial Commission asked Lewin to help carry leaders and conduct research on the most effective means of combating racial and reli gious prejudice in communities. This led to the development of sensitivity dressing and the creation, in 1947, of the now famous National Training Laboratories. However, his huge workload took its toll on his health, and on 11 February 1947 he died of a heart storm (Lewin, 1992).980 B. Burnes Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004LEWINS WORKLewin was a humanitarian who believed that only by resolving social conict, whether it be religious, racial, marital or industrial, could the human condition be improved. Lewin believed that the key to resolving socialconict was to facilitate learning and so enable individualists to understand and restructure their perceptions of the world around them. In this he was much inuenced by the Gestalt psychologists he had worked with in Berlin (Smith, 2001). A unifying theme of much of his work is the view that . . . the group to which an individual belongs is the ground for his perceptions, his tinctureings and his actions (Allport, 1948, p. vii).though Fi eld Theory, Group Dynamics, Action Research and the 3-Step model of change are often treated as separate themes of his work, Lewin saw them as a unied whole with each element supporting and reinforcing the others and all of them necessary to understand and bring about Planned change, whether it be at the level of the individual, group, organization or even society (Bargal and Bar, 1992 Kippenberger, 1998a, 1998b Smith, 2001). As Allport (1948, p. ix) states All of his concepts, whatever root-metaphor they employ, comprise a single wellintegrated system. This can be seen from examining these four aspects of his work in turn.Field TheoryThis is an approach to understanding group behaviour by trying to map out the totality and complexity of the eld in which the behaviour takes place (Back, 1992). Lewin maintained that to understand any situation it was necessary that One should view the present situation the status quo as being maintained by reliable conditions or ram downs (Lewin, 1943a, p. 172). Lewin (1947b) postulated that group behaviour is an intricate set of symbolic interactions and forces that not only affect group structures, only if also modify individual behaviour. Therefore, individual behaviour is a function of the group environment or eld, as he termed it. Consequently, any changes in behaviour stem from changes, be they small or large, in the forces within the eld (Lewin, 1947a).Lewin dened a eld as a totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent . . . (Lewin, 1946, p. 240). Lewin believed that a eld was in a continuous state of adaptation and that Change and constancy are relative concepts group life is never without change, merely differences in the amount and type of change exist (Lewin, 1947a, p. 199). This is why Lewin used the term quasi-stationary equilibrium to indicate that whilst there might be a rhythm and copy to the behaviour and processes of a group, these tendedto uctuate constantly owing to ch anges in the forces or circumstances that impinge on the group.Lewins view was that if one could identify, plot and establish the effectiveness of these forces, then it would be possible not only to understand why individuals, Kurt Lewin 981 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004groups and organizations act as they do, but also what forces would need to be senseless or strengthened in order to bring about change. In the main, Lewin saw behavioural change as a slow process however, he did recognize that under certain circumstances, such as a personal, organizational or societal crisis, the various forces in the eld can shift promptly and radically. In such situations, established routines and behaviours break down and the status quo is no longer viable new patterns of activity can rapidly emerge and a new equilibrium (or quasistationary equilibrium) is formed (Kippenberger, 1998a Lewin, 1947a). Despite its obvious value as a vehicle for understanding and changing group behaviour, with Lewi ns death, the general interest in Field Theory waned (Back, 1992 Gold, 1992 Hendry, 1996).However, in recent years, with the work of Argyris (1990) and Hirschhorn (1988) on understanding and overcoming resistance to change, Lewins work on Field Theory has once again begun to attract interest. According to Hendry (1996), even critics of Lewins work have drawn on Field Theory to develop their own models of change (see Pettigrew et al., 1989, 1992). Indeed, parallels have even been drawn between Lewins work and the work of complexity theorists (Kippenberger, 1998a). Back (1992), for example, argued that the formulation and behaviour of complex systems as described by topsy-turvydom and Catastrophe theorists bear striking similarities to Lewins conceptualization of Field Theory. Nevertheless, Field Theory is now probably the least understood element of Lewins work, yet, because of its authority to map the forces impinging on an individual, group or organization, it underpinned the oth er elements of his work.Group Dynamicsthe word dynamics . . . comes from a Greek word meaning force . . . group . . . dynamics refers to the forces operating in groups . . . it is astudy of these forces what gives rise to them, what conditions modify them, what consequences they have, etc. (Cartwright, 1951, p. 382)Lewin was the rst psychologist to write about group dynamics and the importance of the group in shaping the behaviour of its members (Allport, 1948 Bargal et al., 1992). Indeed, Lewins (1939, p. 165) denition of a group is still generally accepted . . . it is not the similarity or dissimilarity of individuals that constitutes a group, but interdependence of fate. As Kippenberger (1998a) notes, Lewin was addressing two questions What is it about the nature and characteristics of a particular group which causes it to respond (behave) as it does to the forces which impinge on it, and how can these forces be changed in order to elicit a more desirable form of behaviour? It wa s to address these questions that Lewin began to develop the concept of Group Dynamics.Group Dynamics stresses that group behaviour, rather than that of individuals, should be the main focus of change (Bernstein, 1968 Dent and Goldberg, 1999). Lewin (1947b) maintained that it is fruitless to concentrate on changing the behaviour of individuals because the individual in isolation is constrained by group pressures to conform. Consequently, the focus of change must be at the group level and should concentrate on factors such as group norms, roles, interactions and socialization processes to create disequilibrium and change (Schein, 1988).Lewins pioneering work on Group Dynamics not only laid the foundations for our understanding of groups (Cooke, 1999 Dent and Goldberg, 1999 French and Bell, 1984 Marrow, 1969 Schein, 1988) but has also been linked to complexity theories by researchers examining self-organizing theory and non-linear systems (Tschacher and Brunner, 1995). However, under standing the internal dynamics of a group is not sufcient by itself to bring about change. Lewin also recognized the need to provide a process whereby the members could be engaged in and committed to changing their behaviour. This led Lewin to develop Action Research and the 3-Step model of change.Action ResearchThis term was coined by Lewin (1946) in an article entitled Action research and minority problems. Lewin stated in the articleIn the destruction year and a half I have had occasion to have contact with a great variety of organizations, institutions, and individuals who came for help in the eld of group relations. (Lewin, 1946, p. 201)However, though these people exhibited . . .a great amount of good-will, of readiness to face the problem squarely and . . . really do something about it . . . These eager people feel themselves to be in a fog. They feel in a fog on three counts 1. What is the present situation? 2. What are the dangers? 3. And most importantly of all, what sha ll we do? (Lewin, 1946, p. 201)Lewin conceived of Action Research as a two-pronged process which would allow groups to address these three questions. Firstly, it emphasizes that change requires action, and is directed at achieving this. Secondly, it recognizes that successful action is based on analysing the situation correctly, identifying all the possible alternative solutions and choosing the one most appropriate to the situation at hand (Bennett, 1983). To be successful, though, there has also to be a felt-need. FeltKurt Lewin 983 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004need is an individuals inner realization that change is necessary. If felt-need is low in the group or organization, introducing change becomes problematic. The theoretical foundations of Action Research lie in Gestalt psychology, which stresses that change can only successfully be achieved by helping individuals to reect on and gain new insights into the totality of their situation.Lewin (1946, p. 206) stated that Action Research . . . proceeds in a spiral of steps each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-nding about the results of the action. It is an iterative process whereby research leads to action and action leads to evaluation and further research. As Schein (1996, p. 64) comments, it was Lewins view that . . . one cannot understand an organization without trying to change it . . . Indeed, Lewins view was very much that the understanding and learning which this process produces for the individuals and groups pertain, which then feeds into changedbehaviour, is more important than any resulting change as such (Lewin, 1946).To this end, Action Research draws on Lewins work on Field Theory to identify the forces that focus on the group to which the individual belongs. It also draws on Group Dynamics to understand why group members behave in the way they do when subjected to these forces. Lewin stressed that the routines and patterns of behaviour in a group are more than just the outcome of oppose forces in a forceeld. They have a value in themselves and have a positive role to play in enforcing group norms (Lewin, 1947a). Action Research stresses that for change to be effective, it must take place at the group level, and must be a participative and collaborative process which involves all of those concerned (Allport, 1948 Bargal et al., 1992 French and Bell, 1984 Lewin, 1947b).