How everything I taught about change is (probably) wrong

As a good faculty member I adhere to the traditional foundation of change management in business schools which are the works of Prof. Kurt Lewin (change as three steps- CATS– devised in the 1950s) and Prof. John Kotter (8 step change model).

I always start this session with a simple statement from McKinsey… 70% of change programs fail!  Research from 2006 Then again, McKinsey did similar research in 2013 after leading a whole host of change programs…. and nothing had changed

Figure 1. Change as three steps.

Kurt Lewin is widely considered the founding father of change management, with his unfreeze–change–refreeze  (see Figure 1 above) regarded as the ‘fundamental’ or ‘classic’ approach to, or classic ‘paradigm’ for, managing change (Robbins and Judge, 2009: 625; Sonenshein, 2010: 478; Waddell, 2007: 22).

Lewin’s Model has subsequently ‘dominated almost all western theories of change over the past fifty years’ (Michaels, 2001: 116). Academics claim that all theories of change are ‘reducible to this one idea of Kurt Lewin’s’ (Hendry, 1996: 624), and practitioners boast that ‘the most powerful tool in my toolbox is Kurt Lewin’s simple three-step change model’ (Levasseur, 2001: 71). See all the nice supporting material I’m referencing?

Regrettably, this foundation is wrong- Lewin never wrote about three steps of change; his followers created this three step model after his death.  Lewin did work on organisation change but his focus was on group dynamics rather than change leadership.

But his theory only rose to prominence in the 1980s when consultants and business schools were looking for a foundation story to the new science of “change management”.  Heres a diagram about how the “Theory of Change” came about;

Around 1980 a new phenomenon occurred: popularising of management theory… marketing was applied to academia.

Why? this change was fuelled by a growing group of US based managers who were anxious about their lack of academic support and made anxious by the rise of Japan’s business culture and the comparative decline of US industry. A growing managerial class wanting to be seen as “professionals” (e.g. professionally trained like Doctors and Lawyers) were eager for both the knowledge and academic kudos that would help them climb the ladders of promotion and they turned books like Theory Z (Ouchi, 1981), The Art of Japanese Management (Pascale and Athos, 1981) and In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982) into best-sellers.  To be honest i was one of these people as I read In Search of excellence in 1985 and turned from thinking about teaching to business.

At the same time, resource starved academic business schools became keen to reinvent themselves for busy executives seeking knowledge but without the time or inclination to do an extended MBA and so in response to time starved but cash rich executives simplified step method approaches grew in popularity.

The then current management theories of organisational development and change then sought out a “founding father” to show their long academic lineage and chose Kurt Lewin and his CATS… change as three steps- as both an ancient starting point and as a sufficiently simple theory to be taught in the morning set aside on week long courses for “change management”.

By the end of the 1980s, Lewin’s CATS: a seemingly obvious but academically proven and relevant theory to managers took root. Lewin’s supposed promotion of it as a tool for intervening to lead change would become the foundation of change management, and the academic origin story was created. The 80s and 90s saw Lewin celebrated as the classical approach to change .

Now where Lewin was MOST interesting about change was not the simple three step approach, but in hind sight it was his analysis that when considering implementing change the unit of analysis must be the group, not the individual (as psychology might direct us), nor the organization (as modern management studies is want to think) or nor wider society (as may be desire of the sociologist).

Over time, and reinforced by a series of McKinsey studies in the recent past linked to above, the focus for managing change has become more about the effective single manager as an individual agent of change who is responding to an increasing urgency for change in today’s society focussing on the individual worker with extrinsic motivation. Change that has been created by a eruptions in the underlying business environment, combatting the resistance of individuals workers, and using the established simple steps and frameworks to change the behaviour of individuals top down to overcome this useless resistance and embrace the extrinsic necessity for change.

This over-focus on the individual as both change-agent and as change-resister is a characteristic of much of modern change management and regrettably my previous teaching.

To take the idea of the group as the key unit of analysis first, we might begin by considering the ideas that follow from this. Lewin’s (1947a) desire in this respect that managing change is more effective if one communicates with and involves the networked group within an organisation rather than individuals.

Indeed, all of these things were born out in the one significant empirical study of corporate change that Lewin was involved in: the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation cited in Lewin’s 1947 Human Relations article which identified that the approach to change that met with most success involved all stakeholders work-shopping specific processes and alternatives before agreeing the way forward (Marrow et al., 1967).  But this is a complicated idea- and not the simple step-by-step focus on individuals unfreezing – changing – then refreezing.

The Textbooks that introduce Lewin’s big idea emphasise a manager’s power to control the change process. What was ignored? Lewin’s belief that group dynamics would drive and direct the course of a transformation more than any other force, and that before any decisions were made, there ought to be a free and open discussion about the change in the air with the people who would be affected by it.

I was introduced to this thinking by the recent works of kiwi’s Stephen Cummings and Todd Bridgman of Victoria University business school.

Their potentially better approach is of focussing on large groups or small networks to me seems to be better attuned to understanding the role of networks on the change process.  Additionally this support the latest research on the influence of super networkers within Organisations.  The recent work of Leandro Herrero  and Richard Lalleman  both emphasise the lack of influence of “Bosses” and the significant influence of a small number of networked “workers” and their influence in making things happen.

How incorrect theories of change are supposed to work are set out in red boxes below…

Here’s how this Viral Change seems to work is set out in the green boxes above… A relatively small number of individuals within any organisation have great power in the creation of change. This power is related to various factors such as high connectivity with others, high trust, or positive morals, and holding non-hierarchical authority.

The behaviours endorsed and spread by that small group of individuals within an organisation (‘activists’) create ‘social tipping points’ where those new behaviours become established as a norm. ‘Critical masses’ of individuals adopting those new behaviours are created via imitation and social copying in similar ways as trends or fashions are created in the macro-social arena. It’s a bottom up vial infection, not the top-down broadcasting of new ideas.

The role of the formal hierarchy, management and leadership, is to support those small groups of highly influential employees who ‘infect’ the organisation with the changes they have endorsed. Hierarchical managements role is therefore  largely back-staged or ‘invisible’ or should be.

And this links more closely with other theories of change such as the four rooms of change and the latest research.

More on this in the next post.