Kurt
Lewin's Change Theory in the Field and in the Classroom:
Notes Toward a Model of Managed Learning (tratto
da qui)
|
[1]
Edgar H. Schein - Professor
of Management Emeritus MIT Sloan School of Management
Abstract
I. "There is Nothing So Practical as a Good Theory:"
Lewin's Change Model Elaborated
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- 1. Disconfirmation
2. Induction of Guilt or Survival Anxiety
3. Creation of Psychological Safety or Overcoming
of Learning Anxiety
4. Cognitive Redefinition
5. Imitation and Positive or Defensive Identification
with a Role Model
6. Scanning: Insight or Trial and Error Learning
7. Personal and Relational Refreezing
II. "You Cannot Understand a System Until You Try to
Change It:" Process Consultation and Clinical Research
III. Kurt Lewin in The Classroom: Teaching the Management
of Planned Change
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- The MIT One Semester Course on Managing Planned
Change
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- A. My Multiple Roles
-
- Teaching
Monitoring and Grading
Consulting and Coaching
Dialogue
The Empathy Walk
Project Reviews and Final Reports
B. The Conceptual Core of the Course: Diagnosis
as Initial Intervention and Process Consultation as a Change
Strategy
Summary and Conclusions
References
Footnotes
Few people have had as profound an impact on the
theory and practice of social and organizational psychology as Kurt
Lewin. Though I never knew him personally I was fortunate during
my graduate school years at Harvard's Social Relations Dept. in
1949-50 to have been exposed to Alex Bavelas and Douglas McGregor,
who, in my mind embodied Lewin's spirit totally. As I will try to
show in this essay, Lewin's spirit and the assumptions that lay
behind it are deeply embedded in my own work and that of many of
my colleagues who practice the art of "Organization Development."
This essay will attempt to spell out some of Lewin's basic dictums
and show their influence in my own and others' contemporary work.
[2] I will endeavor to show how my own thinking
has evolved from theorizing about "planned change" to thinking about
such processes more as "managed learning."
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The power of Lewin's theorizing lay not in a formal propositional
kind of theory but in his ability to build "models" of processes that
drew attention to the right kinds of variables that needed to be conceptualized
and observed. In my opinion, the most powerful of these was his model
of the change process in human systems. I found this model to be fundamentally
necessary in trying to explain various phenomena I had observed, and
I found that it lent itself very well to refinement and elaboration.
My own early work in clinical/social psychology dealt with the
attitude changes that had occurred in military and civilian prisoners
of the Chinese Communists during the Korean war (Schein, 1956,1961,1968).
1 found contemporary theories of attitude change to be trivial and
superficial when applied to some of the profound changes that the
prisoners had undergone, but I found Lewin's basic change model
of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing to be a theoretical foundation
upon which change theory could be built solidly. The key, of course,
was to see that human change, whether at the individual or group
level, was a profound psychological dynamic process that involved
painful unlearning without loss of ego identity and difficult relearning
as one cognitively attempted to restructure one's thoughts, perceptions,
feelings, and attitudes.
Unfreezing as a concept entered the change literature early to
highlight the observation that the stability of human behavior was
based on "quasi- stationary equilibria" supported by a large force
field of driving and restraining forces. For change to occur, this
force field had to be altered under complex psychological conditions
because, as was often noted, just adding a driving force toward
change often produced an immediate counterforce to maintain the
equilibrium. This observation led to the important insight that
the equilibrium could more easily be moved if one could remove restraining
forces since there were usually already driving forces in the system.
Unfortunately restraining forces were harder to get at because they
were often personal psychological defenses or group norms embedded
in the organizational or community culture.
The full ramifications of such restraining forces were only understood
after decades of frustrating encounters with resistance to change,
and only then did we begin to pay attention to the work of cognitive
psychologists on perceptual defenses, to what psychoanalysts and
the Tavistock group were trying to show us with their work on denial,
splitting and projection, and to Argyris's seminal work on defensive
routines (e.g. Argyris, 1990; Hirschhorn, 1988). In trying to explain
what happened to POWs I was led to the necessity to further "unpack"
the concept of unfreezing and to highlight what really goes on there.
Unfreezing is basically three processes, each of which has to be
present to some degree for readiness and motivation to change to
be generated.
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It is my belief that all forms of learning and change start
with some form of dissatisfaction or frustration generated by data
that disconfirm our expectations or hopes. Whether we are talking
about adaptation to some new environmental circumstances that thwart
the satisfaction of some need, or whether we are talking about genuinely
creative and generative learning of the kind Peter Senge focuses on,
some disequilibrium based on disconfirming information is a pre-requisite
(Senge, 1990). Disconfirmation, whatever its source, functions as
a primary driving force in the quasi-stationary equilibrium.
Disconfirming information is not enough, however, because we can
ignore the information, dismiss it as irrelevant, blame the undesired
outcome on others or fate, or, as is most common, simply deny its
validity. In order to become motivated to change, we must accept
the information and connect it to something we care about. The disconfirmation
must arouse what we can call "survival anxiety" or the feeling that
if we do not change we will fail to meet our needs or fail to achieve
some goals or ideals that we have set for ourselves ("survival guilt").
[3]
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In order to feel survival anxiety or guilt, we must accept the disconfirming
data as valid and relevant. What typically prevents us from doing
so, what causes us to react defensively, is a second kind of anxiety
which we can call "learning anxiety," or the feeling that if we allow
ourselves to enter a learning or change process, if we admit to ourselves
and others that something is wrong or imperfect, we will lose our
effectiveness, our self-esteem and maybe even our identity. Most humans
need to assume that they are doing their best at all times, and it
may be a real loss of face to accept and even "embrace" errors (Michael,
1973, 1993). Adapting poorly or failing to meet our creative potential
often looks more desirable than risking failure and loss of self-esteem
in the learning process. Learning anxiety is the fundamental restraining
force which can go up in direct proportion to the amount of disconfirmation,
leading to the maintenance of the equilibrium by defensive avoidance
of the disconfirming information. It is the dealing with learning
anxiety, then, that is the key to producing change, and Lewin understood
this better than anyone. His involving of workers on the pajama assembly
line, his helping the housewives groups to identify their fear of
being seen as less "good" in the community if they used the new proposed
meats and his helping them to evolve new norms, was a direct attempt
to deal with learning anxiety. This process can be conceptualized
in its own right as creating for the learner some degree of "psychological
safety."
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My basic argument is that unless sufficient psychological safety is
created, the disconfirming information will be denied or in other
ways defended against, no survival anxiety will be felt, and, consequently,
no change will take place. The key to effective change management,
then, becomes the ability to balance the amount of threat produced
by disconfirming data with enough psychological safety to allow the
change target to accept the information, feel the survival anxiety,
and become motivated to change.
The true artistry of change management lies in the various kinds
of tactics that change agents employ to create psychological safety.
For example, working in groups, creating parallel systems that allow
some relief from day to day work pressures, providing practice fields
in which errors are embraced rather than feared, providing positive
visions to encourage the learner, breaking the learning process
into manageable steps, providing on-line coaching and help all serve
the function of reducing learning anxiety and thus creating genuine
motivation to learn and change.
Unfortunately, motivation is not enough. A theory or model of change
must also explain the actual learning and change mechanisms, and
here Lewin's cognitive models were also very helpful in providing
a theoretical base.
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By what means does a motivated learner learn something new when we
are dealing with thought processes, feelings, values, and attitudes?
Fundamentally it is a process of "cognitive restructuring," which
has been labeled by many others as frame braking or reframing. It
occurs by taking in new information that has one or more of the following
impacts: 1 ) semantic redefinition--we learn that words can
mean something different from what we had assumed; 2) cognitive
broadening--we learn that a given concept can be much more broadly
interpreted than what we had assumed; and 3) new standards of judgment
or evaluation--we learn that the anchors we used for judgment
and comparison are not absolute, and if we use a different anchor
our scale of judgment shifts.
An example will make this clear. The concept of "teamwork" is today
highly touted in organizational circles, yet the evidence for effective
team work is at best minimal. The problem lies in the fact that
in the U.S., the cultural assumption that society revolves around
the individual and individual rights is so deeply embedded that
when teamwork is advocated we pay lipservice but basically do not
change our individualistic assumption. How then does change in this
area come about? First, we would need to re-define teamwork
as the coordination of individual activities for pragmatic
ends, not the subordination of the individual to the group. If we
define teamwork as individual subordination, as treating the group
to be more important than the individual, we arouse all the defenses
that lead to quips like camels being horses constructed by a committee,
negative images of "group think," lynch mobs, etc.
Second, the redefinition of teamwork also allows one to redefine
individualism in a way that preserves its primacy, not to "substitute"
groupism for individualism. This process of redefinition in effect
enlarges the concept of individualism to include the ability
and obligation to work with others when the task demands it. In
other words, helping a team to win is not inconsistent with individualism.
And, third, one can change the standards by which individual
performance is rewarded. Instead of rewarding "rugged individualism"
or the competitive winning out over others (which makes collaborative
behavior look "weak"), individuals can be increasingly rewarded
for their ability to create, lead, and participate in teams (which
makes collaborative behavior look "strong"). The best individual,
then, is the one who can be an effective team player. What Lewin
did with the housewives, was to help them to change their standard
of what was an acceptable meat, so that kidneys, liver, etc. became
cognitively redefined as acceptable to buy and serve. This process
is fundamental to any change if one wants it to last.
The new information that makes any or all of these processes possible
comes into us by one of two fundamental mechanisms--1 ) learning
through positive or defensive identification with some available
positive or negative role model, or 2) learning through a trial
and error process based on scanning the environment for new
concepts (Schein, 1968).
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Cognitive re-definition occurs when the learner has become unfrozen,
i.e. motivated to change, and has, therefore opened him or herself
up to new information. The next question to address, then. is how
the new information comes to the learner. The most basic mechanism
of acquiring new information that leads to cognitive restructuring
is to discover in a conversational process that the interpretation
that someone else puts on a concept is different from one's own. If
one is motivated to change, i.e. if the factors described above have
been operating, one may be able to "hear" or "see" something from
a new perspective.
The best examples come from what has colloquially been labeled
"brainwashing," where POWs who were judged "guilty" yet felt innocent,
finally were able to admit their guilt when they could identify
with their more advanced cell mates sufficiently to realize that
the concepts of "crime" and "guilt" were defined differently by
the Chinese communists. One was guilty because a crime was
defined as "any action that could be harmful to the
communists" even if no harm had occurred. A postcard to home, could
conceivably contain information that would help the enemy, so sending
the postcard was an act of espionage and the sender had to learn
to appreciate and confess his or her guilt. Being born into the
wrong social class was a crime because middle class attitudes could
be very harmful to the communist cause. Semantic redefinition, cognitive
broadening and changing standards of judgment were all present in
this process.
Only by recognizing this potential for harm, confessing one's guilt,
and acknowledging the incorrectness of one's social origins could
one hope to learn how to be a good communist or to be released from
jail. Once one had accepted the new cognitive frame of reference
and learned the new definitions and standards, one could make rapid
progress in re-education and remove the heavy disconfirming pressure.
The key to the whole process, however, was to identify psychologically
with other prisoners who had already made the cognitive shift and
learning to see the world through their eyes.
Readers who are familiar with socialization processes in families,
schools, companies, religious movements, and other organizational
settings will readily recognize this mechanism as the key to apprenticeships,
to "big brother" programs, to the concept of "mentoring" and to
the various more formal group based indoctrination programs that
organizations use. The mentor or big brother is often both a source
of psychological safety and the role model to facilitate cognitive
redefinition (Schein, 1968; Van Maanen & Schein, 1979)
Defensive identification is a rarer process that occurs when the
learner is a captive in a hostile environment in which the most
salient role models are the hostile captors, e.g. prison guards,
authoritarian bosses or teachers, etc. The process was first described
in relation to Nazi Concentration Camps where some prisoners took
on the values and beliefs of the guards and maltreated fellow prisoners.
In the face of severe survival anxiety, for some learners "identification
with the aggressor" was the only solution (Bettelheim, 1943). Genuine
new learning and change occurred, but, of course, in a direction
deemed undesirable by others. In considering such outcomes one is
reminded that unfreezing creates motivation to learn, but does not
necessarily control or predict the direction of learning. If the
only new information available is from salient and powerful role
models, learning will occur in that direction. One of the key elements
of a managed change process is, therefore, what kind of role models
one makes available to the learners once they are unfrozen.
If either no good role models are available, or one wants the learning
to be more genuinely creative one has to create the conditions for
what I call "Scanning."
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A learner or change target can be highly motivated to learn something,
yet have no role models nor initial feeling for where the answer or
solution might lie. The learner then searches or scans by reading,
traveling, talking to people, hiring consultants, entering therapy,
going back to school, etc. to expose him or herself to a variety of
new information that might reveal a solution to the problem. Alternatively,
when the learner finally feels psychologically safe, he or she may
experience spontaneously an insight that spells out the solution.
Change agents such as process consultants or non-directive therapists
count on such insights because of the assumption that the best and
most stable solution will be one that the learner has invented for
him or herself.
Once some cognitive redefinition has taken place, the new mental
categories are tested with new behavior which leads to a period
of trial and error and either reinforces the new categories or starts
a new cycle of disconfirmation and search. Note that in the process
of search, if role models are readily available, they will most
likely be used. Identification is thus an efficient and fast process,
but it may lead to solutions that do not stick because they do not
fit the learner's total personality. If one wants to avoid that,
one must create learning environments that do not display role models,
thereby forcing the learner to scan and invent his or her own solutions.
It is this dynamic, to rely on identification with a role model,
that explains why so many consultation processes go awry. The consultant,
by design or unwittingly, becomes a role model and generates solutions
and cognitive categories that do not really fit into the culture
of the client organization and will therefore only be adopted temporarily.
A similar result occurs when organizations attempt to check on their
own performance by "benchmarking," i.e. comparing themselves to
a reference group of organizations and attempting to identify "best
practices." The speed and simplicity of that process is offset by
two dangers. First, it may be that none of the organizations in
the reference set have scanned for a good solution so the whole
set continues to operate sub- optimally, or, second, that the identified
best practice works only in certain kinds of organizational cultures
and will fail in the particular organization that is trying to improve
itself. In other words, learners can attempt to learn things that
will not survive because they do not fit the personality or culture
of the learning system. For change to remain more stable it must
be "refrozen."
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The main point about refreezing is that new behavior must be to some
degree congruent with the rest of the behavior and personality of
the learner or it will simply set off new rounds of disconfirmation
that often lead to unlearning the very thing one has learned. The
classic case is the supervisory program that teaches individual supervisors
how to empower employees and then sends them back into an organization
where the culture supports only autocratic supervisory behavior. Or,
in Lewin's classic studies, the attempt to change eating habits by
using an educational program that teaches housewives how to use meats
such as liver and kidneys and then sends them back into a community
in which the norms are that only poor folks who can't afford good
meat would use such poor meat.
The implication for change programs are clear. For personal refreezing
to occur, it is best to avoid identification and encourage scanning
so that the learner will pick solutions that fit him or her. For
relational refreezing to occur, it is best to train the entire group
that holds the norms that support the old behavior. It is only when
housewives groups met and were encouraged to reveal their implicit
norms that change was possible by changing the norms themselves,
i.e. introducing collectively a new set of standards for judging
what was"ok" meat.
In summary, what I have tried to show above is that Lewin's basic
model of change leads to a whole range of insights and new concepts
that enrich change theory and make change dynamics more understandable
and manageable. It is a model upon which I have been able to build
further because its fundamental concepts were anchored in empirical
reality. Intellectual knowledge of the change process is not the
same as the know-how or skills that are learned in actually producing
change. In the next section I examine the implication of Lewin's
thinking for the practice of change management.
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The change and consulting literature is filled with the notion that
one first diagnoses a system and then intervenes to change it. I learned
early in my own consulting career that this basic model perpetuates
a fundamental error in thinking, an error that Lewin learned to avoid
in his own change projects and that led him to the seminal concept
of "action research." The conceptual error is to separate the notion
of diagnosis from the notion of intervention. That distinction
comes to us from scientific endeavors where a greater separation exists
between the researcher and the researched, particularly from medicine
where the physical processes are assumed to be somewhat independent
of the psychological processes (an assumption that is not even holding
up in many parts of medicine).
The classical model is that the doctor makes an examination, runs
certain tests, decides what is wrong, and writes a prescription
which includes recommendations for therapy or, if necessary, for
other interventions such as surgery. The consulting industry has
perpetuated this model by proposing as a major part of most projects
a diagnostic phase in which large numbers of interviews, questionnaires,
and observations are made the basis of a set of recommendations
given to the client. Consultants differ on whether they feel they
should also be accountable for the implementation of the recommendations,
but they tend to agree that there is a discrete billable period
in any project that is basically considered necessary--namely a
diagnosis of the problem--and that the consultant's basic job is
done with a set of recommendations "for future intervention." If
interviews or surveys are done, the attempt is made to be as scientifically
objective as possible in gathering the data and to interfere minimally
during this phase with the operation of the organization. What is
wrong with this picture?
If Lewin was correct that one cannot understand an organization
without trying to change it, how is it possible to make an adequate
diagnosis without intervening? So either consultants using the classical
model are getting an incorrect picture of the organization, or they
are intervening but are denying it by labeling it "just diagnosis."
Isn't a better initial model of work with organizations something
like the stress test that the cardiologist performs by putting the
heart under pressure to see how it will perform, even knowing that
there are some risks and that some people have been hurt during
the test itself? This risk forces the diagnostician to think about
the nature of the "diagnostic intervention" and to apply clinical
criteria for what is safe, rather than purely scientific criteria
of what would seemingly give the most definitive answer.
It is my contention that Lewin was correct and that we must all
approach our consulting work from a clinical perspective that starts
with the assumption that everything we do with a client system is
an intervention, and that, unless we intervene, we will not learn
what some of the essential dynamics of the system really are. If
we start from that assumption, we need to develop criteria that
balance the amount of information gained from an intervention with
the amount of risk to the client from making that intervention.
In other words, if the consultant is going to interview all the
members of top management, he or she must ask whether the amount
of information gained will be worth the risk of perturbing the system
by interviewing everybody, and, if the answer is "yes," must make
a further determination of what is to be learned from the reactions
of the management to being interviewed. That is, the interview process
itself will change the system and the nature of that change will
provide some of the most important data about how the system works,
i.e. will respondents be paranoid and mistrusting, open and helpful,
supportive of each other or hostile in their comments about each
other, cooperative or aloof, and so on. The best information about
the dynamics of the organization will be how the organization deals
with the consultant, because his or her very presence is de facto
an intervention.
Yet the focus in many traditional consultation models is on the
"objective data obtained in the interview" with nary a reference
to how the interviewer felt about the process and what could be
inferred from the way he or she was received. The irony in all of
this is that Lewin was by training a physicist and knew very well
the rules of scientific inquiry and objectivity. For him to have
discovered that human systems cannot be treated with that level
of objectivity is, therefore, an important insight that is all too
often ignored in our change and consultation literature.
In actual practice what most change agents have learned from their
own experience is that "diagnostic" activities such as observations,
interviews, and questionnaires are already powerful interventions
and that the process of learning about a system and changing that
system are, in fact, one and the same. This insight has many ramifications,
particularly for the ethics of research and consulting. Too many
researchers and consultants assume that they can "objectively" gather
data and arrive at a diagnosis without having already changed the
system. In fact, the very method of gathering data influences the
system and, therefore, must be considered carefully. For example,
asking someone in a questionnaire how they feel about their boss
gets the respondent thinking about an issue that he or she might
not have focused on previously and it might get them talking to
others about the question in a way that would create a common attitude
that was not there before.
The concept of process consultation as a mode of inquiry
grew out of my insight that to be helpful one had to learn enough
about the system to understand where it needed help and that this
required a period of very low key inquiry oriented diagnostic interventions
designed to have a minimal impact on the processes being inquired
about (Schein, 1969,1987,1988). Process consultation as a philosophy
acknowledges that the consultant is not an expert on anything but
how to be helpful, and starts with total ignorance of what is actually
going on in the client system. One of the skills, then, of process
consulting is to "access one's ignorance," to let go of the expert
or doctor role, and get attuned to the client system as much as
possible. Only when one has genuinely understood the problem and
what kind of help is needed, can one even begin to think about recommendations
and prescriptions, and even then it is likely that they will not
fit the client system's culture and will, therefore, not be refrozen
even if initially adopted. Instead, a better model of help is to
start out with the intention of creating in insider/outsider team
that is responsible for diagnostic interventions and all subsequent
interventions. When the consultant and the client have joint
ownership of the change process, both the validity of the diagnostic
interventions and the subsequent change interventions will be greatly
enhanced.
The flow of a change or managed learning process then is one of
continuous diagnosis as one is continuously intervening. The consultant
must become highly attuned to his or her own insights into what
is going on and his or her own impact on the client system. Stage
models which emphasize up front contracting do not deal adequately
with the reality that the psychological contract is a constantly
evolving one and that the degree to which it needs to be formalized
depends very much on the culture of the organization.
In summary, Lewin's concept of action research is absolutely fundamental
to any model of working with human systems, and such action research
must be viewed from a clinical perspective as a set of interventions
that must be guided primarily by their presumed impact on the client
system. The immediate implication of this is that in training consultants
and change agents one should put much more emphasis on the clinical
criteria of how different interventions will affect client systems
than on the canons of how to gather scientifically valid information.
Graduate students should be sent into field internships as participant
observers and helpers before they are taught all the canons of how
to gather and analyze data. Both are necessary, but the order of
priority is backward in most training programs.
What can be done to enhance an understanding of these models and
to begin to build the necessary skills to implement them? We turn
next to an experimental course that attempts to teach "the management
of planned change."
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The idea for a "planned change workshop" goes back to the mid 1960's
when Richard Beckhard and I designed a program on "planned change"
for the National Training Labs. The essence of our program was that
participants should be involved in real projects which could be of
one or two years duration, and that the time spent together should
be devoted initially to learning diagnostic intervention tools and
models and, thereafter, to reporting progress to each other. That
program started with a one week workshop and was followed by quarterly
meetings of three days duration. Participants were organized into
teams geographically and were expected to meet regularly with each
other to share problems and progress.
What Beckhard and I learned from this program is 1) to learn about
managing change one must be involved in a real project, and 2) one
of the most powerful sources of motivation to work through all the
frustrations involved in managing change is to have to report regularly
on progress to "team mates" and to the faculty. All of the participants
noted during and after the program how important it had been to
give quarterly progress reports, to have a chance at those times
to rediagnose, to recalibrate their own situation and to share war
stories and frustrations with others who were in the same boat.
Criteria for choosing the initial project were 1 ) something that
the workshop participant was personally involved in and cared about;
2) something that would make a real contribution to the organization
from which the participant came; and 3) something that was realistic
in terms of being doable in the time allocated to the workshop,
i.e. one or two years. We considered the workshop a success and
felt we had learned what the essential components of such a learning
experience had to be. But it was not until two decades later that
I found a way to implement my own learning in the more traditional
classroom environment.
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In 1987 I decided to experiment with a version of the Beckhard/Schein
model in the regular Masters curriculum of the MIT Sloan School. I
offered a mini-course that ran for 10 weeks, three hours per week.
Eventually it was expanded to a full 14 week long semester elective
course for full academic credit. Enrollment in the first three years
averaged around 25 students, but in the last year or so it caught
on so I ended up in 1994 with three sections of 30 to 35 students
each.
In the first session I emphasized that the core of the course was
not the class time or reading, but two actual change projects--one
personal and one focused on an organization and carried out by a
group. The personal project asked each student to pick some
personal change goal that he or she wanted to work on for the next
14 weeks. The first week's paper had to spell out the goals and
the method that would be used to achieve them, including some system
for appraising progress week by week. Each week a one page progress
report had to be handed in to me detailing outcomes and any reactions
or thoughts about the change process. These reports were private
between me and each student and provided me an opportunity to react
and coach, typically by asking questions and making suggestions.
Reading 100 one page papers was time consuming but very engaging
because each student was wrestling with real and personally meaningful
issues--stopping smoking, losing weight, overcoming shyness, learning
to talk more in large classes, improving relationship with spouse
or a child, increasing reading speed, developing a more healthy
balanced life style, overcoming chronic lateness, and so on.
The group projects were to be realistic efforts to make
an organizational change somewhere in the MIT environment. At the
opening session I collected data from the class on possible organizational
change projects they might wish to undertake in small teams.
Given that the project had to be completed in 14 weeks, we focused
on organizations to which students had access already, which meant
de facto that most of the projects were located in and around the
MIT Sloan School.
We started with a brainstorming session on all kinds of things
that could and/or should be changed around the school, followed
by a joint critical analysis of what was feasible and worthwhile.
My role in this was to provide a "sanity" or "reality" check on
the ideas that were brought up. When we had a list of feasible projects
we duplicated it and then, in the second class session, did a straw
vote to see how many people were interested in which, to reduce
the number down to roughly one-fourth the size of the class so that
each team could consist of four or five students. Final choice of
projects and signing on to the teams was the last step, usually
accomplished by the third or fourth class session.
In the end I only required that each team had at least two people
and no more than seven or eight. It was essential that each student
picked a project that he or she was genuinely motivated to complete.
This process stood in sharp contrast to what most other classes
were offering as projects where students selected from pre-arranged
topics, sites, or problems instead of having to wrestle with what
they would personally actually commit themselves to. Lewin's insight
about the importance of involving the learner were not lost here.
Once the teams were formed, they met weekly during and after the
class sessions and were required to submit a weekly progress report
on specific goals selected, diagnostic thinking about the project,
action steps taken, and results. Sample projects that were undertaken
were to revise the particular curriculum of a key course on strategy
to make it more international, to resurrect the European Club and
to improve its process of helping students find jobs in Europe,
to improve the responsiveness of the career development office,
to reduce the bureaucracy of the MIT housing office, to fix a leak
in the bridge between two buildings that had been left alone for
the past three years, to develop a student lounge, to redesign the
form on which students gave feedback to faculty on their teaching,
to increase the interaction between first and second year masters
students, to increase the range of food offerings in the local student
cafeteria, to create a lecture series that would expose students
to some of the more prominent faculty at MIT, and so on.
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I served as the animator, teacher, monitor, coach and consultant.
In the initial three hour session I provided the structure, the tasks,
the rules, and the challenge. The bulk of the time in class was devoted
to explaining how things would work, convincing the class that these
projects were for real and that at our last session we would all share
what was actually accomplished. Students were so overtrained to be
passive that animating them to get involved was, in fact, the first
challenge. The most important element of that process was to convince
students that I meant it--that they actually had to choose their own
projects and commit to them.
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Teaching. Starting with the second
class I played a teacher role in providing various diagnostic models
for the students to use in analyzing their individual and team projects.
I suggested a number of books and asked people to read as much as
possible early in the 14 week period since all of the diagnostic
material was relevant up front. At the same time I gave weekly reading
assignments to focus us on relevant materials during the first half
of the semester. Diagnostic models such as the Beckhard/Harris change
map, force field analysis, role network analyses, and the Lewin/Schein
stages of change were presented in the early weeks and rediscussed
at later sessions so that the groups would have all of the tools
available early on but could revisit them as they became more relevant.
A major chunk of time was devoted initially to the concept of process
consultation because the change teams would have to operate without
formal position power. I argued that their best chance of forming
into effective teams vis-s-vis each other and their change targets,
was to define themselves initially as internal process consultants
who would have to develop some kind of access and a constructive
relationship with their selected change targets. I also pointed
out that this way of defining planned change was virtually synonymous
with how one might define the process of management itself, except
that one did not have formal position power. In this context I also
reminded students that most managers report that having position
power is not enough to make planned change happen.
Part of each class during the remainder of the course was devoted
to short lectures on whatever seemed relevant at the time, war stories
from my own experience, war stories that students told from their
experience, and dealing with student questions on their projects.
In dealing with questions I shifted my role increasingly to being
a process consultant to the class and to the projects to highlight
the importance of this role.
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Monitoring and Grading. The monitoring
role was most salient in how I dealt with the papers. For example,
if a paper stated a goal of losing 30 pounds by the end of the semester,
I might ask whether or not that was realistic, how much weight loss
that would mean per week or per day, and how the person would monitor
his or her own progress. If the goal was to overcome shyness I might
ask the person to translate that into something concrete and measurable
such as how many new contacts were made per week at parties, etc.
I gave relatively few hints or suggestions unless the person specifically
requested that kind of help, but concentrated on "process" monitoring:
"How will you measure your progress toward your goal?" "Have you
thought about how you will know at the end of the week whether you
have made any progress?" "What will this mean for your daily behavior?"
etc. Suggestions were always couched as questions: "Have you done
a force field analysis relative to your change target?" "Who are
the people in your role set and how will they react?" "Have you
thought of involving your spouse in your project?" etc. If the logic
of what was in the paper did not hold up I would question it or
point out inconsistencies or lack of realism.
I made it clear at the outset that I expected everyone to do all
the work, attend all of the classes, submit all of the papers, and
that would result in a grade of A for every student. The only way
to get a poor grade would be to shirk on the work or to put in obviously
substandard papers. If students were absent or did not hand in papers
two weeks running, I put notes in their boxes reminding them of
their commitment. My goal was to create a climate where everyone
would learn to the maximum of their own potential and would, therefore,
merit the grade of A. I did not require that every project had to
meet its change targets, but I did require that every project maximize
its own learning.
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Consulting and Coaching. These roles
came up most often when I was asked questions about "what to do
if....," usually in relationship to some "impossible" situation
that the class member had experienced. Implicit in these questions
was the assumption that since I was an expert on change I would
be able to advise anyone on anything having to do with change. It
is on these occasions that I found myself having to subtly shift
my role to that of process consultant by asking inquiry types of
questions to learn more about the reason for the question, the context,
and what the questioner had already thought of. Sometimes I discussed
the process directly by noting that the question was putting me
into an expert role that I was not prepared to fulfill.
If team members asked me what do in relation to some aspect of
their specific project, I attempted to get them to think it out
with my help rather than giving them an "expert" answer. Or I would
provide a number of alternatives instead of a single solution if
it was clear that I had to provide some level of expertise. The
best way to get this across was to think of myself as a "coach"
who would help with the projects but could not do the actual work.
The best setting for coaching was when one group was asked to consult
to another group, an activity that I started midway into the course.
Sometimes I would role play the consultant before asking class members
to do it, but the best learning actually arose when groups consulted
with each other. Inevitably the consultants would make ineffective
comments, or ask confrontive questions, or in some other way create
a tense rather than a helping relationship. Once this happened I
had two choices. I could let the interaction run its course and
then get a reconstruction. A more effective intervention was to
jump in immediately when something happened that seemed not to be
optimally effective and provide an alternative or actually "role
model" the alternative. This was direct coaching and was deemed
by class members to be the situation in which they learned the most.
In these settings I became the "process expert" because we were
working on real situations in which I did indeed have more experience.
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Dialogue. During the last two years
I changed the structure of the class sessions by arranging us all
in a circle, introducing the concept of dialogue, and starting each
class with a "check-in" which involved asking each student in turn
to say something about "where you are at right now" at the beginning
of each class (Bohm, 1989; Isaacs, 1993; Schein, 1993). Though this
was at times cumbersome because it took quite a while for 30 people
to check in, the ritual itself became very meaningful and important
to the class. The circle format and the dialogue assumptions made
each session much more interactive and comfortable. It allowed me
from time to time to also ask for a check out by going around the
room near the end of class to see where people were at. If we were
short of time we used a truncated version of check in by asking
each person just to say two or three words such as "anxious but
motivated," "tired and sleepy," "comfortable and eager," "distracted"
and so on.
The Check-ln guaranteed that everyone would have a voice without
having to raise their hand or figure out how to get in, a process
that was especially important for the foreign students with language
problems. One could see week by week how they become more comfortable
during the check in and how this generalized to comfort in the remainder
of the class session. Check-ln also revealed the class mood, things
that were going on in the students' lives that were a distraction,
fatigue levels and other factors that enabled us all to start class
work on a more "realistic" level. It reinforced the dictums I had
espoused--"always deal with the reality as you find it" and "go
with the flow."
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The Empathy Walk. At roughly eight
to nine weeks into the semester I asked each class to form itself
into pairs and to do the following exercise developed by Richard
Walton and me at a workshop in the 1960's:
1 ) Talk with your partner to identify someone in the greater Boston
area whom the two of you consider to be most different from
the two of you. This will require you to think about how you are
similar and along what dimensions someone would be really different.
2) Locate someone who fits your definition of someone most different
and establish a relationship with that person so that you can
spend a few hours getting into that person's world.
3) Be prepared to report back to the class what you learned.
We typically devoted one whole class session to the "war stories"
students brought back and pulled out insights about the process
of developing empathy. In addition each student wrote up their individual
experience in the weekly paper that week.
Post class feedback consistently confirms that this is one of the
most potent exercises of the semester because it forces confrontation
of self and others at multiple levels. I assigned readings from
Erving Goffman (1959, 1967) during these weeks to provide some conceptual
handles. The ingenuity and cleverness of students that this exercise
releases is dramatic. Students have found and built relationships
with homeless people, street musicians, prostitutes, go-go dancers,
trappist monks, convicted murderers, blind people, dying aids patients!
successful celebrities, fishermen, hare krishnas, and so on. They
discover, among other things, that the difference between them and
their target is often less that their difference from each other.
They realize how insulated their lives are from many real world
problems, and how narrow their own perspectives are. They come face
to face with social status and the dilemmas of having a privileged
position in society, usually in the form of anxiety and guilt when
they contemplate how one approaches a homeless person without "talking
down to them." The discovery that some of these people have had
or still have rich lives comes as a shock. In every case it opens
the student up to becoming more inquiring and more sensitive to
others, an essential step in becoming a successful change agent
or manager.
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Project Reviews and Final Reports.
Toward the latter third of the course I began a series of project
reviews by inviting any groups that wanted some help to present
their issues and have other groups or individual students be consultants.
After a half hour or so of the group and their helpers operating
in a fish bowl I would open it up to the floor to get other comments.
As unhelpful comments were made such as unsolicited advice or even
punishment for mistakes that the group was perceived to have made,
I would intervene in a coaching mode to examine what was happening.
As pointed out above, these turned out to be some of the most salient
learning experiences.
During the last two class sessions, usually accompanied by cookies
and drinks, each group reported its final outcomes, salient points
about their process, and the major things they had learned from
doing the project. It was at this point that many students revealed
the importance of doing both a personal and group change project
because their struggles with themselves in the personal project
gave them real insights into the problems of resistance to change
in the group projects. Different groups reported different kinds
of learning but a common theme that ran through all of them was
the importance of making a commitment to the change, having an audience
in the form of faculty and fellow team members, and having weekly
reports that forced constant planning and replanning, and provided
opportunities to get feedback.
The real payoff to the students is to discover that they can actually
produce changes that have an impact. To see the Sloan School adopt
a new faculty feedback form, to see actual changes in the student
cafeteria menu offerings, to be thanked by the MIT Housing Office
for improving the system of dealing with applicants, to create a
new physical space and student lounge, to create events that increase
the interaction between faculty and students and have those events
become regular annual events, and, most importantly, to hear the
Dean's office make reference to future student projects as a positive
force for change is the best feedback possible. My own assessment
is that student teams well training in planned change methods can
accomplish more than powerful committees of faculty and administrators
who do not understand how change can and should be managed. Finally,
what surprises us all most is that change can happen fairly rapidly.
Fourteen weeks is enough to make fairly substantial changes happen.
But the conceptual core must be the right one.
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The most important and most difficult concept to get across early
in the course is that diagnosis is intervention and, in fact, that
everything that involves the target system in any way is intervention.
The discovery by students that diagnosis is intervention is paradoxical.
In order to figure out what we need to change and discover where there
is already some motivation to change that we can link with, we have
to find out things about the present state of the system that we cannot
know without inquiring. In order to gather such information we have
talk to people in the system and ask them questions or conduct surveys.
What is especially important to discover is where there is already
motivation to change, where there is already survival anxiety that
can be harnessed, because for many kinds of projects, students are
not likely to be able to disconfirm or induce survival anxiety or
guilt. On the other hand, if the change project involves organizational
structures where the students are the recipients, they can often marshal
potent disconfirming data and induce considerable survival anxiety.
The mental model at this stage that they are "just gathering preliminary
diagnostic data" overlooks that the very people whom they have involved
in the question asking may later be the prime targets whom they
are ultimately trying to change. And, by asking those people various
kinds of questions, they have 1 ) influenced their thinking by raising
certain issues; 2) created an image in their minds of our own style
and approach; and 3) created a degree of awareness and self- consciousness
(possibly even defensiveness) because the targets now know that
"there is a game afoot" and they are in some unknown way part of
it.
Furthermore, as change agents, students often assume that they
must remain fairly private about just exactly what they are trying
to do, so they ask very broad inquiry type of questions, never once
considering that the very vagueness of their questions may produce
tension and anxiety in the interviewee precisely because he or she
does not know what the change agents are after. How then do we gather
the data necessary to determine what the present state of the system
is without creating anxiety, misrepresenting ourselves, and unduly
influencing the interviewee prematurely?
The answer lies in working from several assumptions that underlie
process consultation (Schein, 1987,1988) and what has more recently
been called appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987;
Shani & Pitman, 1991). From process consultation one derives
the assumption that one must always work in the present reality
and must understand the ebb and flow of that reality moment to moment,
shifting roles as necessary. If a student is going to gather data
from a faculty member, the student must understand that there are
already strong role expectations on both sides and one must work
initially within that set of expectations. For example, some amount
of deference is expected and must initially be honored. The faculty
member would expect to be asked questions that draw on his or her
field of expertise and the student would be expected to listen politely.
On the other hand if the student knows that the faculty member
knows that the student is part of a team that has been set up to
redesign portions of the curriculum, the student can assume that
the faculty member would be curious, possibly anxious, and would
prefer to find out first from the student what this was all about
before revealing his or her own information. In that case the student
might open the discussion by volunteering a description of the project
in terms that are informative and minimally threatening.
Alternatively, the faculty interviewee might seize the initiative
and ask a bunch of questions about the project. In those preliminary
questions, the student would have to assess how much anxiety is
present and vary his or her tactics accordingly. It is in the design
of those tactics where "appreciative inquiry" plays a role. One
of the core assumptions of appreciative inquiry is to focus initially
on what is working well and avoid criticism or problem foci. The
interview might well start with what the faculty member is most
proud of or what works best in the curriculum. If the interviewer
focuses on success and what works well, he or she is creating psychological
safety that will make it easier for both parties later in the interview
to discuss problem areas, difficulties, things that need improvement.
The prime data that the interviewer needs and wants is where the
faculty member sees problems or has motivation to change, but the
initial assumption has to be that he or she will not be ready to
talk about problems until they feel safe with the interviewer, and
they will only feel safe if the interviewer displays appreciation
of what works well.
As the interview or interaction proceeds, the change agent must
be constantly alert for changes in mood or feeling on the part of
the interviewee, being especially sensitive to issues that may be
threatening to the interviewee leading to a shutting down of the
flow of information. It is in that ongoing interaction that the
tactical use of inquiry questions, diagnostic questions, action
oriented questions, and confrontive questions comes into play (Schein,
1987, p. 1 46).
The goal should be to create an interaction that will provide information
to the change agent, begin to build trust with the potential change
target, and begin to get the change target to think diagnostically
and positively about the change project such that he or she will
welcome another interview or interaction because their curiosity
or their own energy for change has been aroused. In a sense the
concept of "change target" has to become transformed in the change
agent's mind into a "client" who seeks some help or into a "learner."
The change agent has to become a facilitator of the learning process
and the desired change has to be embedded in a "helping process"
that makes sense to the learner.
In thinking this way we have come full circle once again to Lewin's
original concept of involving the change target in the change process,
but I have tried to elaborate and deepen our understanding of the
issues involved in making that happen, especially when the change
agent operates from a position of low status and minimal formal
power.
[Back to Table of Contents]
As I reflect on the material in this essay I am struck once again
by the depth of Lewin's insight and the seminal nature of his concepts
and methods. I have only reflected on some aspects of Lewin's theory,
but even those few aspects have deeply enriched our understanding
of how change happens and what role change agents can and must play
if they are to be successful. Lewin probably saw such issues more
clearly because he was able to view U.S. culture from a European perspective.
Important changes inevitably involve deep cultural and sub-cultural
assumptions. The ability to perceive and appreciate the meaning of
such tacit cultural assumptions is enhanced by working across several
cultures. If we want to enrich our understanding of these dynamics
further, we also should become cross- cultural learners, to expose
ourselves to different cultures and begin to reflect on what it means
to try to change cultural assumptions. We may then discover why "change"
is better defined as "learning," why cultures change through enlarging
and broadening not through destruction of elements, and why the involvement
of the learner is so crucial to any kind of planned change or, as
we might better conceptualize it-- "managed learning."
[Back to Table of Contents]
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1. Invited paper for a special issue of Systems Practice
edited by Susan Wheelan, March, 1995. [Back]
2. I have deliberately avoided giving specific references
to Lewin's work because it is his basic philosophy and concepts
that have influenced me, and these run through all of his work as
well as the work of so many others who have founded to field of
group dynamics and organization development.[Back]
3. I am indebted to Colleen Lannon Kim tor these terms.
I had originally used Anxiety 1 and Anxiety 2 (Schein, 1993). She
helpfully put some useful labels on them.[Back]
[Back to Table of Contents]
