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Kurt
Lewin's Change Theory in the Field and in the Classroom:
Notes Toward a Model of Managed Learning |
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Edgar
H. Schein / Professor of Management Emeritus MIT Sloan
School of Management
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Table of
Contents
Abstract
I.
"There is Nothing So Practical as a Good Theory:" Lewin's Change
Model Elaborated
-
- 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
-
- The
MIT One Semester Course on Managing Planned Change
-
- 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."
I. "There
is Nothing So Practical as a Good Theory:" Lewin's Change Model
Elaborated
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.
1. Disconfirmation
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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2. Induction
of Guilt or Survival Anxiety
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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3. Creation
of Psychological Safety or Overcoming of Learning Anxiety
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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4. Cognitive
Redefinition
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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5. Imitation
and Positive or Defensive Identification with a Role Model
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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6. Scanning:
Insight or Trial and Error Learning
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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7. Personal
and Relational Refreezing
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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II. "You
Cannot Understand a System Until You Try to Change It:" Process
Consultation and Clinical Research
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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III. Kurt
Lewin in The Classroom: Teaching the Management of Planned Change
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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1. The
MIT One Semester Course on Managing Planned Change
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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My Multiple
Roles
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 Conceptual
Core of the Course: Diagnosis as Initial Intervention and Process
Consultation as a Change Strategy.
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.
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Summary
and Conclusions
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."
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Footnotes
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]
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