Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Behind Lewin's Three-Step-Change Model - Coggle Diagram
Behind Lewin's Three-Step-Change Model
CATS is regarded as the fundamental approach to change management. CATS became dominant in most western theories of change & provided solid basis for the development of change management.
Some scholars regard ‘refreezing’ as inappropriate in today’s complex nature of business that requires flexibility and adaptation. Others feel that it is a re-packaging of Taylor’s concept of scientific management. On the other hand, some academics defended Lewin by claiming that his work is one-sided and partial which represents just a quarter of his canon and must be understood in concert with other ‘three pillars’.
Cummings et al. believe that this foundation was not what Lewin actually wrote and more to do with others’ repackaging and marketing. What we know of CATS now is a reconstruction of the original model.
The Formation and form of CATS
A modal of the change process: Unfreezing the old behaviour; moving to a new level of behaviour; and refreezing the behaviour at the new level.
Genealogical Formation
Ronald Lippitt calls Lewin’s ‘Three phases’ model as the basis for his seven-phase model.
CATS as an intervention tool, calling the steps 'phases of influence'.
As significant as the transposition from freezing to refreezing, Schein switched out of Lewin’s ‘moving’ for ‘changing’.
In the publications ‘The mechanisms of change’, Schein creates tables that list his development of Lewin’s idea with more clarity.
CATS becomes a basis for a seven-stage ‘Model of attitude change’ and a seven-stage approach to process consulting.
By 1965, CATS was described as ‘what Lewin described as the stages of change’。
By 1985, CATS was described as ‘Lewinian change theory’。
By 1992, ‘CATS described as the fundamentals underlying any change in a human system’
But, Lewin’s model (CATS) is too instrumental, too simplistic, and mechanistic for the complexities of the modern world.
Archaeological form
The conditions of possibility of that version of CATS fit with particular problems, viewpoints, and values that framed the development of management knowledge in the 1980s.
1. American industry and management consultancies seek to compete differently.
Around 1980 a new phenomenon occurred: pop management.
The rise of Japan’s business culture and the comparative decline of the US industry. An enlarged managerial class, eager for the knowledge that would help them climb the ladders of the new knowledge economy.
McKinsey & co moved to head off its rapidly growing competitor Boston Consulting Group by developing saleable knowledge through linking up with academics such as Tony Athos at Harvard Business School.
McKinsey’s approach demonstrated the potential of academics and consultants to develop memorable and applicable ‘truths’ for managers seemingly backed by ‘university quality’ research.
2. Growing associations of business academics concerned to 'be relevant'.
Schein, in a Sloan Management Review article reviewing Theory Z and The Art of Japanese Management noted that ‘neither book refers to the growing literature, that their arguments were supported by a ‘meagre database’ and their ‘quick fix’…. Prescriptions were ‘glib’, ‘superficial’ and ‘naïve’.
The academy began to fear its own irrelevancy in the eyes of the growing audience of managers wanting actionable knowledge.
In 1985, a special Academy of Management symposium devoted to organizational change was organized.
Its publicity materials noted that executives were wrestling with the challenge of keeping organizations competitive and that ‘an examination of what these executives and their organizations were doing would probably reveal that.
In fact, many of the things being tried were consistent with research and theory in organizational behaviour’ .
Knowledge needed to be presented in an attractive scientific-looking package.
• Many of the best-known and best-selling management textbooks of today were first published in the late 1970s and early 1980s
• later editions took on a new appearance in the 1980s
• translations of knowledge into diagrams were supported by changes in publishing technology
• excellent tools for making teaching to increasingly large groups of management students
• Most respondents agreed that schools have gone too far with quantitative methods & modelling, felt it was time to return to the teaching of more practical skills and techniques
• To date, research on organizational development has been largely empirical, and scholars have not attempted to create a model’.
A space created by the decline of organizational development
• perceived ‘gap’ encouraged the emergence of ‘a rival, more business-oriented approach referred to as change management
• typically adopted the role of ‘facilitator’ or ‘process consultant’ – roles that were divorced from strategy, technology and operations
• criticized OD for being preoccupied with humanistic and democratic values
A worthy academic provenance is required.
• Lewin’s supposed promotion of it as a tool for intervening to lead change, would become the foundation of change management,
• By the end of the 1980s, Lewin’s CATS: seemingly natural, but academically proven and relevant to managers
The counter-historical approaches of Michel Foucault and exploring the career of an idea
Counter conventional histories that presented a ‘progress of consciousness’
Highlighted the role of psychology’s history in presenting:
psychology as at once building on noble foundations (Socrates, Aristotle)
innovating to bring forth a new ‘happy age in which madness
was at last recognized and treated in accordance with a truth to which we had long remained blind’.
What sustains their belief in what Foucault subsequently take to be as advances in knowledge built upon these foundations?
A power network ‘of relations, constantly in tension, in activity’ (Foucault, 1977a: 26). These networks grow as texts and surrounding discourse educates initiate by reduplicating and re-interpreting events and assumptions taken to be important. These identified origins become ‘the site of truth that makes possible a field of knowledge whose function is to recover it’ (Foucault, 1977b: 144).
Foucault defined his overarching counter-historical aim as raising doubt about what was promoted as the truth of the foundation and evolution of objects in order to ‘free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently’ (Foucault, 1985: 9; also Foucault, 1977b: 154; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983: 120).
Initiates to the sub-field of change management
A progress of consciousness that begins with CATS as a key foundation, the first and now ‘classic’ theory, and culminates in the current ‘state of the art’.
Their counter-history aims to ‘unfreeze’ CATS, to show how it takes form and develops into something far more than its author ever intended:
They examine how its author moves from a minor figure
They follow the formation of the elements after Lewin’s death that would influence their view of CATS as a foundational model for the problematization of change that spiked in the 1980s.
Then they explore the episteme particular to the 1980s that made possible the form of a new truth of CATS that they see today.
Beyond this, they analyse the reduplication, continued formation and hardening of the historical view of CATS and its author beyond the 1980s.
2 approaches for developing such counter-histories by Foucault
Archaeology
studied the effects of episteme, an archaeological strata or: ‘world-view[s] which imposes norms and postulates, a general stage of reason [and] a certain structure of thought’ (Foucault, 1976: 191) on the development of knowledge objects; the ‘conditions of possibility' for acceptable knowledge at particular times (Foucault, 1970: xxii).
Genealogy
traced the networks of relations that procreated knowledge’s formation over time. The archaeological side of IA ‘deals with the system’s enveloping discourse. The genealogical side of analysis, by way of contrast, deals with series of effective formation of discourse (Foucault, in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 105; see also Foucault, 1985: 12).
Dubious Assumptions
Referencing Lewin’s work is unusually lax, without making any references to his work.
There is no empirical evidence provided and no graphical illustration given of CATS.
The idea is not well-integrated with other elements.
An edited book by Newcomd and Hartley gives a little more prominence to CATS, labelling it as a ‘Three-Step Procedure’ and attempting to link it to some empirical evidence. However, this evidence seems completely disconnected from CATS.
Lewin may not have had the chance to fully revise the paper or that elements might have been finished by the editors.
There is also no other origin for CATS in the archives of various institutes.
Recovering New Frontiers
Lewin outlines many frontiers in the 1947 paper from which CATS is developed, but the two to which he devotes the most space, and which interconnect to most of the other frontiers he wrote about, are the first and the last in the article.
Last Article: A call for advances in mathematics and statistics - that would enable multiple variables relating to individuals and groups to be analysed as a system - to enable the other frontiers he has outlined to be reached.
First Article: when studying change the unit of analysis must be the group, not the individual, the organization or wider society.
Another approach that might have fascinated Lewin is optimization, which relies on computing power to isolate the values of variables within a pre-determined equation
that maximize a desired outcome
CATS has taken on a life or career of its own and passing on an unthinking acceptance of it as a fundamental basis of thinking about change management may conceal and unwittingly repress other possibilities.
Genealogical formation 2
Robbins and Wren are part of a wider self-reinforcing network, and this is what makes it difficult to see behind this formation and think otherwise.
Conventional and critical textbooks, history books and articles relate and reinforce the current accepted form of ‘Lewin’s CATS’
CATS - It has become a vehicle by which, as Whitley (1984) describes, an academic field seeks to promote, paradoxically, innovations that follow collectively agreed fundamental concepts.
The enveloping episteme that helped form CATS, - the heritage helps to inspire, directly and perhaps subconsciously too, other ‘n-step guides for change’ often crossing back over into other sub-fields or popular themes of the day.
One can trace an interesting spiral of influence and inference in the work of Kotter in particular.
CATS has become far more fundamental and instrumental than Lewin ever intended it to be.
By revealing that CATS is contingent (its perceived contribution depends on the prevailing power–knowledge relations), - understanding that the field is built on questionable foundations, - may free things up and encourage thinking differently about change management’s past and liberate substantial innovation in the present.