Lewin's Change Management Model
Lewin's model says lasting change happens in three stages: unfreeze the current way of doing things, make the change, then refreeze it as the new normal before it slides back.
Unfreeze sits on the left, Change in the middle, Refreeze on the right, one arrow carrying you through all three.
Reach for this when…
- You've announced a change and people are nodding along and doing nothing differently.
- A previous change effort quietly reverted within months.
- You're about to restructure and haven't built any case for why the old way has to go.
How to run it
- Unfreeze: show clearly why the current way no longer works.
- Build a coalition and reduce the fear of change before you start.
- Change: introduce the new process, structure, or behaviour.
- Support people through the disruption while it's still unfamiliar.
- Refreeze: reinforce the new behaviour until it's just how things are done.
A worked example
Situation. Yusuf Al-Balushi ran Muscat Connect, a customer-service outsourcing company in Muscat, Oman, where agents kept reverting to an old call script months after a new one was rolled out.
Applied. He realised the launch had skipped Unfreeze entirely, agents had never been shown why the old script was actually costing calls, so he ran a session with real call data before relaunching the new script with weekly coaching to Refreeze it.
Result. Adoption held past the point where previous changes had always slipped back, because the new script had displaced the old one instead of sitting alongside it.
The catch
The model assumes a fairly stable end state to refreeze into, which fits a single defined change better than a business changing continuously. It also says little about how to actually do the changing, the middle stage, beyond acknowledging it's disruptive.
If you skip straight to Change without doing Unfreeze, you haven't shortened the process, you've just guaranteed it reverts.
Origin: Kurt Lewin