Planned Change

Why Kurt Lewin's Social Science is Still Best Practice for Business Results, Change Management, and Human Progress

Gilmore Crosby

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

"Gil Crosby has accomplished what most of us in the world of applied behavioral science, in general, and OD and T-Group training, in particular, have not—making the theoretical father of our work accessible. Thus, this book is a gift and with it we can understand more deeply and teach others more accurately what Lewin actually stated and meant. Moreover, the book is reader-friendly, visually appealing, and humorous rather than academically boring. Thank you, Gil!"

Dr. W. Warner Burke

E.L. Thorndike Professor of Psychology and Education

Teachers College, Columbia University

Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) was a visionary psychologist and social scientist who used rigorous research methods to establish an approach to planned change that is both practical and reliable. He mentored and inspired most of the early professionals who came to identify themselves as practitioners of organization development (OD). He also fostered the emergence of the experiential learning method known as the T-group, which uniquely structures group dynamics into a laboratory for dramatic individual and team development. In the early days, most OD professionals learned much about themselves and about group dynamics through T-group experiences.

Lewin's methods, though little known, yield consistent business results such as increased performance and improved morale. His approaches have the rare impact of not just changing behavior, but changing the beliefs that underlie behavior. Sadly, most OD professionals today— business and organizational leaders, community organizers, and people, in general—have never read any of Lewin's actual writing beyond a quote or two. Indeed, some in the OD profession have rejected or distanced themselves from what they think Lewin taught, even though they and many others seem to know very little about his methods or history. Because Lewin was a prolific writer, one of the author's main goals is to organize his immense body of published work so that readers can easily explore the source material and form their own opinions.

Essentially, this book is aimed at introducing Lewin in a new way, both simplified yet substantial enough to guide anyone who is trying to plan change, whether at the individual, group/team, organizational, or societal levels. Lewin was not trying to create methods for OD professionals alone (or for social scientists as he regarded himself). In his interventions, he taught those how to do their own version of planned change. He believed social science might be the light that helps create a brighter future for humanity. This text transfers this knowledge to a broad audience so that each reader can more successfully implement organizational and social change.

Section III
Methods and Theories

Cover for Lewin’s second book, version 2

Chapter 4
A Universal Theory of Social Science

Physicists have long sought a universal theory that explains all phenomena, whether relatively small or large. Lewin set the bar no lower for the social sciences. He was determined to establish a universal theory of social science that could be used to understand and effect change at the individual, group, and societal level. While acknowledging that small individual behaviors could not be predicted, such as which pair of pants I might chose tomorrow morning, Lewin believed that the majority of beliefs and behaviors could be reliably understood, influenced, and even predicted in the context of the system they are in. As Lewin put it, “One of the most striking features of this development (the transition from Aristotelian to Galilean concepts) is that the opposition between universal concept and individual event is overcome. Law and single occurrence enter into intimate relationship… Thereby the representation of single cases gains new scientific meaning. It has a direct bearing on the determination of general laws (Lewin, 1936, p21).”

I believe I can and will demonstrate that Lewin achieved his goal of establishing social science theory and methods that can be applied universally to understanding and influencing human behavior. To the extent that he was thwarted in any portion of his quest, it would be in his vision of complementing his theories with a system for representing social phenomena in mathematical and topographical terms. That remains an unfinished task, perhaps unachievable, but that does not detract from the quality of his theories and methods.

His success in establishing a theory that covers both “universal concept and individual event” is a blessing both to my professional career and to humanity. Unfortunately, it also makes the task of organizing his writing into discreet topics more difficult and somewhat arbitrary. For example, some of Lewin’s best planned change writing came in his 1943 essays on the impending cultural reconstruction of Germany. Is it political analysis? Is it about group dynamics? Social change? Organization development (OD)? The answer is all of the above, because as he intended, Lewin’s core theoretical thinking applied to everything related to human behavior, both large and small, general and singular.

I realize that I lived much of my life without reading some of his best writing. This was in part because I never thought to look under some of his article headings. What for example, one might think at first glance, has The Special Case of Germany got to do with my work as an OD practitioner? Much to my pleasant surprise, it turns out, when you start to take in the sub-headings such as 1) General Aspects of Culture Change, and 2) Techniques of Changing Culture, this and most of his writing is relevant to everything OD. This realization was an important part of my motivation to weave his words together in this text.

Along with his belief that a universal theoretical approach could be devised, Lewin believed that advancement in the social sciences is critical to averting the destructive power of technology and securing a better future for humanity.

As he put it in the beginning of one of his last essays, Frontiers in Group Dynamics (Lewin, 1947, 1997, p301):

One of the by-products of the second World War of which society is hardly aware is the new stage of development which the social sciences have reached. This development indeed may prove to be as revolutionary as the atom bomb. Applying cultural anthropology to modern rather than “primitive” cultures, experimentation with groups inside and outside the laboratory, the measurement of socio-psychological aspects of large social bodies, the combination of economic, cultural, and psychological fact-finding—all of these developments started before the war. But, by providing unprecedented facilities and by demanding realistic and workable solutions to scientific problems, the war has accelerated greatly the change of social sciences to a new developmental level.

The scientific aspects of this development center around three objectives:

1. Integrating social sciences.

2. Moving from the description of social bodies to dynamic problems of changing group life.

3. Developing new instruments and techniques of social research.

Theoretical progress has hardly kept pace with the development of techniques. It is, however, as true for the social as for the physical and biological sciences that without adequate conceptual development, science cannot proceed beyond a certain stage… The theoretical development will have to proceed rather rapidly if social science is to reach that level of practical usefulness which society needs for winning the race against the destructive capacities set free by man’s use of the natural sciences (as illustrated in Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1
Mushroom cloud

With a sense of urgency, Lewin brought us a long long way quickly. It may be easy to take systems thinking for granted these days. On the other hand, if you blame most problems on individual abilities, personalities, or groups, you are still stuck in pre-systemic thinking. As Rensis Likert explains, Lewin opened the door to changing that:

“One of the clearest and simplest formulations of Kurt Lewin was his distinction between the scientific concepts of Aristotle and Galileo. In dynamics Aristotle emphasized the ‘nature’ of the object: he held that a stone fell to the ground because it was ‘earth’ and had therefore to go towards the earth. Galileo, on the other hand, made physicists pay more attention to the object’s relation to its environment. According to Aristotelian thought the environment played a part by ‘disturbing’ the processes which followed from the nature of the object concerned; but in Galileian thought it is the concrete whole, which comprises the object and the situation, that determines the dynamics of the event defined: that is to say, an object is always in and part of its environment - an obvious notion, but one with far-reaching implications if taken literally and always applied (Likert, 1947, p3).”

Figure 4.2
Galileo Galilei

This is no small shift in perspective. As Lewin puts it, “… the transition from Aristotelian to Galilean concepts demands that we no longer seek the ‘cause’ of events in the nature of a single object, but in the relationship between an object and its surroundings. It is not thought then that the environment of the individual serves merely to facilitate or inhibit tendencies which are established once for all in the nature of the person. One can hope to understand the forces that govern behavior only if one includes in the representation the whole psychological situation (Lewin, 1936, p26).”

Systems Thinking: The Object and Its Surroundings

Or to put it another way, in systems thinking what is happening in the “object” is a window into “its surroundings” and vice versa. The part reflects the whole, influences the whole, and is influenced by the whole. To change the object (an individual, a group, a location) one must understand, address, and change enough of the system to influence the object and sustain the change. Or, as family systems thinker Edwin Friedman might put it, the object of focus is the symptom bearer or “identified patient” in which the system’s “stress or pathology has surfaced” and if you treat it in isolation “fundamental change is not likely (Friedman, 1985, p19).”

Lewin constantly bridged the gap between theories and disciplines, and my orientation is to do the same. A prime example is how clearly Lewin’s concepts blend with Friedman and his mentor Murray Bowen’s family systems theory. The synergy between Bowen’s theories and Lewin’s is striking. Both took a highly inter-disciplinary approach, both applied biological concepts such as differentiation, physics concepts such as field theory, psychological concepts such as the effect of tension on individuals and groups, and homeostasis (from physics and biology). Bowen (and his protégé Friedman) are the next biggest influences after Lewin on my version of OD (with John Wallen, Daniel Goleman, and Daryl Conner close behind).

I suspect Bowen (1913–1990) was influenced by Lewin, but I have found no evidence yet in the form of citations in Bowen or Friedman’s materials. However, besides the parallels in their theoretical material, Bowen was at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, from 1946 to 1954, where Lewin had been a guest lecturer, and he formulated his major theories during the 1950s when Lewin’s influence in psychology circles was strong. The similarities make it so that Bowen and Friedman, as well as others, can easily be applied to and enrich Lewinian theory. I trust Lewin would agree, especially perhaps about the usefulness of The Interpersonal Gap by John Wallen (Appendix A), which wasn’t formulated until years after Lewin’s death. I will occasionally point out such theoretical synergies throughout this text.

Field Theory: The Life Space

In Lewin’s mind, one could best operationalize systems thinking and better understand the relationship between the object and its surroundings by thinking in terms of fields. The current moment, or “life space” of the individual, includes the field of the real and imagined past as it is relevant in the moment, as well as the field of goals and aspirations towards the future. “According to field theory, behavior depends neither on the past nor on the future but on the present field. (This present field has a certain time-depth. It includes the ‘psychological past,’ ‘psychological present,’ and ‘psychological future’ which constitute one of the dimensions of the life space existing at a given time.) (Lewin, 1945, 1997, p189).”

It also includes the relevant fields of the individual’s primary groupings, which could be as small as a one on one relationship, a family, a work group, and as large as an ethnic group, one’s gender, a nation, or even the human race. Behavior in the moment is related to and a reflection of these social fields, although not everything is relevant at any given time, nor can all behaviors be predicted. As Lewin put it, “Although the whole life situation always has some influence on the behavior, the extent to which one must take it explicitly into account… is very different in different cases. A person who is trying to decide whether or not to get married, whether or not to go into a certain business, whether or not to begin a lawsuit against an influential opponent, will in general act in accord with his whole life situation.

Only happy-go-lucky, superficial, or childish persons act out of a narrow momentary situation in important questions of life. On the other hand whether a man who is taking a walk goes along the right or the left side of the road will be decided by a much less inclusive momentary situation. It is easy to observe how the structured part of the life space becomes wider or narrower under the influence of a new event (Lewin, 1936, p43).”

The object and its surroundings, the general law and the specific instance, the past and future; all important elements of Lewin’s universal social science. All elements of the life space of individuals and groups at any given point in time. “… the psychological field which exists at a given time contains also the views of that individual about his future and past. The individual sees not only his present situation; he has certain expectations, wishes, fears, daydreams for his future. His views about his own past and that of the rest of the physical and social world are often incorrect but nevertheless constitute, in his life space, the ‘reality-level’ of the past. In addition, a wish-level in regard to the past can frequently be observed. The discrepancy between the structure of this wish—or irreality —level of the psychological past and the reality—level plays an important role in the phenomenon of guilt. The structure of the psychological future is closely related, for instance, to hope and planning (Lewin, 1943, 1997, p207).”

Socially Constructed Reality

The subjective and socially constructed nature of personal reality (or irreality) is also a vital concept in Lewin’s methods. Boldly reaching across disciplines, anthropology provided much of the research that grounded Lewin’s belief that culture and values were social constructs and as such could be altered and were best altered through social (group) process. We are products of the cultural field that we are born into. “Cultural anthropology has emphasized recently that any constancy of culture is based on the fact that children are growing into that culture. They are indoctrinated and habituated in childhood in a way that keeps their habits strong enough for the rest of their lives (Lewin, 1943, 1997, p290).” As he put it later in Conduct, Knowledge, and Acceptance of New Values, “… what exists as reality for the individual is, to a high degree, determined by what is socially accepted as reality. This holds even in the field of physical fact: to the South Sea Islander the world may be flat; to the European it is round. Reality therefore is not an absolute. It differs with the group to which the individual belongs…the general acceptance of a fact or a belief might be the very cause preventing this belief ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I Lewinian Principles of Planned Change
• Section II A Brief Biography
• Section III Methods and Theories
• Section IV Planned Change Now
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index