Kurt Lewin is famous for inventing the “Change As Three Steps” model of organizational change. In this model, the organizational leader:
Prepares the organization for the change that they want to undertake by working out a vision and strategy;
Makes the change happen through communication, training, incentives, and punishments;
And finally stabilizes the organization in its new way of working.
The imagery used is that of basic physics - the organization is solid ice that is warmed up to be remoulded before being frozen again.
Of course, Kurt Lewin no more invented this model than Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson invented General Relativity - as this article outlines in detail.
Regardless of its progenitor, this model has proved persistent as an underpinning of organizational change efforts over the last 40 years. It positions the managerial change agent as being in control of the change process and the organization as being stable yet malleable.
We have a solid. We have a liquid. What’s missing from this? Well, a gas, obviously.
And I think most organizations are far more like gases than they are like solids. In solids, the bonds between molecules are strong enough to hold them in place. As more energy enters the material (i.e. as it gets hotter), the molecules vibrate more and the bonds loosen up, forming a liquid. Finally, when enough energy enters the system, the bonds break and the molecules start flying about: as a gas.
Trying to work out the location of any individual molecule in a gas is a fool’s errand. You have to understand them as a statistical population. The ideal gas law* outlines the relationship between temperature, volume, and pressure for a gas. You don’t manage a gas trying to control every molecule, you change one characteristic by changing another.
The people in our organizations are less tightly bonded together than we think they are. We fly around and collide with each other in a mostly harmless manner. Notoriously our work expands to fill the time available in much the same way that a gas expands to fill the space available.
Those of us who wish to change these systems need to focus on the broader context of temperature, space, and pressure more than trying to control each individual participant. Our organizations evade our grasp just as the air slips between our fingers.
As leaders, we must monitor the energy, pressure and volume of the groups that we work with. Too much or too little of each of these things is bad. And all three are interconnected. If we try to manage our systems using only one form of measurement, then we court disaster.
Now of course, this metaphor has limits. The molecules in gas are not sentient. And leaders do not stand outside the systems they wish to change despite what they (and their consultants) tell themselves.
But here (unlike other social situations) gas is good.
Take a deep breath.
*My ideal gas is probably some concoction of vaporized rosewater and pork chops.
N.B. This emerged from a conversation with Johnnie Moore.
I love the idea. I find more processes are chaos a require disciplined structure to stabilize. We use the term frozen as resistant to change. And our gas molecules are as resistance as an ice molecule and just as ossified.