Change Relating to Business

Today's business world is highly competitive. The way to survive is to reshape to the needs of a rapidly changing world. Resistance to change is a dead-end street for the individual and the organization. Customers are not only demanding excellent service, they are also demanding more. Organizations are reshaping themselves to change quickly in order to meet the needs of their customers. The organization's top leaders know they cannot throw money at every problem. They need highly committed and flexible workers.

A worker's first reaction to change is to resist it. People get comfortable performing tasks and processes a certain way. This comfort provides them with the security that they are the masters of their environment. They fear that change could disrupt their lives by making them look like a fool. The fear that they will not be able to adapt and learn and that their jobs will be harder making them lose a sense of control.

The unfreeze/refreeze model is one of the simplest models for understanding organizational or social change (Cummings). It was developed by Kurt Lewin, a physicist turned social scientist. Because of his professional background, he used physical science analogies to help explain social phenomenon (Cummings). His analogy deals with changing the shape of a block of ice. He describes a situation in which a man has the intention of making a round tire-shaped ring of ice with cherries in it to float in a big punch bowl. The man brings home a block of ice but it isn't the shape that he needs it to be so he has to figure out a way to reshape it so it fits in the bowl. Forcing the ice into the bowl will not help it to change so he has to come up with a different way of doing it. He decides to melt the ice in a pot on the stove. Although the ice is in a different state, it is still made up of the same components. He then takes a circular mold and pours the water into it. Then he adds the cherries and puts it into the freezer in order to refreeze it. After he refreezes it, he can take it out of the fridge and plop it into his punch bowl. He has successfully converted a cube of ice into a tire-shaped ring of ice with cherries around its circumference (story from Cummings).

The three stages he went through are unfreezing, change and refreezing. The same three stages can be used to describe any change in an organization, especially social changes. The problem is, in an organization, people often forget one of the three steps (Cummings). Typically, step one or step three is forgotten. Step two is completed and the change is made but it's never really successful because there are three stages to consider, not one.

Kurt Lewin theorized that these three stages, unfreezing, change, and refreezing are the stages to change.

Unfreezing deals with the fact that old ideals and processes must be tossed aside so that new ones may be learned (Marrow). Often, getting rid of the old processes is just as difficult as learning new ones due to the power of habits. Just as a teacher erases the old lessons off the chalkboard before beginning a new lesson, so must a leader help to clear out the old practices before beginning the new. During this part of the process, a person needs to provide just a little bit of coaching as they are unlearning and a lot of emotional support to break the old habits (Marrow). The first thing that must be done is to get the organization receptive to change, otherwise the organization will be like that block of ice. It will naturally resist change.

Feeding back people's opinions is one good way to begin the unfreezing process (Marrow). The survey feedback technique makes the organization aware that there are problems, that people are upset, that morale is low, or that work attitudes and performance are not what they ought to be (Marrow). That's a form of unfreezing. For an individual, receiving bad news from a doctor about a health issue that needs to be addressed could be an unfreezing motivator. In a company, a committee can be set up to investigate a problem in order to see if they can get enough data to unfreeze the organization (Kent). A consultant can be used to do the survey feedback also.

Unfreezing is often missed in training programs, particularly management training (Kent). People are simply sent to courses. They don't see any need to change and so unfreezing has not occurred. They are not receptive to learning. Someone else is simply telling them that they should change their ways and they don't see any need to do so. Part of the problem is that the person perceives the management training program as focusing on changing the individual himself (Kent). In the person's view, someone is telling him that he has been doing the job wrong and he has to change. Naturally there is resistance.

Sometimes, authority is the only motivator that can be used to get people to learn new skills (Kent). They may not see that there is a need to change, or to learn new skills. What's better is when the learning of these management skills isn't perceived to be a sign of past failure but rather the person sees it as an opportunity to learn new skills, to improve himself