Change Selection
01
Please choose a question
LEWIN’S FORCE FIELD ANALYSIS
Kurt Lewin
Force Field Analysis is a mixture of Gestalt and behaviourism. It is a way of
seeing how a problem is affected by the wider world around it, (the field), and
how the problem affects the wider world.
Consider everything
The environment influences behaviour and behaviour influences the
environment. Nothing is independent, so everything should be considered.
Driving and Resistant Forces
Everything acts as a force on change. Some thing act as driving forces pushing
movement towards change, while other things acts as resistors and get in the
way. The thing that gets in the way most of all is fear of learning how to do things
differently.
Look at the field
Lewin believed that by representing the change diagrammatically and giving
each influence a score, places are able to measure up which things are important
or which things are not important at all. The intervention in the system then
becomes not; what do we need to add, but instead becomes, what do we need to
take away?
The method
– Name the proposed change in the centre
– List on the left hand side the positive drivers
– List on the right hand side the resistors
– Give each element a score between one and ten, with one being a weak
influence and ten the most powerful. Numbers can be used more than
once.
Force Field Analysis
John Atkinson of the Phillips Kay Partnership, and co-author of ‘The Art of Change Making’, talks about Lewins Force Field Analysis at the ‘Systems Leadership Steering Group: 3 years on’ event in December 2015.