Three Metaphors of Change

When something is difficult to understand, people sometimes use a metaphor to help other people comprehend it.  The challenge is to get the metaphor right.

When it comes to change, I want to explore 3 metaphors.  The first comes from Kurt Lewin, a famous early researcher into organizational change.  Lewin came up with the metaphor of freezing and unfreezing – like you do with a block of ice.  Before the change, an organization is in a frozen state – rigid and practised in old behaviours that no longer work.  Rigid blocks of ice cannot move: they first need to thaw out and turn into a more flexible state – unfreezing.  Unfreezing is where the change takes place, when things move.  However, when change has occurred, you want to freeze again so the changes are preserved.  This is the final state of change – refreezing.

This metaphor is well known and still informs change management practice.  However, as a metaphor, I find it has two main limitations.  First is that ice and water have no say in what happens to them.  The model refers to a process that is ‘done to’ the organization, as though it were an experiment in physics.  Ice doesn’t complain or resist if you melt it, but organizations are made of people, and they do resist change.  You can’t ‘do to’ people like you can ‘do to’ ice.  The second limitation is that the metaphor assumes you can predict cause and effect.  Melt ice and you get water every time.  Freeze water and you always get ice.  But when you are dealing with people, things are not that predictable.  Who can predict what will happen when you destabilise something in an organization?

The second metaphor is that change is a journey.  You begin the journey, have challenges along the way and, if you persist, eventually you reach your destination.   The journey metaphor highlights the process and the vision of the future state.  In some ways, this is a satisfying metaphor, because change does feel like a journey at times.  It is also a much more human metaphor than the detached, scientific metaphor of Lewin.  But there is a problem with this metaphor.  When people go on a journey, they don’t usually return to where they began – unless they become lost, or they have a good reason to return.  Journeys are purposive ventures and the metaphor assumes onward progress; maybe struggling and slow progress, but ever onward and upward.  But in the real world, change isn’t like that.  With change, the ‘traveller’ is not always in control and he may (unwillingly) return to where he began – perhaps more than once.  There is unpredictability about change that doesn’t usually occur in journeys, and that unpredictability is a normal part of the process. 

The third metaphor is that change is a story – a book written.  This book has many authors: everyone who has a role to play in the change process is an author.  Change occurs as people write different parts of the story.  This metaphor assumes that change is constructed from the inside – that people within the organization (the multiple authors) change the organization from the inside. This is very different from the Lewin model, where change is ‘done to’ the organization from the outside. 

The story metaphor is powerful for two reasons.  First, because change does actually involve stories – stories leaders tell about the change, stories told in training sessions, informal stories told over a cup of coffee.  These stories do shape the change process – it is a dynamic process created and shaped by the kinds of stories told.  It is also powerful because the book is a work in progress and many authors (stakeholders) write the story: there is unpredictability about how the chapters will turn out.  This degree of uncertainty rings true about change.

Why does any of this matter?  Partly because how a consultant sees change influences how they approach it and work with it.  More specifically, it shapes how they work within an organization – do they come in as an expert who does things to make the organization change, or do they help the organization learn how to shape its own resources and stories from within?   The latter approach leads to empowerment, self-direction, and autonomy; the former can lead to dependence.  Be careful how you choose a change management consultant. 

Steve Barlow