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Lewins Model of Organisational Change

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CHAPTER 2

Change Frameworks for Organizational Diagnosis
How to Change

Change is. —Anonymous

Chapter Overview
• The chapter differentiates between how to create organizational change, its process, and what should be changed, the content. Change leaders must understand both. • Lewin’s classic “Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze” model is discussed. • A modified version of Beckhard and Harris’s change management process is developed in depth. The model asks: (1) What is going on in the organization? (2) Why change? (3) What is the gap between the existing and desired states? (4) How do we close this gap? and (5) How do we manage during the transition phase? • These explicit models will help change leaders articulate their implicit models of how organizations work and how to change their organizations.

Sweeping demographic changes, technological advances, geopolitical shifts, and pressures to be more sensitive to our physical environment are combining with
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34——TOOLKIT FOR ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

concerns for security and organizational governance to generate significant pressure for organizational change. Awareness of the political, economic, sociological, and technological (PEST) aspects of any organization’s external environment forewarns us of the need to pay attention to such factors. Furthermore, it alerts managers to a need to have some means in place to attend to their organization’s relevant environmental contexts and to decide whether they need to take some action as a result. McDonald’s is one of many organizations scanning its environment and making decisions about changes to its products as a result of changes in its environment. Des Moines, Iowa—McDonald’s Corp. is working on an alternative for parents who wish their kids would lay off the

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