Lewin’s change model is a three-stage framework for managing organizational change, developed by psychologist Kurt Lewin in 1947. It breaks any change process into three steps: unfreezing the current state, making the change, and refreezing new behaviors into place. The model’s core insight is that change isn’t an event but a process, and people need structured support to move from old habits to new ones.
Despite being nearly 80 years old, Lewin’s model remains one of the most widely taught frameworks in business, healthcare, and education. Its simplicity is its strength: it gives leaders a way to think about why people resist change and what to do about it.
Stage 1: Unfreezing
Unfreezing is about shaking loose the status quo. Before any change can happen, people need to understand why the current way of doing things is no longer working. This is the stage where leaders build a case for change, communicate a vision of the future, and help their team develop curiosity about what comes next.
The biggest challenge here is persuading people to leave their comfort zone. Lewin recognized that individuals and organizations naturally settle into patterns, and those patterns feel safe. If staff can understand the potential impact of a change, they’re more likely to engage with it. Without that understanding, resistance is almost guaranteed.
Practical unfreezing looks different depending on the context. In healthcare settings, for example, geriatric education centers preparing to improve falls prevention started by conducting needs assessments, sharing data with staff, and gaining stakeholder commitments before any training began. They also recruited respected staff members to serve as advocates for the project, building credibility before asking anyone to change their clinical routines.
The key question at this stage: do the people affected by this change understand both what’s wrong with the current approach and what the new approach looks like? If the answer is no, you’re not ready to move forward.
Stage 2: Changing (Movement)
Lewin called the second stage “transition,” and he saw it as the inner journey people make in reaction to a change. This is when new behaviors, processes, or structures are actually implemented. People are unfrozen and moving toward a new way of working, but that doesn’t mean they’re comfortable.
This stage is often the hardest. People feel unsure, even fearful. They’re learning new skills, adjusting to new expectations, and making mistakes along the way. Support during this period is critical, and it can take several forms: formal training, one-on-one coaching, or simply giving people permission to get things wrong as they learn. Role models help too. When people can see a colleague successfully adopting the new approach, it becomes easier to picture themselves doing the same.
Communication matters just as much during the change stage as it did during unfreezing. Leaders need to keep reinforcing a clear picture of what the change looks like in practice and why it’s worth the discomfort. Without that ongoing reminder, people lose sight of where they’re heading and drift back toward familiar habits.
Stage 3: Refreezing
Refreezing is about locking the new way of doing things into place. This step must happen after the change has been implemented, and if it doesn’t, the change will almost certainly be short-lived. People revert to old habits when new ones aren’t reinforced.
In practice, refreezing means integrating new behaviors into the organization’s culture, policies, and daily routines. A hospital that shifts to bedside handoff reporting, for instance, would make it a formal unit policy and hold all team members accountable for following it. Positive reinforcement plays a big role here: recognizing and rewarding people who effectively incorporate the change helps solidify it as the new normal.
Leaders can also strengthen refreezing by prioritizing reflection. Looking back on the change process, acknowledging what was difficult, and framing the experience in terms of growth rather than trauma builds stronger relationships and greater appreciation among the team. That emotional closure makes people more willing to engage with the next change when it comes.
Force Field Analysis: Lewin’s Companion Tool
Lewin also developed a tool called force field analysis that pairs naturally with his three-stage model. The idea is simple: at any given moment, two sets of forces are acting on a situation. Driving forces push toward change, and restraining forces resist it. When those forces are equal, nothing moves. For change to happen, driving forces must outweigh restraining forces.
Organizations can shift that balance in two ways: strengthen the driving forces or reduce the restraining ones. In many cases, reducing restraining forces is more effective because pushing harder on the driving side can create tension and backlash. A manager preparing for unfreezing might list all the factors working against the change (budget concerns, staff anxiety, unclear communication) and address them directly rather than simply amplifying the reasons the change is needed.
This analysis works as a diagnostic step before unfreezing begins. It forces leaders to move past assumptions and identify the specific barriers that will derail the process if left unaddressed.
How It Looks in Practice
Lewin’s model has been applied across industries, but healthcare offers some of the clearest examples because clinical settings combine high stakes with deep-rooted routines. In one well-documented case, geriatric education centers in Maine and Virginia used the model to improve falls prevention among older adults. The unfreezing phase involved needs assessments and recruiting respected staff to champion the project. The movement phase focused on training health professionals in evidence-based falls risk assessment, with formative evaluation built in so the program could be adjusted as problems surfaced. Refreezing meant embedding the new assessment protocols into standard clinical practice across hospital emergency departments and outpatient settings.
What made these cases instructive was the recognition that planning for the context of the change (how it affected the workplace culture, workflows, and team dynamics) was just as important as planning for the clinical outcomes themselves. The change didn’t succeed because the new practice was better on paper. It succeeded because the people implementing it were guided through each stage deliberately.
Where the Model Falls Short
The most common criticism of Lewin’s model is that it’s too linear. Real organizational change is messy. People don’t move neatly from unfreezing to changing to refreezing. They backslide, encounter unexpected obstacles, and sometimes need to revisit earlier stages while already deep into implementation.
The concept of refreezing also draws skepticism in fast-moving environments. In industries where change is constant (technology, startups, any organization navigating rapid digital transformation), the idea of stabilizing into a new equilibrium can feel outdated. Some critics argue that modern organizations need to stay permanently “unfrozen,” continuously adapting rather than settling into fixed patterns.
These are fair points, but they don’t make the model useless. Lewin’s framework was never meant to be a rigid procedure. It’s a way of thinking about the psychology of change: people need to let go of old patterns before they can adopt new ones, they need support during the transition, and new behaviors won’t stick without reinforcement. Those principles hold up regardless of how fast the change cycle moves. Most modern change management approaches, from Kotter’s eight-step model to the ADKAR framework, build on the same foundational logic Lewin laid out in 1947.