In Schein’s 1980 three stage planned change theory, he discusses unfreezing, “creating the motivation to change what was previously mentioned”, changing, “The actual changes in behaviors and attitudes to the new desired behaviors and attitudes”, and refreezing, “freezing the new behaviors into the standard behavior”. But why is this important to business, and us as leaders, leading the business? Planned change aims to prepare the entire organization, or a major part of it, to adapt to significant changes in the organization’s goals and direction (Rao, 2009). I would like to focus on the unfreezing part of this planned change theory, as sometimes it is very overlooked. As leaders, we need to be open to learning, even if it means unlearning something first.
When looking back at the Organizational Change definition, “adapting the group to meet changes in the environment” (PSU, 2020), we realize that change is inevitable, and our companies need to be adaptable and agile to move with new problems and challenges. Disturbance to businesses will always be around. There will always be something to create disruption and change, whether it’s a natural, technological or manmade disaster. When you are the business that is getting disrupted, it’s easy to fall ball back on what you know.
In her 2015 TedX Talk, Liz Wiseman talks about starting at Oracle and being put in charge of building Oracle University. She talks about being a total rookie, just a year out of business school, but always asked a lot of questions, even naïve simple questions, just to keep it simple and not over complicate the building process. After the success she had with the program, the company decided that they needed to bring in someone more experienced to run the program she had built, so they brought in an experienced manager who knew all the steps. But we must remember how Wiseman got to this point, she was adaptable, and changed with her environment, questioning everything so she could learn and grow. If she hadn’t been constantly learning and growing, what would have happened?
She and her team would have hit a wall, they would not have been able to move as quickly as they needed to get to their next point. Wiseman needed to unlearn (unfreeze), her usual way of working to be able to move quickly and be what she describes as “scrappy”. If she had just gone back to her original ways of not being agile, not slowing down to remember the small things, and not just asking the simple questions, do you think she would have gotten to answer the question she asks “what’s the most important thing for us to get right?”.
She goes on to state, “because I had no real agenda of my own, I sought guidance, I stayed close to my stakeholders, I needed their feedback. What my team and I lacked our experience we compensated for and our willingness to learn to think creatively, and to deliver quick wins.” When looking back at the definition of planned change, adapting the group to meet changes in the environment, Wiseman did just that, her team was agile, always taking feedback, always being creative, moving with the environment around them.
I’ll leave you with one final quote from Wiseman that stuck with me:
“When we’re experienced, we gain knowledge and confidence and credibility, but once we have seen a pattern, once we know that pattern, we can be blind to the other possibilities. We stop asking why, and we just do. We build up scar tissue and we learn to be afraid of going down certain paths, and we now have a reputation to protect, and so we don’t let ourselves make mistakes or fail essentially. We acquire a set of adult-onset learning disabilities, and once we stop learning. We stop having fun, and we stop finding success.”
When we’re experienced, we freeze patterns, going back to what’s comfortable, it’s been successful for us, but we have to get to the next level as leaders, we have to unfreeze. We have to change.
Living and working with child-like wonder. (2015). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN1V8Y_kOEI
Pennsylvania State University. (2020). Lesson 05: Planned Change. https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2041071/modules/items/27977845.
Rao, S. R. (2009, January 28). A Planned change is needed. Retrieved from https://www.citeman.com/4820-a-planned-change-is-needed.html.
Schein, E. H. (1980). Organizational psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
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