Abstract
Although Kurt Lewin is a key figure in the history of organizational behavior, only a few scholars or practitioners can explain why he earned this status. In order to shine light on this dissonance, we elaborate on the reasons why Lewin’s ideas are seldom discussed in today’s curricula (e.g., Lewin’s work is difficult to pin down due to his interdisciplinary interest as well as his convoluted writing style). To highlight the enduring applicability of Lewin’s approaches, we link his ideas (e.g., psychological satiation) with more recent concepts, like burnout. To support the continuing relevance of Lewin’s work, we outline how his ideas can inspire current epistemology by discussing his distinction between Aristotelian and Galilean thinking and his quest to find unexpected observations to generate new knowledge. Furthermore, as Lewin is regarded as the “practical theorist,” revisiting his work will show how theoretical concepts can influence organizational practices. Specifically, we discuss how Lewin’s ideas can improve design thinking, which is a modern team-based approach to generate innovations.
By the time of his death, Lewin was regarded as one of the most outstanding psychologists (Tolman, 1948). Nonetheless, albeit often cited, Lewin’s influence decreased over time. Even worse, Lewin became such a mythic figure that many authors refer to Lewin without really following his thinking, thereby often causing misconceptions about his ideas (Billig, 2015; Colucci & Colombo, 2018). This led to Burnes and Bargal (2015) raising the question whether Lewin is rather a “totemic figure much referred to, but little understood or used” (p. 354). Lewin’s metamorphosis from an impactful psychologist to a totemic figure results in two questions that recur throughout this article: (a) why are Lewin’s ideas so rarely recognized and applied today and (b) what would be the purpose or use of refocusing on Lewin’s ideas?
There are different angles for answering the first question (why were Lewin’s ideas forgotten?). For instance, there is the possibility that Lewin was “all over the place”: developmental, experimental, and industrial/organizational psychologists regard him as an important figure, making it difficult to grasp Lewin’s profile. Furthermore, he worked with a wide range of collaborators who, after his death, went their separate ways, with each group of collaborators focusing on a distinct area of Lewin’s work, but none really looking at Lewin’s overall and integrated approach (Burnes, 2020). Taking another angle, we also focus on the context factors, such as that Lewin’s ideas were too modern to become recognized and canonized by the time they were developed.
We begin answering the second question (why refocus on the work of Kurt Lewin?) with a brief synopsis of his life and work. This should help to demystify Lewin and embed his ideas into their historical context. On many occasions, Lewin already identified concepts (e.g., psychological satiation) that align with modern constructs (e.g., burnout). Subsequently, we describe what scholars and practitioners could gain from rediscovering the ideas of Lewin the “practical theorist,” as Marrow (1969) called him. For a theoretical avenue, we elaborate on his epistemological cornerstone, which is to overcome the Aristotelian way of thinking in psychology in favor of a Galilean reasoning (Lewin, 1931). Furthermore, we highlight how Lewin’s search for new and unexpected findings was his basis for generating new psychological constructs, a reasoning nowadays called abductive inquiry (Tateo, 2013).
The second facet of our answer regarding the benefits of reviving Lewin’s ideas focuses on organizational practices. As Lewin’s work had a tremendous impact on the emergence of organization development (OD), we outline how his ideas and intellectual contributions can still advance this field. OD is the systematic endeavor to enhance an organization’s effectiveness and problem-solving capacities in order to adapt to environmental demands (T. G. Cummings & Worley, 2015). Although OD has much to offer for today’s organizations that operate in a complex world, it seems as if OD is losing its sense of self-belief (Burnes & Cooke, 2012; Marshak, 2005). To counteract this development, we review how Lewin’s ideas might help OD to regain its sense of relevance. Specifically, we focus on design thinking, a team-based approach to generate user-centered solutions that is increasingly being used for OD (e.g., Elsbach & Stigliani, 2018). However, several barriers exist that prevent the integration of design thinking into organizational routines (Micheli et al., 2019). Thus, this article closes with suggestions as to how Lewin’s ideas could help to overcome existing barriers for using design thinking as a means to improve OD.
Why are Lewin’s ideas missing from today’s curricula?
Lewin was regarded by his immediate successors as an inspirational source and his work was formative for the emergence of modern psychology. However, today Lewin is frequently cited, but rarely do authors and practitioners explain how their work relates to his ideas (Colucci & Colombo, 2018). This has caused severe misconceptions about Lewin’s ideas and concepts (Burnes, 2020). In the following, we focus on possible reasons why Lewin’s ideas became forgotten: the first two reasons deal with Lewin’s broad research interests and complex way of writing, making it difficult to pin down his core ideas. Afterwards, we focus on the fact that Lewin’s ideas were too modern to become canonized during his lifetime.
Lewin’s work is difficult to pin down
Usually, you can relate great psychologists to “their” great ideas: for instance, Ajzen and Fishbein to the theory of reasoned action/theory of planned behavior, or Maslow to his hierarchy of human needs (Ajzen, 1991; Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010; Maslow, 1943). However, what are the concepts one would associate with Kurt Lewin?
Some might say “his” field theory. Yet, field theory is not Lewin’s invention, but was developed by physicists. In the early 20th century, field theories were in vogue and used by many scientific disciplines. Further, Lewin emphasized that the term “theory” in field theory should not be understood in the usual sense. Rather field theory “is probably best characterized as a method: namely, a method of analyzing causal relations and of building scientific constructs” (Lewin, 1943, p. 294; see also Burnes & Cooke, 2013).
Scholars and practitioners in the field of organizational behavior would probably name his three-step model of change (“unfreeze-move-freeze”). Yet, Lewin (1947a) only introduced this terminology shortly before he died. This has led some to consider it a departure from his past work (see S. Cummings et al., 2017). However, as Burnes (2020) points out, this is merely a relabeling (using simpler terms) of the work he had been developing since the 1920s and, as such, it can be considered a major contribution to the understanding of behavioral change.
Educational psychologists, on the other hand, would cite his contribution as an innovative researcher who was among the first to use film material to showcase the concepts he was studying (van Elteren, 1992). They might also refer to Lewin’s first Cornell study that described how mothers fed their children and how nurses fed orphans (Zimbardo, 2016). Psychologists with a clinical background might refer to his work on treating alcohol misuse (Lewin & Grabbe, 1945), solving marital conflicts (Lewin, 1948a), or his impact on group therapy by influencing the work of Wilfred Bion (Torres, 2013).
It might be that the broad scope of his interests led to a fragmentation and lack of understanding of his ideas after his death in 1947. Take, for instance, Lewin’s work on group dynamics. After Lewin’s death, the Research Center for Group Dynamics was moved from MIT to Michigan. Here, the training group (T-Group) movement was steered in a direction that was “psychoanalytic or Rogerian and less sociological or Lewinian” (Highhouse, 2002, p. 281). This even resulted in Lewin’s successors issuing a “death certificate” for action research (Colucci & Colombo, 2018, p. 25), although it still offers much potential to improve organizations (Bleijenbergh et al., 2021).
This psychoanalytic perspective and neglect of action research might have intensified the OD crises that started in the late 1960s. Around this time, the effectiveness of T-Groups to contribute towards organizational effectiveness was questioned (Burnes, 2020). In the following years, this conflict was exacerbated as OD, resting on democratic-humanist ideals, did not meet managers’ needs. As French and Bell (1995) observe, from the 1980s onwards, there has been a growing tendency for top managers to focus less on people-orientated values and more on “the bottom line and/or the price of stock . . . [consequently] some executives have a ‘slash and burn’ mentality” (p. 351). Thus, change management, as a way to “manage change” by focusing on realigning structures and procedures, became the dominant consulting approach (Marshak, 2005).
Another reason why Lewin’s ideas lost momentum might be due to his demanding writing style. In his articles, Lewin seldom distinguished between theory development and practical applications. During Lewin’s time, this shifting between theory and practice was common. However, constantly switching between theory building, offering a systematic observation, and sketching an experimental design does not sit well with today’s more structured writing style and reading habits.
Furthermore, Lewin aimed to establish a new language for turning psychology into an established science. For this purpose, he often borrowed terms from other disciplines (e.g., the term feedback from engineering), created new metaphors (e.g., life space) or even a whole mathematical discipline (hodology, i.e., how to determine whether individuals approach or avoid goals) to establish psychology as a science on the level of biology and physics. Taken together, reading Lewin made it necessary to learn a new language and, as Lewin (1934) himself noted, a lot of concentration. Most scholars—especially from the United States, where Lewin’s Gestaltist ideas were alien to the dominant behaviorism—avoided this extra effort. 1 Hence, Lewin’s ideas have never been a core part of the behavioral science canon (Marrow, 1969). This also led to some of Lewin’s core concepts, such as his three-step model of change and his approach to resistance to change, being criticized without due consideration or understanding of their underlying theoretical and empirical basis (Burnes, 2015, 2020).
Lewin’s thinking was too innovative for his contemporaries
In many cases, Lewin’s ideas were way ahead of their time. For instance, the insight that “command and control” are not effective leadership behaviors to operate in a complex environment is common sense today. It was, however, certainly a disturbing suggestion in the 1930s (Burnes, 2009). Even decades later, the suggestion of Lewin’s former colleague Douglas McGregor (1960) that understanding employees as motivated to do their best for an organization when given the resources (Theory Y), instead of considering them as inherently lazy (Theory X), met skepticism from many of his contemporaries.
It is also worth speculating whether Lewin’s left-wing positions “tainted” his ideas and made organizational leaders turn to consultants and experts in business administration instead of psychologists. For instance, in his early Berlin years, Kurt Lewin fostered the emancipation of workers against an inhumane Taylorism (Lewin, 1920). Lewin was also interested in how applied psychology might help to socialize society by focusing not only on production but also on the workers’ welfare. For this purpose, Lewin collaborated closely with the Marxist Karl Korsch (Lewin & Korsch, 1939).
It might be this association with left-wingers that made decision-makers hesitant to pick up Lewin’s ideas, as Marxists and communists were ostracized in post-WWII United States. In comparison, Elton Mayo and his colleagues who founded the Human Relations movement were seen as more in tune with the needs of managers rather than of organized labor (Bruce & Nyland, 2011). Supported by conservative business leaders like John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Human Relations School strove to maintain managers’ authority at the workplace. Although we might be more liberal today, the 1950s and 60s were a critical time in which management knowledge was canonized and the effect of having overlooked Lewin then still has an impact on today’s curricula (S. Cummings et al., 2017). This might explain why we read about Hawthorne in introductory management textbooks but not about Harwood.
Though Lewin died unexpectedly and at a relatively early age in 1947, he left behind a large body of work, a wide range of collaborators, and a reputation as one of the leading psychologists of his day (Burnes & Cooke, 2012). However, after his death, his collaborators went their separate ways and tended to focus on different aspects of Lewin’s work, thus undermining and obscuring the coherence of his approach to change. This is probably why Lewin is often depicted as a mythic figure whose work is not well understood or widely discussed (Billig, 2015). The next section summarizes Lewin’s main ideas by integrating them into his biography and historical context.
Lewin’s ideas then and now
Lewin’s motivation to resolve social conflict arose from his personal experience as a Jew growing up in Germany, as a soldier in WWI, the break-up of the Weimar Republic, and the religious and racial intolerance, both in Germany and the United States (Burnes, 2004). These experiences drove Lewin to not only want to understand human behavior, but also to change it for the better.
Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) was born into a Jewish family. In 1910, he began his studies of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Lewin was influenced by the thinking of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1910) and his reasoning that focusing on functions and relations offers more epistemological potential than studying the essence of objects. Lewin also took psychology courses and eventually chose Carl Stumpf as the supervisor for his doctorate. His thesis was finished in 1916, while Lewin was a soldier during WWI. Although they had no close working relationship, Stumpf inspired Lewin to conduct empirical experiments to turn psychology into an empirical science. In Berlin, Lewin also encountered the Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler. This influence was formative for his understanding of human behavior.
After the war, Lewin became a private docent at the Berlin University (1918–1921). A private docent is an unsalaried university lecturer who is directly paid by students for tuition. This position reflected the problems that Jews had in obtaining a tenured university position at this time. Lewin’s research focused on the question of how work processes can become more humane (Lewin, 1920). However, after his move to the Institute of Psychology in 1921, Lewin shifted his focus to measure constructs like emotions and motivation experimentally. Until then, these topics had only been covered by poetry and psychoanalysis.
During his time in Berlin, Lewin encouraged his students to develop behavioral guidelines for the experimenter, but also to be flexible in order to adapt to the situation. The experimenter thereby becomes an active element in the process to gain a better understanding of the psychological processes being studied. This new way of conducting experiments resulted in many influential dissertations, such as those by Bljuma Zeigarnik (1927, the Zeigarnik Effect), Tamara Dembo (1931, the dynamics of anger), and Ferdinand Hoppe (1931, levels of aspiration).
An article by Brown (1929) made Lewin’s work accessible for an English audience. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lewin was invited for scholarly visits to the United States. The network that he built up during these visits helped him emigrate in 1933, as the Nazis came to power in Germany.
On his way to America, Lewin stopped at Cambridge to meet Frederic Bartlett. Here, he first met Eric Trist, a student of Bartlett. They met again in 1936. These encounters laid the foundation for the later links between Lewin’s work and that of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, which was cofounded by Trist (Hinshelwood, 2018).
In America, Lewin’s first post was at Cornell University as refugee scholar. In 1935, he moved to the Child Welfare Station, University of Iowa. While working at Berlin University, Lewin met regularly at the Schwedisches Café to discuss research ideas with his students. This was done in an open atmosphere; every idea was welcome and potentially the basis for a new research project. He continued this tradition in the United States with the Hot-Air Club and the Topology Group. These sessions attracted numerous influential participants, such as Erik Erikson, Fritz Heider, and Margaret Mead.
In his early career, Lewin was interested in improving work processes. This interest was rekindled when in 1939 he was asked by his friend Alfred Marrow, CEO of the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation, to help him overcome labor problems he was having at the company’s new factory in Marion, Virginia (Marrow, 1969). Harwood struggled to recruit and retain capable workers. Even after a 12-week training period, new employees worked less than half as fast as the workers in established subsidiaries. The studies Lewin carried out at Harwood laid the foundations of OD (Burnes, 2007). He did not limit his work to workers’ skills and abilities, but took a holistic approach that included decision-making processes, leadership training, intergroup conflict and/or co-operation, and many other factors that might indirectly affect workers’ behaviors.
Lewin’s work focused on group and not individual behavior (Burnes, 2020). This approach was further developed in WWII when he was asked by the Department of Agriculture to help change American food consumption habits to match the reduced war-time resources. In 1944, he founded the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the MIT.
In the same year, he also became chief consultant of the Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress. The main purpose of the commission was to combat religious and racial prejudice. To achieve such social change, Lewin believed that those expected to change (e.g., citizens of a community) have to be involved in the process, since reeducation should be an active instead of a passive process. In 1946, Lewin organized a series of workshops in New Britain, Connecticut, from which the National Training Laboratories and the T-Trainings emerged (Burnes & Cooke, 2012).
As can be seen, in the last decade of his life, Lewin’s work covered a wide range of issues, organizations, and collaborators. After his death in 1947, his work legacy became fragmented and much of it forgotten and/or misunderstood (Burnes & Cooke, 2012). In order to address and redress this lack of understanding of Lewin’s work, and to show its relevance for today’s world, Table 1 summarizes key concepts from his work and how these can be seen today.
Lewin’s ideas and how these concepts are described in modern terms.
To revive Lewin’s ideas, the next section sketches two possible paths. For the theoretical avenue, we describe how Lewin’s epistemology could inspire us to generate new knowledge. For the practical avenue, we focus on the question of how Lewin’s ideas could improve OD by adopting the design thinking approach.
Learning from Lewin’s epistemology
In this section, we elaborate on three themes as to how Lewin’s epistemology and scientific approach could advance current thinking. First, we summarize Lewin’s reasoning as to why putting too much emphasis on studying the “essence” of things neglects contextual factors. Second, we argue for an increased use of behavioral observations to overcome the predominance of quantitative questionnaires that only measure phenotypical relations. Third, we show how Lewin’s abductive thinking helps to generate new insights.
Thinking in relations, not categories
To advance our current epistemology, we review Lewin’s arguments on why an Aristotelian thinking is not compatible with modern science and why we need a Galilean thinking instead. 2 In the Organon (Greek for “instrument”), Aristotle describes how categories help to define objects of interest. The most important category is substance as the being of an object must be clear, before other categories such as quantity or quality can be ascribed (Adamson, 2014). Furthermore, Aristotle distinguishes between natural and accidental features of objects. Natural or essential features can be observed in all objects of a class. Everything else is random or accidental and, for Aristotle, not worthy of further examination. Thus, Aristotle’s epistemology does not focus on an individual case, but always on a whole class of objects with its general features.
For Lewin, however, it is important not only to focus on rules, but also to pay at least equal attention to the exceptions that might falsify assumptions. Inspired by Cassirer (1910), he took a relational approach, in which a meaning for a phenomenon emerges from the interaction of an object with its context. Categories, on the other hand, prompt thinking in dichotomies that ignore external influences. For instance, categories like “good workers” do not direct our attention towards understanding when individuals show a superior performance.
Although Lewin described these differences decades ago, it seems that psychological research still favors the Aristotelian mode of thought over the Galilean. For instance, there is a tendency to classify individuals as introverted or securely attached, leading to a “cult of personality” (Burke, 2018, p. 200). These labels possess an evaluative character and “acquire causal-explanatory power in the thinking of psychologists” (Valsiner, 1984, p. 452). For Lewin however, typologies or archetypes that represent “red, green, blue, or yellow” personalities would only contribute to a phenotypical understanding, and, without a consideration of contextual factors, remain meaningless. It is also the tautology that Lewin criticized on such classificatory approaches: scoring high on items that indicate that you tend to “sense,” “judge,” “think,” or be “introverted” puts you in the respective category that predicts your behavior (e.g., being analytical).
Use behavioral observation, not only quantitative measurements
Psychology journals tend to publish significant rather than meaningful results, “with the former meaning something which is relevant, evident, and that speaks for itself, the latter implying the idea of sense, understanding, agency, and motives” (Tateo, 2013, p. 525). Instead of reflecting the philosophy of how to get closer to an understanding of human behavior and create meaning, psychologists have a tendency to apply new methods to reach significant results that might be a quantitative but not a qualitative advancement (Hopner & Liu, 2021). This should not entirely undermine the value of statistical or quantitative research. Lewin himself valued mathematics, as it helps to legitimate psychology’s status as a science. Yet, often these methods are applied without a reflection of what is measured: collecting hundreds of questionnaires and correlating variables only grasps a phenotypical aspect, but fails to understand the genotype that caused a phenomenon. Further, the reductionist methods that deconstruct individuals into variables cause many significant results, but these are too partial to generate a comprehensive understanding of what causes behavior (Hopner & Liu, 2021). Thus, “the statistical procedure, at least in its commonest application in psychology, is the most striking expression of this Aristotelian mode of thinking” (Lewin, 1935, p. 16).
Although there are research streams that try to create a genotypic understanding of cause-and-effect relationships within complex organizations (e.g., realist evaluation, Pawson & Tilley, 1997), mainstream psychology is less interested in discussing factors that cause behavior and is more attracted to elaborate, statistical models (Kramer, 2016).
Based on Lewin’s criticism that psychology has put too much emphasis on the person (object) in isolation, we suggest that, even today, psychology would benefit from refocusing on Lewin’s “grand truism” (Jones, 1998, p. 35). The truism refers to Lewin’s argument that the behavior (B) of an individual is a function of personal (P) and environmental (E) factors, which is spelled out in the formula B = f(P, E). Although this formula seems like common knowledge, psychologists tend to neglect the interactionist term and focus on main effects (Crano, 1989; Kihlstrom, 2013; Ross et al., 2010). Experts and laypeople alike are inclined to regard the “P” as the main cause of effects, mirrored in the tendency to generate typologies. Following the interactionist perspective, Lewin drew attention to the fact that individuals are not passive, but create their own perceived life space. That is, their behavior affects the behavior of significant others and thereby allows or hinders the attainment of valued goals (E = f(P)). Adopting such a contextual perspective enables researchers to measure the emerging cause–effect relationships between individual and context, which helps to advance knowledge more than just studying both factors independently (Guyon et al., 2018). Lewin was among the first to apply sequence analysis to understand the complex dynamics in social relationships (Ploder, 2021). Despite this early usage, it seems that “organizational scholars are not aware of the methodological advances that are available today for modeling temporal interactions and detecting behavioral patterns that emerge over time” (Lehmann-Willenbrock & Allen, 2018, p. 325). Furthermore, relying on behavioral observation would also help to detect new and unexpected phenomena.
Be attentive for unexpected observations
Although Lewin criticized Aristotelianism for putting too much emphasis on the substance of objects while neglecting their function and relations, he converged with Aristotle on the question about how new and unexpected findings can be integrated into existing theoretical frameworks. One might even draw a line from Aristotle to Lewin, and relate both to the work of Charles S. Peirce, the inventor of abductive inquiry (Adelman, 1993). 3
For Aristotle, epistemology includes not only “knowledge” but also “understanding.” This means that you know something, when you can demonstrate it (Adamson, 2014). Hence, Aristotle distinguished between a syllogism that infers the fact (i.e., deduction) and a syllogism that infers the reason and cause of a phenomenon (Flórez, 2014). It is this discovering and formulating of new ideas and hypotheses that Peirce called abduction (Burks, 1946). Abduction leads to an electrifying eureka moment when one finds a new hypothesis for puzzling results. Learning about why expectations do not come true by taking context factors into account constitutes the thinking that progresses science (Lewin, 1931). Accordingly, Lewin searched for these moments. For instance, Lewin et al. (1939) observed that one of his research colleagues was not able to show a democratic leadership style, but displayed an absence of leadership. Based on the behavior of the followers, Lewin formed the hypothesis that this sort of “laissez-faire” leadership style increases aggression within groups.
Another eureka moment occurred during his endeavor to change food habits during WWII. Lewin realized that housewives were the “gatekeepers” who decide about families’ food consumption and that they could be best convinced to change their shopping routines using group discussion that ended with a democratic decision-making.
Another example is Lewin’s discovery of the power of feedback in 1946 (Freedman, 1999). During a workshop in New Britain, Connecticut that took several days, participants interacted during the day among themselves, and researchers discussed their observations made through one-way mirrors in the evening. Three participants asked the researchers to be present during these discussions. All researchers declined except Lewin, who led the group. 4 Listening to the researchers’ discussion, one participant learned how researchers perceived her behavior during the workshop. At first, she was shocked and defensive. However, the other two participants confirmed the researchers’ observations. The next day, she changed her behavior and interacted more purposefully. Over the next few nights, other participants also wanted to listen, and Lewin learned that feeding back observations to actors could change their behavior.
The workshop in Connecticut was designed for community leaders to learn behaviors for reducing stereotypes against minorities. These topics and research interests that are meant to improve society are typical of Lewin (Burnes, 2009). His epistemological ideas and his empirical research aimed at solving social issues are in no way separate, but closely related. This is most clearly formulated in his idea of action research (Lewin, 1947b) that invites subjects, thus far seen as research objects, to become coresearchers. As action research uses hypotheses created during the change process to design and test interventions, it resembles the practical application of abductive inquiry (Shani et al., 2020). Yet, action research’s potential to improve organizations is widely overlooked (Bleijenbergh et al., 2021). We thus outline an avenue for using Lewin’s epistemology and practices to improve OD.
The practical theorist: How Lewin’s ideas improve organization development
Lewin had a tremendous influence on the first generation of OD practitioners and scholars. These colleagues and students (e.g., Chris Argyris, Douglas McGregor, Warren Bennis, Margaret Mead) made OD the common approach towards enhancing an organization’s functioning during the 1950s and 60s. Yet, appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987) was the last significant improvement and the OD field gradually lost its significance (Burke, 2018; Marshak, 2005).
Nowadays, however, it is increasingly recognized that organizations need new approaches to cope with a complex and ambiguous environment. One of these new methods is design thinking—a team-based approach, relying on a defined process that explores and takes into account human needs before developing a solution (Norman, 2013). A design thinking process usually begins with a challenge defined by the management or other relevant stakeholders that sees room for improvement in a certain area, for instance “How might we improve our organization’s eco-balance?” (The example is taken from Endrejat et al., 2019.) It delegates this challenge to a self-directed team of design thinking experts. The team follows a predefined path, such as the four steps suggested by the Design Council (2007): discover, define, develop, and deliver.
Discover
Design thinking teams try to gain a deep understanding of users’ perspectives, preferably on vivid insights that are gained through observation and interviews. For the sustainability challenge, the team explored various sustainability areas, such as electricity, mobility, and waste production.
Define
Teams have to focus on the key needs and insights. This often goes hand in hand with reframing the challenge, as findings might lead to a new understanding or a challenge to taken-for-granted beliefs. In this example, the team decided that waste production, especially the use of disposable mugs, is a challenge worth tackling. Key needs of employees were rephrased into “How to” questions, such as “How can the usage of reusable cups be made as effortless as the usage of disposable cups?”
Develop
To generate creative solutions that meet users’ needs, the team is encouraged to think outside the box because otherwise, people’s ideas tend to be constrained by their current context. In our example, the team developed a prototype that connected reusable mugs via radio frequency identification (RFID) chips to users, thus personalizing the cups.
Deliver
In this phase, the “wow” ideas are turned into ideas that could be integrated into organizational structures (“what works?”). In our example, the team learned that there were privacy concerns, skepticism about the robustness of the RFID chips, and that the scan process at the cash desk takes too long. The refinement led to the final solution, a reusable cup system that does not require the user to pay a deposit or wait in a queue. Several test sessions showed that the reusable cups were returned and not taken home, meeting concerns that cups would be stolen.
Design thinking is considered as a promising approach to initiating organizational change (Elsbach & Stigliani, 2018). Despite this, design thinking has not yet reached its full potential within organizational structures (Kurtmollaiev et al., 2018; Micheli et al., 2019; Shapira et al., 2017). Table 2 summarizes four aspects that undermine the application of design thinking as an effective tool for OD, and how Lewin’s ideas might help to overcome these barriers.
How Lewin’s ideas could help to establish design thinking as an OD approach.
Improving the discover phase: Conduct action interviews
A defining characteristic of the design thinking process is the adoption of an integrative approach that enables a deeper understanding of the problem context. However, often design thinking teams have problems exploring the “real” problem. As an example, they might skip interviews or conduct these in a sloppy manner to get to the solution phase quickly. Further, the team might lack the skills to ask the appropriate questions necessary to make employees feel safe to open up.
Lewin considered change an iterative process, seeing the diagnosis and change intervention as being inseparable. To this end, Lewin (1948b) suggested the use of “action interviews,” which help to create a trusting atmosphere often by “easing the situation with a joke or two” (p. 129). Lewin (1948b) noted that this made it easier to create a mutual understanding of a current problem, such as the case where the cause of conflict was quickly attributed to the “impatience of the [machinists due to] the scarcity of mechanic time” (p. 129). During an action interview, teams do not only collect or present facts and determine if something is right or wrong. Instead, a design thinking team might make use of an action interview to direct interviewees’ attention towards user needs. However, a desired outcome is not achieved by the design thinking team per se. The interviewed employees are encouraged to speak their mind, which ensures that their perspectives are included in the process.
Improving the define phase: Use abductive inquiry
Design thinking could be understood as a bottom-up approach to initiating organizational change, as the ideas that are presented to the relevant decision makers are composed of the insights from potential users, employees, and other stakeholders. Design thinking teams try not only to analyze an issue (i.e., dissecting phenomena into their component elements), but also to engage in synthesis (i.e., organizing pieces into larger systems). Yet, teams usually struggle with the analysis and synthesis, either because team members are too solution-oriented or they experience pressure from management (Micheli et al., 2019). Also, many teams feel uncomfortable when faced with different and conflicting perspectives and fear causing failures with their suggested solution. As a result, teams might avoid reframing the challenge after they collected user insights because they are afraid of deviating from the initial challenge.
Lewin’s starting point for his expedition from cloudy wishes to concrete plans was his inquiry as to why a person behaves one way and not another. He did so by detecting dissimilar behaviors in similar situations and by finding explanations for the causes of these special events (Marrow, 1969). In today’s terms, one might call such an approach abductive inquiry (e.g., Shani et al., 2020). In contrast to deduction, abductive inquiry does not only derive its conclusions from existing knowledge, but can also produce new data by finding the best explanations for an observed event. As mentioned above, Lewin detected and systemized the laissez-faire leadership style based on careful observation of his colleagues’ behaviors (Lewin et al., 1939). Lewin was among the first who applied abductive thinking (Tateo, 2013) and thus could serve as an inspiration for design thinking teams today.
Furthermore, Lewin avoided spending too much time on analyzing unsolvable issues, as for him, a solution cannot be “right” or “wrong” but only “better” or “worse” (Marrow, 1969). Thus, design thinkers might want to follow Lewin and reframe a problem to turn it into a solvable issue (and gain a new perspective on an issue by doing so) and quickly progress in the solution process, thus circumventing management’s concern over investing in a lengthy and resource-intensive procedure.
Improving the develop phase: Use behavioral observation to overcome dysfunctional team dynamics
After teams have defined the key challenges, they move from problem definition to the solution phase using ideation techniques, such as brainstorming. However, many teams experience problems while brainstorming, such as social loafing, evaluation apprehension, or idea blocking (Diehl & Stroebe, 1991). These group effects lead to the assumption that creative groups do not leverage their potential. Yet, for team building effects and creating commitment for a solution, it is necessary that the team considers the output as teamwork and not the genius work of one single team member. In most cases, the phenomena undermining a team’s creative output are the result of dysfunctional team dynamics that are difficult to recognize from the perspective within.
Lewin stated that the factors that make an intervention effective should be understood as well as possible (Lewin, 1947b). Accordingly, Lewin and his colleagues usually relied on behavioral observation (e.g., Barker et al., 1941) and Lewin could be understood as one of the early researchers using sequence analysis (Ploder, 2021). The usage of coding systems that detect idea-facilitating and idea-hindering actions helps team members become aware of their dynamics (Endrejat et al., 2019). Feedback that is based on a fixed coding scheme raises team members’ acceptance that they behaved in a certain way. It thereby sets the foundation for new norms within the team that Lewin considered essential to increase a team’s output.
Improving the delivery phase: More emphasis on implementation
Most teams spent the majority of their time on defining challenges and creating solutions, compared to integrating these into organizational routines (Shapira et al., 2017). Thus, a design thinking team might create stunning insights and great ideas that remain inconsequential without implementation. Even worse, making latent “pain points” tangible might cause more harm than good. Kurtmollaiev et al. (2018) found that training team leaders in design thinking had a negative effect on the teams’ operational capabilities. A possible reason might be that the training was only targeted at team leaders, but not at team members. Introduced in this manner, design thinking runs the risk of remaining alien to the “daily business.” Take for instance the training participants in the Kurtmollaiev et al. (2018) study: these managers might create new and innovative solutions but respond to reluctance by their followers with confrontational language to “sell” new ideas. This in turn reduces the chances that a prototype will be accepted by the intended users. Thus, in some cases “resistance” is rather the result of the communication between a design thinking team and intended users (Endrejat et al., 2020).
Thus, it is necessary that important change recipients become coresearchers who also co-operate in data gathering and evaluation. Such an approach is illustrated in a study by Marrow and French (1945), two of Lewin’s colleagues at Harwood. Marrow and French wanted to change the stereotypes managers held regarding the performance of elderly women. The managers did not believe any figures that were presented to them. Thus, the researchers took another approach: they let the managers define the decision criteria and assigned data collection to them. This method led to the desired change in stereotypes.
While working with the Office of Naval Research, Lewin learned that training only one group member is unlikely to achieve a desired change. Thus, if you expect a team to enhance its output, all group members should join the training to modify its dynamic in a desired manner. However, usually, it is not feasible to train all employers to become design thinkers. To turn all affected employees into coresearchers, nonetheless, the design thinking team might generate different prototypes and let the other employees vote. These approaches became possible with technological instruments that allow transferring haptic storyboards, ideation outcomes, and prototyping results into a digital platform. The team’s results can thereby easily be shared with colleagues to integrate them into the design process. The prototypes also help managers to understand which forces exist in systems that stabilize the status quo. Following Lewin in this regard means not to ask why something is, but ask why the change you want to see has not yet happened (Kihlstrom, 2013).
Conclusion
Scholars do not tend to elaborate on “old wisdom” but seem more interested in selling new concepts, leading to a fragmentation of research fields (Schein, 2015). This development might be fueled by practitioners’ desire to be up-to-date. 5 We think, however, that the “newest tools” for improving organizational functioning are derived from previous work. Each modification and relabeling of an established concept deviates from the core idea, thereby tainting the initial effectiveness (Billig, 2015). Therefore, refocusing on some of the “classics” can benefit our understanding of core, psychological concepts. In this article, we took a tour of the past and tried to bring back the work of Kurt Lewin into curricula, academics’ heads, and practitioners’ hands.
Although the history of psychology is an obligatory part of most curricula, it is seldom considered as a subject that can inspire current thinking and doing (S. Cummings et al., 2017). The work of Kurt Lewin is an exemplary case for this practice. Standard narratives made him a mythic figure that overshadowed his actual work (Billig, 2015). Consequently, his ideas are often considered as historic events, something we are obliged to know about, rather than use. Yet, if we consider Lewin only as a poster child, our education and practice is like singing a song without knowing the melody. To redress this, we have tried to show what once made Lewin’s ideas so popular. Specifically, we asked three times “Why”: (a) why is Lewin’s work seldom taught today, (b) why is Lewin often regarded as such an outstanding scholar and practitioner, and (c) why might it make sense to refocus on some of his core ideas to progress today’s epistemology and OD practices? The answers discussed in this paper showed that Lewin’s approach to solving social issues still offers much inspiration to advance our thinking and actions.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
