3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis

Force field analysis, developed by Kurt Lewin, is the diagnostic tool CM3 places at the end of the context-setting section. It provides an analysis tool which helps identify the driving forces, both internal and external, for the change and the restraining forces that will work against it.

The basic structure

Picture the current situation as held in place between two sets of opposing pressures:

The situation stays put while the two sets balance. Change requires the balance to shift.

The key insight: reduce restraint before adding drive

The most examinable and most practically useful point is that there are two ways to shift the balance, and they are not equally good.

You can increase the driving forces — more executive pressure, a harder deadline, a bigger burning-platform message. This works, but it raises tension in the system. People pushed harder against unchanged obstacles become more stressed, more resistant and more likely to comply superficially while quietly working around the change.

Or you can reduce the restraining forces — remove the obstacle, resource the retraining, resolve the competing priority, address the fear. This shifts the balance without increasing tension, and the change moves more easily.

Most organisations instinctively reach for the first option because it is faster and requires no investment. The change manager's professional contribution is often to redirect that energy: rather than asking the sponsor to push harder, ask which two restraining forces could be removed with the same effort.

Building one properly

Force field analysis is typically developed in a workshop setting rather than produced at a desk, and that is not incidental. The value comes from three sources that a solo analysis cannot supply:

1. Surfacing restraining forces honestly. People will name obstacles in a facilitated group that they would never put in an email — competing priorities, a manager who has quietly decided not to cooperate, a system dependency nobody owns.
2. Shared understanding. When a leadership team builds the picture together, they own the conclusion. A restraining force presented to them in a slide is an assertion; a restraining force they identified themselves is a fact they will act on.
3. Weighting. Not all forces are equal, and the group's judgement about which restraints actually matter is usually better than any individual's.

A workable sequence: define the change precisely, then brainstorm driving forces, then brainstorm restraining forces, then weight each for strength, then identify the two or three restraints whose removal would most change the picture.

Where CM3 reuses the tool

Force field analysis appears twice in the syllabus, and the second appearance is easy to miss. In the Work of the change manager area, building a strategy to manage resistance advises making time early to consider the opportunities (driving forces) and risks (restraining forces) the change presents, and states that force field analysis can be a useful tool to help change teams map causes of resistance visually.

So the same tool serves two purposes: an up-front approach-shaping diagnostic, and an ongoing instrument for understanding where resistance is coming from. In the resistance context, restraining forces and causes of resistance are largely the same list.

Practical cautions

Two failure modes are worth naming.

The tidy diagram. A force field produced to look balanced and reassuring for a steering group is worthless. If every driving force is strong and every restraining force is minor, the analysis was not honest, and the value of the technique is precisely its honesty about obstacles.

The one-off. Forces change. A restraining force you removed in month two can return in month six when a reorganisation gives someone new the same objection. Revisiting the force field at intervals, particularly after a significant event, keeps it useful rather than decorative.

Weighting the forces

A force field that lists forces without weighting them is only half finished. The usual method is to score each force for strength — commonly on a simple three- or five-point scale — and to draw the arrows proportionally, so the picture shows not just what exists but what matters.

Weighting changes decisions. A list of eight restraining forces looks daunting; a weighted list often shows that two of them account for most of the resistance and the other six are noise. Effort then concentrates where it moves the balance.

Two weighting judgements repay care. Strength is not the same as visibility — the loudest objection is frequently not the strongest restraint, and a quiet structural constraint such as a competing priority in another department can outweigh it. And strength is not the same as legitimacy — a restraining force based on a misunderstanding is still a real force until the misunderstanding is corrected, and it should be weighted as it actually operates rather than as it ought to.

When the same exercise is repeated later in the change, the movement between the two pictures is itself useful evidence: forces you have successfully reduced, forces that have grown, and forces you did not previously see.