How to Map—and Move—Organisational Change

Why understanding resistance is your first real step towards impactful change

Sometimes, workplace change can feel inevitable, yet somehow still stuck.

In your office, maybe you have been trying to embed more agile ways of working. Or perhaps you have moved to a hybrid setup, but the business culture is dragging its heels behind the policy. Staff politely nod and agree in meetings, say all the right things, and use all the current buzzwords, but in practice, change very little when they return to their desks.

Or perhaps it’s digital transformation—you’ve bought the new tools, but the adoption just isn’t resonating. If you’ve felt that invisible pushback from colleagues when rolling out something new, you’re not imagining it. You’re feeling the system pushing back on you.

Lewin’s Big Idea: Systems Are Held in Place by Competing Forces

That’s exactly what the psychologist Kurt Lewin tried to unscramble way back in the 1940s. Lewin was one of the earliest thinkers to treat group behaviour as something held in place by forces—with some driving change forward, and others trying to hold it back. The status quo is basically the equilibrium point of these opposing forces.

From these insights came what is now called Force Field Analysis—a widely used diagnostic method and decision-support tool that maps the dynamics behind why systems remain the same and how they can be shifted.

Lewin was an academic, but he wasn’t writing from his ivory tower for other academics. He sought to understand the cause of things and, drawing from physics, developed this tool for real-world change agents—business leaders, government reformers, and community organisers dealing with tough, messy problems such as workplace morale, racial integration, and leadership resistance. He wanted to help them see where the system was before attempting to shift it. That insight remains valid today, nearly 80 years later.

Here’s how Force Field Analysis works:

To perform this analysis, you first need clarity on the changes that are proposed. Then you need to work with team members and stakeholders to identify and prioritise the external and internal driving forces pushing for a change (for example, client demand for agility or staff desire for flexibility in their work). Then you need to do the same for all of the possible restraining forces that could hold change back (such as unclear expectations, manager discomfort, or fear of losing team cohesion).

The current situation—whatever it is—is held in place by the equilibrium between these opposing forces but if the forces for change are stronger—it is more likely to happen. In other words, to bring about change, your mission is to strengthen the driving forces and weaken the restraining forces.

Let’s consider an example of how this could work in practice with a case we’re all familiar with: embedding agile and flexible work practices.

Imagine your business is trying to move toward hybrid work and faster, more responsive delivery models. On paper, you’ve got buy-in, it seems logical. Clients want it. Employees love the idea of flexibility. You have put the tools in place. Yet things stall. Managers hesitate. Accountability drops. The business culture erodes. What is happening here isn’t really about bad intentions—it’s a system resisting change.

So what can you do about it? This is where Lewin’s classic Three-Step Change Model helps translate diagnosis into action.

Lewin’s Three-Step Change Model: How to Make Change Stick

Here’s how it works.

Step one: Unfreeze. That means surfacing the current assumptions and pain points. By using Force Field Analysis, you should have arrived at a position where it has been possible to make the invisible visible. In this step, you will have written out what’s helping change and what’s blocking it. You’ll often find the biggest resistors to change are not technical—they’re human, structural, or psychological.

Step two: Change. Now that you see the tension points, it is time to design around them. Here, you should strengthen the drivers of change—such as sharing client demand for agility, celebrating flexible work wins, or showing how hybrid setups actually improve service delivery. At the same time, you will be looking to reduce the resistance to change. This is where you could coach your managers, clarify expectations, and create new norms. The aim here isn’t to force change, but to rebalance the system, in a diplomatic way, so that change becomes easier and more natural than staying the same.

Step three: Refreeze. This is the part most teams are said to skip. But if you want new behaviours to stick, you have really got to stabilise them. So, it might mean embedding hybrid workflows into onboarding, measuring success through collaboration outcomes, or establishing regular team rituals—like reflection sessions (called retrospectives) and daily check-ins (standups)—that help reinforce the new way of working. Without these, people often slip back into old habits. Real change needs ongoing support and reinforcement.

But here’s the thing: Force Field Analysis is a static tool. It serves as a great starting point because it gives you a snapshot of where your system is right now—but all organisations evolve over time. The forces shift, particularly because the personnel of businesses change over time. That poses new questions. What happens if leadership support for change starts to wane? What if you change the training budget? What happens if early productivity dips? These are dynamic questions, and that’s where System Dynamics can enter the picture.

From Diagnosis to Simulation: System Dynamics

While Force Field Analysis is a great tool to help you diagnose, System Dynamics helps you to simulate (check out the Forces and Signals podcasts on Systems Thinking). It lets you map how different parts of your system interact over time. You have the ability to test different scenarios—such as phasing in hybrid policies or varying leadership involvement—before committing to real-world action. Think of it as a sort of pressure-testing of your change strategy in a sandbox before unleashing it in your real-world workplace.

The sweet spot is to combine both tools. You can use Force Field Analysis to identify the tensions. Then, you make use of System Dynamics to explore how those tensions could play out over time and thus, figure out what your best interventions might be.

So, What’s The Takeaway Here?

Change doesn’t happen just because we want it. Other people in the organisation often have counter ideas or at the very least prefer the status quo.

Change happens when we shift the forces in the system—by design, not by accident. So, whether you’re going digital, going hybrid, or going agile, lasting transformation requires that you unfreeze the current reality, act with intent, shake things up, and then reinforce what works.

So, if your workplace feels stuck in transition, take some time out to pause for reflection and map out the forces at play. Once you shake things up, that elusive breakthrough may finally emerge.💪