Force Field Analysis and Model of Planned Change

Force Field Analysis

Force field analysis is anchored in field theory developed by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s. The significance of force field analysis lies in its practical application with a democratic-participative approach for collective decision making and action planning that fundamentally contradicted and shifted the prevailing traditional view of management as the ultimate authority over knowledge and decision making. Lewin’s theoretical contribution referred to a field as the composition of influencing forces and symbolic interactions that structure behaviors in social groups and individual actions.

The notion of force is something that propels or hinders movement from one region of a life space to another. On one hand, forces that arise from within are “own forces,” which encompass values, thoughts, needs, feelings, beliefs, and any other factors embedded in one’s internal composition or within a group’s norms and behaviors. On the other hand, “induced forces” arise from the external environment, which include people, events, things, context, and other factors.

Different forces have varying rates of change in their strength to move toward or away from the intended direction or goal. An important heuristic is that proximity to a region of forces is positively related to the strength of the forces’ influence. This means that the closer one is to a set of own forces [Page 288]and induced forces, their influences will be stronger in moving toward a particular direction. As an example, to generate induced forces for commitment to customer service among executive ranks, they need to experience the customer service firsthand, as a customer or as an employee, in order to be influenced by induced forces to enable much more rapid changes for improving customer service.

According to Lewin, a field is conceptualized as a space with lines of force. This could be a composition of positive valences that makes up converging forces toward a region or alternatively, a composition of negative valences that makes up diverging forces. This conceptual definition has had relevance to disciplines beyond management to subjects such as sociology, psychology, and even physics. The importance of the field idea centers on being able to map the complexities and dynamics of the forces that encompass human behavior. Changes of the forces in a field lead to changes in social behaviors that then provide feedback to the system in a mutually interdependent fashion. This means there is a quasi-stationary equilibrium as a field is in a constant state of adaptation.

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