ABSTRACT
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, in 513 b.c., “Nothing is constant except change.” But even change is changing. In world of accelerating technological and societal changes, framed by globally interconnected participants, the slope of change over time has become increasingly steep. Perhaps Kurt Lewin’s most notable contribution to understanding the process of planned change is his Psychological Force Field model, according to which a person’s behavior depends upon properties of the individual, and the person’s contextual environment. A person’s behavior exists in a state of quasi-stationary equilibrium, the result of two opposing forces: pushing forces that encourage moving behavior/attitudes in one direction, and restraining forces that seek to restrain or move behavior/attitudes in the opposite direction. Gordon Lippitt and colleagues describe in great detail their consulting work at a department within the World Bank. However, the effectiveness of their three-year consultation was unclear, in large part because there were no objective pre- and post-intervention indicators of success.
