Kurt Lewin

The change model taught in management courses everywhere contains a word he never wrote.

Search Kurt Lewin's sixty-seven English-language publications and two archives for "refreezing" and you will not find it. He wrote two paragraphs, in 1947, about unfreezing and moving - and then he died, at fifty-six, with his research centre unfinished and his best students still in their twenties. Nearly everything now sold under his name took its shape afterwards, in the hands of other people.

That gap between the man and the legend is where this book starts.

What Lewin actually left is smaller and far more useful: an instruction. Look at the field before you judge the person. Find what is holding the present state in place before you push on it. Behaviour, he argued, is a function of the person and the environment - not character alone, and not circumstance alone, but the whole situation as the person actually experiences it.

He tested that idea in strange, specific places. Two after-school clubs of five children in Iowa, run by a graduate student playing both an autocrat and a democrat. Eighty-five women in wartime Cedar Rapids, where a lecture on offal changed the behaviour of ten per cent of them and a group discussion changed fifty-two. A Connecticut workshop in 1946 that ran late, and accidentally invented a way of training people that outlasted him by decades.

Inside:

• Field theory and the life space - what "the environment" meant to him, and why he insisted on the one the person is standing in rather than the one an observer sees
• The leadership-climate experiments as they were actually run, including the finding the retellings leave out: aggression rose under autocracy in some clubs and collapsed into apathy in others
• Force-field analysis, and why he thought removing a restraint usually beat adding pressure
• Action research, and the sentence that defined it: "Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice"
• The Berlin group whose work is credited to him - Zeigarnik, Hoppe, Dembo, Ovsiankina, Karsten, most of them women, all of them authors of their own studies
• Where the three-step change model really came from, and what the historical dispute turns on
• The honest criticisms: a formalism that never delivered, studies too small to carry the weight placed on them, and a modern leadership literature that declines to confirm the headline

Also here: the artillery officer wounded in 1918; the Jewish academic who got out of Germany in 1933; the mother he could not get out, deported from the Netherlands and murdered at Sobibór in 1943; and the misquotation he is most often thanked for, which he did not write either.

Written for the general reader, not the seminar room. Verified sources, no invented scenes, and the criticism given its due.

Part of Pioneers of Human Behaviour - gateway books on the minds that shaped us.