Every organisation, whether a municipal corporation, a startup, or a government department, eventually faces the need to change. The hard part is rarely deciding what to change. The hard part is getting people to actually accept and sustain that change. This is where change management strategy comes in. A change agent has several ways to push an organisation from its current state to a desired one, and the method chosen often decides whether the change sticks or quietly fades away. Three broad strategies dominate this discussion: force-coercion, rational persuasion, and shared power. Each works on a different assumption about why people behave the way they do, and each produces very different results.
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Why change needs a deliberate strategy
People do not resist change randomly. They resist because change disturbs habits, routines, and a sense of security. The social psychologist Kurt Lewin captured this neatly in the 1940s with his three-stage model of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. First, an organisation must “unfreeze” old behaviours by creating awareness that the current way of working is no longer good enough. Then the actual change is implemented. Finally, the new behaviour is “refrozen” so that it becomes the default and people do not slip back to old patterns.
The three change strategies map directly onto this idea. Some strategies are good at unfreezing quickly but poor at refreezing. Others are slow to start but excellent at making change permanent. The classification itself comes from the work of Robert Chin and Kenneth Benne, who, in their writing on general strategies for changing human systems, described three meta-approaches that they informally called the forcing strategy, the telling strategy, and the participating strategy. These have remained relevant to public organisations and urban institutions for decades.
The force-coercion strategy
The force-coercion strategy relies on authority, rewards, and punishments to drive change. The underlying assumption is straightforward: people act mainly out of self-interest, so they will comply when faced with the threat of loss or the promise of gain. A change agent using this approach issues a directive and expects it to be followed, backing it up with the power of position, money, or sanctions.
This is the most familiar form of change in hierarchical settings. A department head announces a new procedure and warns that anyone who does not comply will face disciplinary action. A government body imposes a deadline for switching to a digital filing system. As described in studies on power-coercive approaches, these strategies assume that those with less power will comply with the wishes of those holding more power, using legitimate authority, rewards, and punishments as the means of enforcement.
When force-coercion works
Force-coercion has a genuine strength: speed. When time is short and discipline is essential, it delivers quick results. Think of an emergency where a city administration must enforce new safety norms immediately, or a public health rule that has to take effect at once. In such situations there is no room for lengthy discussion. Force-coercion is also a useful unfreezing device because it breaks people out of entrenched old habits and forces them to confront a new reality.
The limits of force
The weakness is equally clear. Change driven by force tends to be temporary. People comply out of fear or for a reward, but their commitment is shallow. The moment the change agent is no longer watching, people often revert to their old ways. Research summarising change implementation in public organisations notes that the power-coercive strategy frequently evokes anger, resistance, and damage to relationships. There may also be quiet, subtle resistance that is harder to detect than open defiance. A study of how employees perceive different change strategies found that a power-coercive approach tends to produce ambivalent emotional and cognitive responses, unlike the more positive reactions to other strategies. In short, force-coercion can move people, but it rarely wins their hearts.
The rational persuasion strategy
The rational persuasion strategy takes a very different view of human behaviour. It assumes people are rational beings who will follow their own self-interest once that interest is clearly revealed to them. Instead of issuing orders, the change agent presents empirical data, logical arguments, and expert evidence to convince people that the change makes sense and will benefit them. This approach is also known as the empirical-rational strategy in the original Chin and Benne typology.
This is the strategy most of us learn in school and college without realising it. When you write a report, build a presentation backed by figures, or make a case using statistics, you are practising rational persuasion. The change usually flows top-down, but it is justified rather than simply imposed. The empirical-rational principle holds that if people understand that a coming change will bring them benefits, their attitude becomes positive and they stop resisting.
Linking persuasion to Lewin’s model
Rational persuasion fits well with Lewin’s framework because evidence can both unfreeze and refreeze. Good data unfreezes by showing that the current situation is flawed and that the cost of doing nothing is high. The same evidence helps refreeze the change by giving people a logical reason to keep following the new way even after the initial push fades. Because the change is anchored in reasoning rather than raw authority, its effects tend to last longer than those of force-coercion.
The strategy is not foolproof. Its success depends heavily on two things: having solid facts and being able to communicate them well. It also works best when the change agent has credibility as an expert. If the data is weak, or if the audience does not trust the person presenting it, persuasion alone will not move people. As one analysis of change strategies points out, an empirical-rational approach is hard to deploy when the incentives are modest, because people are reluctant to give up a comfortable present for an only slightly better future.
The shared power strategy
The shared power strategy is the most participative of the three. Rather than telling people what to do or persuading them with data, the change agent invites stakeholders to take part in identifying the need for change and shaping the solution. People are treated not as recipients of a decision but as participants in a dialogue. This approach is also called the normative-reeducative strategy, and it rests on the idea that humans are social beings whose behaviour is guided by shared norms, values, and group commitments.
In this model, change is achieved by collectively re-examining existing norms and developing commitment to new ones. The change leader builds consensus, encourages collaboration across all levels of an organisation, and lets the goals emerge from the group rather than from the top. It is the foundation of most modern organisational development work and is widely used by change specialists for exactly this reason.
Why participation produces lasting change
The greatest strength of shared power is durability. Because people help create the change, they own it. The change becomes internalised rather than externally enforced, which means it survives even when no one is monitoring compliance. The shared power approach delivers major benefits in terms of longer-lasting and internalised change precisely because it relies on empowerment and genuine participation.
The obvious trade-off is time. Shared power is slow. Building consensus among many stakeholders, reconciling different values, and letting solutions emerge naturally all take patience. For a city-level urban renewal project that affects residents, local bodies, and businesses, this participatory route may take months of consultation. But the resulting change tends to face far less resistance because the people affected feel that their voices were heard. This is why participatory planning has become central to good urban governance and community development.
Choosing the right strategy
No single strategy is correct all the time. The best choice depends on the situation, the time available, the stakes involved, and the culture of the organisation or community. Force-coercion suits emergencies and situations demanding immediate discipline. Rational persuasion suits situations where solid evidence exists and the change agent is credible. Shared power suits situations where long-term, deeply rooted change is the goal and there is time to build it.
In practice, skilled change agents rarely use one strategy in isolation. They often combine approaches, using a touch of force-coercion to unfreeze quickly, rational persuasion to justify the move, and shared power to refreeze the change so it lasts. The very framework that Chin and Benne built has been criticised for assuming that organisations move neatly from one stable state to another, when in fact modern organisations operate in constantly shifting and competitive environments. Lewin’s own model has drawn similar criticism for being too plan-driven and for underestimating the emotional side of change. Awareness of these limits helps a change agent stay flexible rather than treating any single strategy as a magic formula.
What do you think? If you were leading a major change in your city’s local administration, which strategy would you reach for first, and why? Can you think of a recent reform where a leader relied too heavily on force-coercion when shared power might have produced more lasting results?
References
- https://www.managementstudyguide.com/kurt-lewins-change-management-model.htm
- https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-assets/17525_book_item_17525.pdf
- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/organisational-change/9789332510487/xhtml/ch4.5.3.xhtml
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.07019
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316595157_Robert_Chin_and_Kenneth_D_Benne_Change_Management_Biography
- https://www.studocu.com/row/document/ethiopian-defense-university/chemical-process-technology/four-strategies-done/98910978
- https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/Kurt-Lewins-Change-Management-Model-Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze
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