Good morning. The change you've been driving isn't stuck for lack of driving. Something is holding it still.
Leadership.
The Force Field
Take the change you've been pushing for months and write down the forces holding it exactly where it is, rather than the reasons it ought to work — and if all you can produce is a list of arguments in its favour, why haven't you asked one person what makes the old way easier?
Kurt Lewin, the German-American psychologist who founded the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT in 1945, spent his last years on a question managers still get wrong: why a group's behaviour holds so steady when everybody agrees it should change. His answer, set out in the 1947 papers gathered after his death as Field Theory in Social Science (1951), was that a level of activity isn't inertia but a balance — a quasi-stationary equilibrium, held in place by driving forces pushing one way and restraining forces pushing back. Both sides are real, and the level sits where they cancel. So there are two moves available, not one. You can raise the level by adding driving force, or by removing restraint, and both of them work. But added force raises tension across the whole system and the change springs back the moment you stop pushing, while a removed restraint moves the level at lower tension and tends to hold. The trap is that only one of the two moves looks like leadership: pushing is visible, quotable and yours, while taking something away looks from the outside like doing nothing at all.
Members only · 4 principles + template + AI mentor
364 more frameworks are waiting.
The Force Field is Day 1 of 365. One framework every morning for a year — across strategy, sales, negotiation, leadership, and more.
$1 /day
Billed $365/yr · cancel any time
365 frameworks
12 topics · templates · AI mentor
One payment a year · the whole library · no auto-renewal.