Toolkit: Force field analysis

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The main purpose of force field analysis is to reflect on the forces for and against change.

Just a reminder to keep a record of all the tools in the table below. As long as you can fill in all the cells of the table, you will be able to write a successful IA.

Force field analysis is a change management tool that measures driving forces against restraining forces. Driving forces are factors that push for change and restraining forces are factors that resist change. Completing force field analysis is very simple and involves 4 steps:

1. Determine the forces
2. Allocate weightings
3. Calculate totals
4. Analyse

Let’s see an example for each of the steps. In the example, I will refer to Bobo Pizza restaurant which I already used as an example in critical path analysis. So, let’s say an IB student wants to find out whether the renovation of Bobo Pizza restaurant was necessary or not. To find it out, the student talked to the restaurant manager, staff, and customers. After collecting all the opinions from all of them, the student has enough data to start force field analysis.

In the first step, the student identifies all factors that impact the proposed change (renovation of Bobo Pizza restaurant) and categorises them into driving forces and restraining forces. In the example below, you can see that the forces are not coming out of nowhere. Each of the forces is something that either the manager, workers, or staff said. All the forces have a citation that leads to a footnote which is a link to one of the supporting documents that are the main sources of data.

After that, the student decided to allocate weightings to each of the driving and restraining forces. As you will see later...