A few days ago I came across a LinkedIn series by Corina Enache, an anthropologist who has spent the past several weeks doing something I hadn't seen done before: methodically tracing management's most beloved frameworks back to their origins, and finding that what we actually use in organizations barely resembles what those origins intended. I've linked every post in the series at the bottom of this page, and each one is worth reading in full.
I read through the series in one sitting and felt the slow-building discomfort of someone who has sat through a lot of change management presentations. I've used some of these frameworks. I've probably cited them. It turns out I was, in several cases, citing a caricature.
With Corina's work as the jumping-off point, I want to push the argument one step further. Because the pattern she documents isn't just ironic. I think it's structural.
The evidence first
Abraham Maslow never drew his famous pyramid. His 1943 paper described needs as fluid, overlapping, nonlinear, "a landscape not a ladder" (his words). The pyramid was drawn in 1960 by Charles McDermid, a consulting psychologist writing in Business Horizons about how to generate maximum employee motivation at minimum cost. Douglas McGregor had already been translating Maslow for business audiences and quietly discarding the nuance in the process. Sixty years of critiques of Maslow's hierarchy are largely critiques of McDermid's diagram, as Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard documented in the Academy of Management Learning & Education in 2019.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed her five stages, denial through acceptance, by sitting with terminally ill patients. With people who were dying, or watching someone they loved die. Death doesn't run a consultation process. It doesn't accept feedback or hold a town hall. The only dignified response available is, eventually, acceptance. That is what the model describes. We now apply it to office reorganizations, where the framing does something useful for management: it turns employee resistance into a phase to be managed rather than information to be heard. The person objecting to the restructure is just in bargaining. Give it time.
Kurt Lewin almost certainly never built Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze. The word "refreezing" doesn't appear anywhere in his writing. It was introduced posthumously, assembled from fragments after his death in 1947, until the scaffolding became the building and the building got Lewin's name on the door. Cummings, Bridgman and Brown documented this in Human Relations in 2016. The irony is complete: Lewin spent his career arguing that behavior cannot be understood by looking at individuals in isolation, that you have to look at the whole web of forces and relationships surrounding them. What carries his name today is a three-box diagram of an ice cube.
The MBTI is the most familiar case and probably the most abused. Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs were a writer and a homemaker, not psychologists, building an instrument to measure Jungian typology that Jung himself never intended to be operationalized into a personality test. Between a quarter and half of people who retake it within weeks receive a different type. The categories are binary despite the underlying traits existing on a spectrum. Its predictive validity for job performance is weak. It has survived, as Corina observes, because it gives people a language for difference, not because it's accurate. Those are not the same thing.
That's 4. Corina's series covers several more: Tuckman's Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing (developed from therapy group literature, applied prescriptively to organizational teams), Kotter's 8 Steps (the model became the checklist, the checklist became the change), Spiral Dynamics (Clare Graves never used colors; Don Beck invented them to move away from racial ranking, and they became a new ranking system), Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) (classified as pseudoscience by multiple systematic reviews), Psychological Safety (the distortion was structural from the start, baked into the academic publishing machine rather than happening after the fact), and Ubuntu (a complete ontological philosophy reduced to a poster on a conference room wall). The pattern holds across every case.
The pattern isn't accidental
We tend to frame these distortions as unfortunate, as simplification gone too far, as consultants who didn't read carefully enough. That framing lets the industry off the hook.
Nuanced ideas don't scale. A framework that requires genuine engagement with complexity, that holds uncertainty, that resists being converted into a checklist or a survey or a two-day certification, cannot be productized. And the management consulting industry is, fundamentally, a productization business. The genius of Maslow's actual paper is also the reason it couldn't be sold: it treated human motivation as irreducibly messy. McDermid's pyramid could be put on a slide. Kübler-Ross's actual clinical insight, that people need to be genuinely heard in the face of loss, is harder to sell than a curve that tells managers which stage their employees are in. Lewin's field theory requires thinking about whole systems of forces and relationships. The ice cube diagram requires a PowerPoint template.
Simplification is the product. The pyramid, the curve, the three boxes, the four letters: these exist because they can be packaged and certified at scale to organizations that want the credibility of the research without the friction of the complexity.
The researchers whose names end up on the frameworks rarely built them to be franchises. Several of them, Graves, Lewin, Kübler-Ross, spent years watching their work get stripped of what made it interesting. The consultants and management writers who followed didn't set out to distort anything; most were probably trying to help. But the gravity of a commercial ecosystem pulls consistently in one direction: toward the version that fits on a slide and away from the version that would slow things down.
Corina ends her series with a question worth sitting with: who designed this framework, who sells it, who uses it, and who gets used by it? The knowledge in these systems has almost always flowed in one direction. So has the money, and so has the power.
I'd add one more: before you reach for the framework, could you do the work without it? The work being: actually observing what's happening, listening to what people are telling you, exercising judgment about the specific situation in front of you. If the answer is no, that's worth examining. If the answer is yes, the framework is an accelerator, not a substitute for judgment. The trouble starts when we can no longer tell the difference, and a stage, a type, or a color quietly replaces the person we were supposed to be paying attention to.
Corina Enache's full series, each post linked below, is where this post began.