Organisation Development

Few social scientists can have received the level of praise that has been heaped upon Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) (Burnes 2004). Indeed, his reputation was such that at the 1947 Convention of the American Psychological Association, Tolman gave his memorial address for Kurt Lewin stating that ‘Freud the clinician and Lewin the experimentalist—these are the two men whose names will stand out before all others in the history of our psychological era’. (Marrow 1969b) Echoing this praise some 40 years later, Schein referred to him as ‘the intellectual father of contemporary theories of applied behavioural science’ (Schein 1988). Being a practitioner and scholar, Lewin combined abstract thinking with great personal interest in real-life phenomena and had an unusual knack for turning everyday events and observations into useful practical theories (Weisbord 2004a). This renders Lewin’s work an endless and overwhelming source of inspiration regarding what is really happening when we engage in change processes. It may be rightly said that Lewin’s work was concerned primarily with the activities of people’s daily lives with one another.