Kurt Lewin’s 1946 Notes for New Britain: Prefiguring Management History’s ‘Eureka’ Moment ?

Abstract

Arguably there is only one ‘ eureka’ in management history, one sudden moment of specific insight and invention. This is the July 1946 New Britain, Connecticut Workshop organized by Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) the ’ the intellectual father of contemporary theories of applied behavioral science, action research and planned change’ (Schein 1980:238). That summer, at that this workshop on inter-ethnic relations, participants and facilitators had the sudden and accidental insight that their interpersonal interactions were a source of data in themselves, from which profound insight and learning could be derived. This insight into the importance of ‘here and now’ group interactions founded group dynamics, the T-group movement, ideas of team development and team building, not least as part of change management processes. Lewin died tragically soon after the workshop, having published little on his emergent ideas. This paper analyses Lewin’s own new discovered personal speaking notes written during the planning of the workshop, which take the form of scant typewritten pages, with handwritten annotations. Given Lewin’s place in the canon of the greats of management thought (Burns 2017b) and the ‘eureka’ status of New Britain, our data and analysis evidences, first, Lewin’s own thinking about the workshop, and connects this to his broader contribution to management thought and practice. Second, it helps to address recent questions raised by recent research about what was uniquely Lewinian about Lewin’s contribution, and what was it that made him this father figure.