Jean E. Neumann: The consultant's consultant, working through complexity in organizational development and change

Abstract

Jean Neumann is senior fellow in scholarly practice at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR), London. She works as both a practitioner and academic in the field of organizational change and development and provides professional advice and development to managers, leaders, consultants, and other organizational change practitioners. Her work is focused on integrating theory and practice to develop more realistic and sensible approaches to the organizational change. While the academy is still accustomed to split theory and practice, research, and action, Jean Neumann's contribution stresses the intimate and profound connection between them; as she demonstrates through her consultancy practice, it is not enough to try to explain things (as the traditional research methods do); the challenge is also to try to change them within a process of understanding and inquiry that involves all members of a given social system. In this sense, her (systemic) consultancy model for organizational change and development offers a learning architecture for a change process that challenges complex issues and supports participative solutions to entrenched problems enabling people to work with uncertainty.