At the Connecticut workshop (from left to right): Frank Wright (possibly Dr. Frank Simpson¹), Leah Gold Fine, Kurt Lewin, Leland Bradford and Ken Benne

As Lewin tells the story:

One example may illustrate the potentialities of cooperation between practitioners and social scientists. In the beginning of this year the Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Race Relations for the State of Connecticut, who is at the same time a leading member of the Interracial Commission of the State of Connecticut, approached us with a request to conduct a workshop for fifty community workers in the field of intergroup relations from all over the state of Connecticut.

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1 Whover wrote the caption in Marrow’s book mistakenly mixed up Benne and Bradford (corrected above). Dr. Frank Simpson was the commission member who solicited Lewin’s services and I suspect a second mistake was misnaming him “Wright”

A project emerged in which three agencies co-operated, the Advisory Committee on Intergroup Relations of the State of Connecticut, The Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress, and the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The State Advisory Committee is composed of members of the Interracial Commission of the State of Connecticut, a member of the State Department of Education of the State of Connecticut, and the person in charge of the Connecticut Valley Region of the Conference of Christians and Jews. The state of Connecticut seems to be unique in having an interracial commission as a part of its regular government. It was apparent that any improvement of techniques which could be linked with this strategic central body would have a much better chance of a wide-spread and lasting effect. After a thorough discussion of various possibilities the following change-experiment was designed co-operatively.

Recent research findings have indicated that the ideologies and stereotypes which govern inter-group relations should not be viewed as individual character traits but that they are anchored in cultural standards, that their stability and their change depend largely on happenings in groups as groups. Experience with leadership training had convinced us that the workshop setting is among the most powerful tools for bringing about improvement of skill in handling inter-group relations.

Even a good and successful workshop, however, seems seldom to have the chance to lead to long-range improvements in the field of inter-group relations. The individual who comes home from the workshop full of enthusiasm and new insights will again have to face the community, one against perhaps 100,000. Obviously, the chances are high that his success will not be up to his new level of aspiration, and that soon disappointments will set him back again. We are facing here a question which is of prime importance for any social change, namely the problem of its permanence.

To test certain hypotheses in regard to the effect of individual as against group settings, the following variations were introduced into the experimental workshop. Part of the delegates came as usual, one individual from a town. For a number of communities, however, it was decided the attempt would be made to secure a number of delegates and if possible to develop in the workshop teams who would keep up their team relationship after the workshop. This should give a greater chance for permanency of the enthusiasm and group productivity and should also multiply the power of the participants to bring about the desired change. A third group of delegates to the workshop would receive a certain amount of expert help even after they returned to the community...

The methods of recording the essential events of the workshop included an evaluation session at the end of every day. Observers who had attended the various subgroup sessions reported (into a recording machine) the leadership pattern they had observed, the progress or lack of progress in the development of the groups from a conglomeration of individuals to an integrated “we” and so on (Lewin, 1941, 1997, p148).

Several elements of what became the T-group (the T stood for training) were woven into the Connecticut experiment from the beginning:

1. The training would take place in the form of a workshop, in this case lasting two weeks, away from the regular work environment of the participants.

2. In Connecticut there were three working groups - a skilled facilitator led each group (Ron Lippitt, Leland Bradford, and Ken Benne).

3. The participants were taught communication, conflict management, and other applicable skills. Planned “re-education” of the “social construction of reality” took place through brief lectures on social science theory, interaction with and influence by the faculty, interaction with the other workshop participants (a highly diverse group), and immersion in the democratic principles of the process.

4. Behavioral observation was a carefully crafted part of the process.

5. Teams were included so as to leverage group dynamics in sustaining the learning after the workshop.

My father, who experienced his first T-group in 1953, maintained all five of these elements in his adaptation of T-group methodology. I will recap these in Chapter 12 along with other elements which emerged during the workshop.

The idea of taking the participants out of their normal working environment became a valuable OD option:

“Sometimes the value system of this face-to-face group conflicts with the values of the larger cultural setting and it is necessary to separate the group from the larger setting. For instance, during retraining of recreational leaders from autocratic to democratic patterns Bavelas was careful to safeguard them from interference by the administration of the recreational center. The effectiveness of camps or workshops in changing ideology or conduct depends in part on the possibility of creating such ‘cultural islands’ during change. The stronger the accepted subculture of the workshop and the more isolated it is the more will it minimize that type of resistance to change which is based on the relation between the individual and the standards of the larger group (Lewin, 1947, 1997, p332).”

The observers played a vital role and were young graduate students in social psychology connected in one way or the other to Lewin and has staff. One, Melvin “Mef” Seeman (1918–2020), was still alive at 101 years of age and of reasonably sound mind at the time of this writing. He enthusiastically spoke with me several times, sharing his warm feelings about Lewin and the workshop although his memory of the details had understandably faded. Sadly, Mr. Seeman passed away Janauary 31st, 2020. RIP Mef.

As mentioned, Mef and the other researchers silently took behavioral notes during the day, and then reviewed them with the faculty in the evening. An observer might report: “At 10AM Mrs. X attacked the group leader. Mr. Y came to the defense of the leader and he and Mrs. X became involved in a heated exchange. Some other members were drawn into taking sides. Other members seemed frightened and tried to make peace. But they were ignored by the combatants. At 10:10AM the leader came back in to redirect attention to the problem... (Bradford et al, 1964, p82).” They also kept careful stats on both the faculty and the participants with strictly behavioral data such as who spoke, how many times, and to whom. Part of the intention was to derive lessons learned from the behavior of the three leaders.

Some of the participants commuted home in the evenings, while the majority stayed at the workshop location, on the Teachers College campus in New Britain, Connecticut. Early in the workshop, three of the participants caught wind of the evening faculty session, and inquired as to whether they could listen in. There are various versions of what happened next. It seems likely that some of the staff were initially stressed by the intrusion and inclined to keep the session private. Marrow reports that, “Most of the staff feared it would be harmful to have the trainees sit in while their behavior was being discussed (Marrow, 1969, p212).” Whatever the case in every version, Lewin, true to form, clearly and warmly welcomed the participants in. According to Warren Bennis, as they sat quietly listening, “They were fascinated by what they heard. Analyzing how a group formed and evolved was much more fun than simply being in one (Bennis, 2010).”

According to Ron Lippitt, “Sometime during the evening an observer made some remarks about the behavior of one of the three persons that were sitting in—a woman trainee. She broke in to disagree with the observation and described it from her point of view. For a while there was quite an active dialogue between the research observer, the trainer, and the trainee about the interpretation of the event, with Kurt an active prober, obviously enjoying this different source of data that had to be coped with and integrated.

At the end of the evening the trainees asked if they could come back for the next meeting at which their behavior would be evaluated. Kurt, feeling that it had been a valuable contribution rather than an intrusion, enthusiastically agreed to their return. The next night at least half of the fifty or sixty participants were there as the result of the grapevine reporting of the activity by the three participants.

The evening session from then on became the significant learning experience of the day, with the focus on actual behavioral events and with active dialogue about differences of interpretation and observations of the events by those who had participated in them.

The staff were equally enthusiastic, for they found the process a unique way of securing data and interpreting behavior. In addition the staff discovered that feedback had the effect of making participants more sensitive to their own conduct and brought criticism into the open in a healthy and constructive way (Marrow, 1969).”

A participant that attended the next evening’s debrief wrote this in their journal: “I think the thing that impressed me the most was how eager Dr. Benne and the other faculty leaders seemed to be to enter into critical analysis of their own leadership, and to make changes in their plans and performance if better ideas seemed to be forthcoming. This attitude seemed to make it possible for all of us to enter into this type of objective and constructive discussion (Lippitt, 1949, p140).”

By the next evening Lewin had expanded the invitation to all of the workshop participants. Each evening more and more came. Often, upon hearing the review, they became dynamically engaged and sometimes defensive about the information. “Lewin and the others realized that a group that scrutinized its own process as it formed and changed was something new and valuable (Bennis, 2010).”

My father’s associate (and my colleague) Dr. John Scherer was also mentored by Lippitt. Dad quotes John’s recollection of a conversation between the three of them thusly, “John Scherer writes, ‘Ron Lippitt told Bob and me it was like an electric current went through Lewin as he got excited about what was happening in that moment—the difference being surfaced between the way the two participants had experienced what happened and what his faculty had experienced... (Crosby, 2019).” As Bradford put it, the result was like a “tremendous electric charge...as people reacted to data about their own behavior (Marrow, 1969, p212).”

Dad continues, “According to Bradford, Gibb, Benne, in 1964, To the training staff it seemed that a potentially powerful medium and process of re-education was somewhat inadvertently hit upon.’ During a group conversation they decided that the following year they would report these interaction dynamics in the midst of the discussions! Most participants are unaware of such dynamics except at some level of discomfort when tension surfaces. In this way participants would learn how to focus on the processes that are constantly taking place between them and the other people in the conversation as well as the content. Thus was birthed the T-group which still creates an electric moment of openness for most new participants (Crosby, 2019).”

A new clarity about action research also began to emerge during this historic event. In Lewin’s summary of the workshop he elevates the role of training in his methodology. Indeed, Lippitt calls it “training-action-research” in his 1949 book Training in Community Relations, which is completely dedicated to the planning, execution, and evaluation of the Connecticut workshop. Here is what Lewin had to say:

I have been deeply impressed with the tremendous pedagogical effect which these evaluation meetings, designed for the purpose of scientific recording, had on the training process. The atmosphere of objectivity, the readiness by the faculty to discuss openly their mistakes, far from endangering their position, seemed to lead to an enhancement of appreciation and to bring about that mood of relaxed objectivity which is nowhere more difficult to achieve than in the field of inter-group relations which is loaded with emotionality and attitude rigidity even among the so-called liberals and those whose job it is to promote inter-group relations.

This and similar experiences have convinced me that we should consider action, research, and training as a triangle that should be kept together for the sake of any of its corners (Figure 10.1, next page). It is seldom possible to improve the action pattern without training personnel. In fact today the lack of competent training personnel is one of the greatest hindrances to progress in setting up more experimentation. The training of large numbers of social scientists who can handle scientific problems but are also equipped for the delicate task of building productive, hard-hitting teams with practitioners is a prerequisite for progress in social science as well as in social management for intergroup relations.

As I watched, during the workshop, the delegates from different towns all over Connecticut transform from a multitude of unrelated individuals, frequently opposed in their outlook and their interests, into co-operative teams not on the basis of sweetness but on the basis of readiness to face difficulties realistically, to apply honest fact-finding, and to work together to overcome them; when I saw the pattern of role-playing emerge, saw the major responsibilities move slowly according to plan from the faculty to the trainees; when I saw, in the final session, the State Advisory Committee receive the backing of the delegates for a plan of linking the teachers colleges throughout the state with certain aspects of group relations within the communities; when I heard the delegates and teams of delegates from various towns present their plans for city workshops and a number of other projects to go into realization immediately, I could not help feeling that the close integration of action, training, and research holds tremendous possibilities for the field of inter-group relations. I would like to pass on this feeling to you (my bolding) (Lewin, 1946, 1997, p149).”

Figure 10.1
Training, action, and research as a triangle (Crosby, 2020)

Besides the birth of the T-group, which we will return to in Chapter 12, the Connecticut workshop was successful on many levels, including the all-important goal of transferring the methods of the social scientist to the community so that they could continue with their own action research activities. As Marrow put it, “Lewin believed that the social scientists may serve principally as consultants or guides, so that the inquiry can be carried on with a high degree of technical competence. But the work must be done by the citizens themselves. Any group of people must cure itself of its sickness on the basis of its own diagnosis and treatment (my bolding) (Marrow, 1969, p221).”

Based on the situation, substitute the word “employees” for the word “citizens” in the sentence above. True to his quest for a universal theory, Lewin applied the same methods in industrial settings. Let us turn our attention there now.