Jean Lawrence

Jean Lawrence, who died earlier this year after several years of illness, was one of the few women from a management background to take up roles in UK Business Schools in the 1960s and 1970s.

Jean had an early career in industry, discovering management and managing were somewhat more complex than the summation of an MBA syllabus. While at Manchester Business School, she developed an interest in experiential education, based upon live projects on issues of current interest. One of these was based upon the Concorde aircraft and how it might enter airline service. I worked with her and other colleagues on this. I especially found much good sense in Jean's continuing conviction that management and managing were best learnt by critical reflection upon experience accompanied by the same level of attention to academic knowledge. (Perhaps this was due to my own background in engineering apprenticeships, degrees, and design work in the UK and the USA.) Jean was a good exemplar of a project method of learning that rested upon a rich understanding of experiential learning. It gave a challenge to a common academic notion that learning must be first cognition and then application.

At Manchester, Jean developed a creative working relationship with John Morris, who was then (and, it transpired, the only ever) Professor of Management Development. Between them they encouraged colleagues to continue to build live projects in both MBA and executive programmes. These included working in both public sector and commercial organisations. The challenges presented in designing and engaging with such an extensive experiential programme were well beyond many colleagues, who were ill equipped to understand what their role might be in supporting the learners. In fairness, these approaches also seemed to be too challenging for some of the ‘clients’.

At the same time, Reg Revans (who had not been appointed to a Chair at MBS) and his colleagues continued to build the work of Action Learning. This sch