The Practitioner’s Handbook of Team Coaching

14 Beyond the theory of everything

Group analysis, conversation and five questions to choose theory in action with teams

Christine Thornton

Theory, praxis, and the desire for a theory of everything

In 1951, Kurt Lewin commented, ‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory.’ Theory is valuable to the practising team coach, but no theory is good at all times, in all places. In the opening lines of his first book (1948), Foulkes, the founder of group analysis, clarifies that theory can help us understand isolated aspects of reality, not provide a ‘theory of everything’: ‘Life is a complex whole. It can only artificially be separated into parts, analysed. Such isolation becomes necessary when we want to know what a particular set of forces contribute ...