Jean Boulton

Dr Jean Boulton is a theoretical physicist, management consultant, teacher and author based in Frome, Somerset. She studied physics at Oxford and completed a PhD in quantum physics at Cambridge, then moved through engineering and management into management consultancy, holding executive positions in large corporates and leading the strategy and organisation division of an international consultancy before setting up her own practice. She has consulted to organisations for decades.

She came across complexity theory in the 1990s and worked at Cranfield University with Professor Peter Allen, who had been a postdoc with Ilya Prigogine. She is lead author of Embracing Complexity (Oxford University Press, 2015, with Peter M. Allen and Cliff Bowman) and author of The Dao of Complexity (De Gruyter, 2024), which sets complexity science beside Daoist thinking and applies both to management, individual change and global issues.

A Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a visiting academic with the University of Bath and Cranfield School of Management, she teaches worldwide on postgraduate programmes. Her practice rule, that she will not work without a diagnosis first, speaks directly to experienced independent professionals deciding which work to take.