Supporting co-sponsorship by The Fielding Graduate University.
Fear has pervaded the discourse and experience of contemporary life; we are bombarded with images of danger and threats. As we work and live in groups, we no longer know whom to trust and who may harm us. Yet we must live and work together. Bridging our differences through understanding becomes imperative.
Groups create categories of people and then treat them as though they had inherent reality. We have now in the US, for example, red and blue groups. Other categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, social class, nationality and age are also created through group life, and their formation and definitions are often influenced by unconscious processes. Even within these categories, people have different minds and their assumptive world contains views of reality that are astonishing in their diversity. Often, these profound and fundamental differences are masked or muddled and, because they are not understood, they become terrifying. All too often, disagreement can thereby become deadly.
Groups create images of themselves and others and then behave as though properties ascribed to individuals belonging to these groups were somehow inherent in the individuals rather than a product of complex group forces. At the root of these attributions are the anxieties of living and working together and, taken together, they can create cultures of fear.
Our emotional, intellectual and spiritual engagement with the world, through whatever roles we occupy in whatever groups we take part in, is always marked by our capacity to tolerate and explore what is uncertain, unknown or unthought in ourselves and in our situations. The unknown is at the same time what is hidden and feared in each of us and what is unknown and feared in the realities of our lives and workplaces.
The Tavistock tradition of group relations conferences is a means to explore how anxieties affect group life and all the individuals within those groups and then to imagine together how the differences that create and reflect those anxieties might be transcended. In viewing group life through the anxieties that are structured both at conscious and unconscious levels, we can become more aware of how fears, both rational and irrational, influence our ability to live and work with others. We try to go beyond the superficial statements of difference and category that we are all familiar with and delve into the deeper, harder-to-grasp roots of the spaces that divide us. Today, this means of analyzing group life has extraordinary relevance.
The purpose of the Conference is to create a temporary institution as a laboratory in which participants can experience and study group and institutional dynamics typical of organizations, broadly construed. The temporary institution thus created shares, at both practical and metaphoric levels, aspects of the larger social world in which we live, and insight gained is transferable to a wide variety of real world settings.
Conference participants will have the opportunity to
This conference offers an experiential means of studying unconscious processes of group life, processes that are ubiquitous in our lives, but are seldom available for examination. Indeed, meaningful scrutiny is only possible where members of a group devote themselves to this task in such a way that shared systems and the dynamic rules that power them can be observed.
In organizational life, people may gossip or commiserate, but because individuals hold only their unique piece of the organizational experience, it is difficult for any subgroup to see how all the parts fit together to form a system - a system that is usually impossible for any single individual to change - even when change is sorely needed. Through shared, collective understandings of such systems, transformation becomes possible.
Tavistock Group Relations conferences offer an opportunity to study and reflect on these processes through real-time experiential learning. The focus of these conferences is on groups, rather than upon individuals, and specific attention is paid to those unconscious or covert forces that foster or obstruct the capacity to work together in groups. Of special importance are the nature and function of boundaries - between inner and outer reality, between role and person, between individual and group, between groups, and between organizations and their environments. We will also give special attention to the effects of individual differences such as gender, race, age, class, nationality and sexual orientation on leadership and the capacity to work in organizational systems.
This learning model provides an opportunity to study what happens within and between groups at the time it is occurring. Participants may explore the complex and often covert processes of organizational systems as they experience them directly, in ways that are usually not open for discussion in organizations and clinical settings. Inevitably, the temporary institution created in this conference mirrors the patterns and personalities of our work life, allowing us to engage, reflect and learn on both individual and institutional levels.
Learning in this model involves disciplined attention to one's own experience, openness to the experience of others, toleration of uncertainty, the readiness to interpret what is happening and the courage to test one's interpretations through communication and action. It also requires being alert to both conscious and unconscious aspects of behavior and the ways in which action is shaped by the broader social, political and economic contexts of the contemporary world.
This model of working and learning evolves from the work of Wilfred R. Bion and others associated with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. (See Readings for more description). Conferences such as these take place throughout the world. In the United States, the A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems (AKRI) is the national organization that sponsors, through its regional centers, these group relations conferences. This conference is sponsored by the Washington-Baltimore Center for the Study of Group Relations of the A.K. Rice Institute and it has been authorized by the Executive Committee of the Washington-Baltimore Center.