“On Beyond Bion”

The 10th annual Margaret Rioch Lecture
presented by Dr. Georgia Sorenson,
with commentary by Dr. James MacGregor Burns
Sponsored by the Washington Baltimore Center for the Study of Group Relations
May 28 – June 11, 2004

On Beyond Bion
Georgia Sorenson 

It is truly an honor to give the 10^th Annual Margaret Rioch Lecture1. I use the term “lecture” loosely, given this format.   Rioch would have enjoyed (as well as challenged) the transformation of a lecture to a blog.2  Special thanks to Washington-Baltimore Center Program Chair Joseph Schmidt for organizing and WBC president Michael Speer for authorizing such a creative forum and to all of you who are participating with me. I offer my appreciation to our discussant, leadership scholar James MacGregor Burns as well.

 The title of this talk, On Beyond Bion, pays tribute to a small book by a great American philosopher, Theodore Geisel, known to many as Dr. Seuss.  Geisel authored On Beyond Zebra, a phantasmagoric exploration of a boy who challenged his playmates to stretch their imagination beyond the traditional 26 letters of the alphabet – from A (Ape) to Z (Zebra) to create an extended alphabet. You might say he dealt in unauthorized space:

"In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!" 

Wilfred Bion, of course, was such a thinker, a creator of new realms and constructs.   His work, especially his ideas concerning the group-as-a-whole, the here-and-now, and basic assumption life, continue to be vital to our understanding of group life.  Bion was certainly On Beyond Zebra. 

 Four decades after Margaret Rioch founded AKRI to carry on the work of Wilfred Bion and others, it is possible that some of you will know nothing at all about Wilfred Bion or Margaret Rioch. Nevertheless, both remain with us today as shadow, guide, ghost, or foil, as do all our group relations ancestors.  They are present in our work in a very real way, as I will discuss later.

Margaret Rioch returned to me – or to us if you agree this was our collective social dream – a couple of weeks ago, shortly after I was asked to deliver the Rioch lecture. I am a little hard of hearing in real life, and in my dream I couldn’t quite understand what she was trying to say.   So I asked her to repeat herself – imagine that – of course she didn’t.  But such is her legendary tenacity that she did come back the next night in full force and arched her eyebrow and told me in no uncertain terms to “harness” (or was it “harvest?”) our collective work.  So be it. You decide.

The Realm of the Invisible

Today I want to address several aspects of organization life that are largely invisible yet are central to different stages of organizational development, including our own.  The enduring power of what I call the organization-idea and it’s founding and their implications today will be discussed initially. Secondly, the juxtaposition of the past, present, and future in organizational life and how it is utilized and managed will be introduced next.   Lastly, I will show how “the space-between” or what I call the  “blue notes “of organizational life yields rich material – perhaps most importantly the  floating world of unauthorized space. I will offer a few stories from my own long association with Rioch and others-- with the hope that those of you reading this will offers yours, too. 

The Realm of Ideas

The first element, wholly invisible yet central to the life of an organization, is the realm of ideas.  It is popular to focus on leadership or leaders these days, but both the process of leadership and leaders themselves are merely the handmaidens of ideas.  Ideas – some ennobling and some nefarious – germinate actions and common purposes.  The organization-idea precedes the primary task, which serves to bring the idea alive. 

An organization’s mission or purpose is often the explication of its central idea. Leadership, it might be said, is the implementation (and in the case of referent-leadership, the embodiment) of the organization-idea.  Mary Parker Follett captured the essence of this invisible leadership in an article written in the 1930s and published after her death. 

Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader – the common purpose… And I believe that we are coming more and more to act, whatever our theories, on our faith in the power of this invisible leader.3

Ideas grow great leaders. Think of the ideas that have produced great leaders, whether activist leaders, political leaders, or intellectual leaders.   The idea of democracy, the idea of markets, and the idea of the unconscious are three great historical ideas, some of which manifested in revolutionary or organizational form.  

Bion was very interested in ideas, and in fact, developed a theory of thinking that gave ideas an almost iconic stature.   He borrowed from Plato's theory of inherent forms and pure thoughts.  His notion of ideas – somewhat similar to Berkeley’s – is based on his premise that pure thoughts exist before there is a mind to think them.  Bion’s  “thoughts without a thinker,” inhabited an invisible realm ISO a mind with moral imagination to bring them to form.  A well-tuned mind, he contended, was a receptor or container of an idea. 

I could add a personal note here that illustrates the floating world of “ideas-in-search of mind.”  A week ago, while writing this talk, I received an unexpected email from a person I did not know (full disclosure: referred by Mannie Sher) Amy Fraher, who asked me: 

I've been looking for photographs of group relations people – in particular Margaret Rioch. I've asked about dozen people and no one has any.

As it turns out she is writing a book4 about idea organizations. She wrote:

I develop the construct of idea organizations – organizations designed to generate intellectual concepts, rather than to produce goods or services – in order to examine the psychodynamic workings of such institutes as the National Training Laboratories, Tavistock and A. K. Rice Institutes as well as early psychoanalytic societies. I show how the innovation these idea organizations require to survive becomes the focus of ruthless attacks and inter-group rivalries, creating a cycle that puts the organization itself at risk. 

I was not surprised to learn of the organizational complexities associated with organizations of ideas.  Max Lerner once said, “Ideas are weapons” and no doubt there is certain violence to challenging orthodoxy.  An idea, by definition, involves disruption and a throwing off of the old ways of seeing things.  Bion was intimately cognizant of the inherent destructive nature of ideas.  Nicola Glover, in her work on psychoanalytic aesthetics writes,

In the creative process, Bion shows that thinking involves the dismantling of previous views and theories, allowing the formation of new ideas. In changing one's way of thinking, the container has to be dissolved before it is reformed. Bion regarded the effort of dissolution as having the quality of a small psychic catastrophe, a "going-to-pieces"… The ability to tolerate this upheaval will result in growth, but it is a painful process that is dependent on the individual's capacity to withstand fragmentation, anxiety, and doubt.5  

I do not have access to the catastrophe Bion wrought in bringing forth his concepts developed in what he modestly called his Leaderless Group Project.  There is no doubt, however, that he faced such forces, as he remarked much later, in 1977:

Whether it is a group of people or an individual which is giving birth to an idea, the pains which are associated with that experience are extremely upsetting and disturbing, and somebody will certainly try to put a stop to it; nobody likes pain. I should be surprised if the phagocytes do not collect and try to gobble up this new idea before it gets more troublesome, before it turns into a contagion or an infection.

In fact, Bion would explore the invisible and disruptive nature of ideas throughout his life. In Bion’s second Brazilian lecture Lawrence writes that “Bion suggested that perhaps Milton's blindness was induced by the unconscious desire to see ‘those things invisible to man’ which Milton reveals in Book III of Paradise Lost.6

We are wise to remember that ideas shape history and institutions, and that ideas have consequences, some of which thread through our life and work for centuries to come.

The Realm of Form

The A.K. Rice Institute was founded in 1964 by Margaret Rioch.  On the plane ride back from her first conference, Rioch told me later,  “I had already determined that I would do my best to import this kind of event to America.”7   It would be a complicated birthing. 

To situate the new organization in place in time means that its very presence disrupts.  To establish an organization means to create friction in the field, between and among similar organizations, social networks, funders, ideological agendas, and deeply political infrastructures. AKRI had to make its place among existing institutions and frameworks such as NTL, Lewin’s centers, and other such institutions.   Eric Trist describes such an event in terms of a  “turbulent field” of increasing complexity.

He should know. During the 1960s,  there was considerable disruption at the Tavistock Institute. Trist was on hand to see Tavistock split into two major groups, with the Human Resources Centre (HRC) led by himself and the smaller Center for Applied Social Research (CASR) organized around Ken Rice. To some degree that split represented the dual focus of socio-technical consultation and psycho-social consultation.  It has also been described as more personality-driven, but clearly the work was headed in two distinct directions. To add to the complication,  the School of Family Psychiatry and Community Mental Health, the Institute for Marital Studies, and the Institute for Operational Research were also subsumed and the organization reorganized into a matrix structure.8

Rioch became involved with the Tavistock work during this turbulent period and it was to have a profound effect on her personally.  In June of 1992, four years before her death, she began to record some of the early history of the AKRI with me.9 

In 1962 my husband, Dr. David McKenzie Rioch and I entertained at dinner an Englishman, named Cyril Sofer, who was visiting the US  in the hope of learning something or other which he could not learn in England.  In the course of a wide-ranging conversation he mentioned that the Tavistock Institute of London was offering to the general public (perhaps not so general) a type of experience, which, so far as I knew, we did not have in the US.

One American male advanced student had attended such an event in England, but had been extraordinarily secretive about it afterward, so that no one else from American had attended the following years. I made some not very complimentary comment on the American, whom I knew slightly. My curiosity was greatly aroused by what I heard and I succeeded in getting Dr. Sofer to tell more.  The detail which he did give, I do not remember. But true to my promise, the next spring when the event in England was to be repeated, I found myself, together with my friend, Dr. Morris Parloff, on the plane for London.

Together we visited the London Tavistock Clinic and were given to understand the ‘conference’ which we both intended to attend, was indeed something of a mystery to those who had not attended, and was spoken of by those who had attended with a kind of semi-religious fervor. 

As we left the conference to go back to London, I found myself weeping quite unabashedly, knowing this was a very important event in my life which was now at an end.  I still have a clear memory of realizing this was a high point in my life.

Rioch was to align herself with the HRC and Rice and bring the work to America. Some years later after his death she named the institute after him.  Even the naming involved turbulence. Miller was adamantly opposed to naming it after Rice, asserting that it fostered an unhealthy dependency on a charismatic leader.  He and Rioch apparently had quite a row about it, and she stubbornly refused to reconsider.

I don’t want to dismiss what must have been tremendous excitement about these luminous new ideas and this new American enterprise.  In the early days, there were friendly historical ties through Kurt Lewin’s efforts and others.  I hope one of you will share some of those early stories in the blog that follows.  But we know, too, that  “change has its enemies,” as Robert Kennedy so often reminded us.  Undoubtedly the chaos and contention was surely there, too, as the work would attempt to situate itself in an environment of American T-groups, NTL, and others working in a similar genre. 

Here-and-Now Reloaded

Organizations that survive beyond the founding stage, such as our own, become containers of the Past, Present, and Future and to lead them is exceedingly rich and complex.  In such organizations, leaders are always  Janus-like figures, looking forward and backward simultaneously. A successor is both a leader and a follower, by definition, and must come to terms with the organizational legacy and the founder’s ghost.  A friend with the Disney Company told me recently that some forty years after Walt Disney’s death, “that’s not the way Walt would have done it,” is still heard at board meetings. Similar pronouncements are sometimes heard about Margaret Rioch. 

Interestingly, one of our organizing ideas is “here-and-now” and yet “then and there” is etched upon our source code.   While our founding remains mostly invisible to me, I can feel its footprints in conferences over the years. How could it be otherwise?  Imported from a chaotic or at least unsettled organization in England by an American woman whose purposes were complex, we were birthed into a certain culture of dependency, alcoholic behavior, sexual liaisons, breakdowns, Vietnam, Watergate, and other irrational behavior. 

As William Faulkner once astutely reminded us: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.10 We are all aware of conference staff issues mirrored in the membership and visa versa, but so too is our genetic and organizational history.  In some conferences there is a certain feel of enchantment. As a director of conferences, I have experienced the enchanted aspects of conference life and for a brief time in the conference embodied/re-enacted aspects of our organization’s history.  It was crazy-making as well as fascinating.  I also had the sense in my enchanted conference of working reparatively across time to some degree, healing old history.  I was fortunate to have an Associate Director11 who could work in two realms and knew me well.  Though I would have not foregone the experience,  I would have liked to have been better prepared for it.  Perhaps my experience gives voice to what others may have sensed and we can begin to talk of it.

This I do know: we need to know our history, to reclaim it. We have some excellent work and written history, including some work by Larry Gould, but it has not been widely taken up.  Understanding that organization-ideas and foundings are necessarily violent and deconstructive, we can have compassion and forgiveness as well as appreciation. It certainly would support our understanding of this work in a broader way.

Thirty years ago I was invited to dine at the Rioch’s who lived nearby.  I was a young undergraduate at American University. I wasn’t used to professors asking me to dinner.   I brought her irises and their cook, Fernanda,  made an elegant and simple dinner. We talked of a new translation of the Tao te Ching that I had given the Riochs some weeks earlier.  David suggested I read the philosopher George Santayana.  A short while later I read the works of Santayana, and especially noted his warning, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Was this David Rioch’s gentle message to me? Did he know I would be writing about this some 30 years later?  I do not believe, as Santayana did, that the present moment is predetermined by the past, but I do think that while “history may not repeat itself, it rhymes.”12

Let me illustrate the power and rhyme of the past-present-future by discussing the work of an installation artist.   I believe the use of simile will illustrate the organizational complexity of non-linearity that I have alluded to earlier.

There is an installation artist, Shimon Attie, whose work reveals the past in public sites.  His work has been described this way:  These “acts of remembrance” “seek to give visual form to the personal and collective histories that are latent -- but not visible -- within our cities' architecture.” Attie explores our relationship with the remembered and mediated past.  In a work in the Lower East Side in the US, Between Dreams and History, and later in a work, Untitled Memory in San Francisco, he projected with lasers old photographs of the buildings from the last century onto the glass facades of buildings where they once stood. [Thus the photograph of the building as it was in the late 18^th century lies atop a modern glass apartment building.] Then he photographed the buildings with their architectural ancestors projected upon them, to introduce still a third dimension in time, which he entitled Between Dreams and History.13

So how do we manage the mess of buildings, ghosts, and collective and mediated past – all in the present let alone construct a future? And why should we? Isn’t this heresy in a here-and-now organization?

One of Bion’s legacies was his gift of the here-and-now (as opposed to there-and -then).  The “present moment” is a core construct of Zen Buddhism. (Aka “Be Here Now”). Bion and David Rioch both spent their childhoods in India, and together with Margaret Rioch, were early western Zen students.  Margaret, as some of you know, was a collaborator with Daisetz Suzuki who is credited with bringing Zen to America. 

Students of Zen are quite attached to their conception of here-and-now, I can assure you.  In 1972 I took a walk along a canal with a Zen teacher.    It was in the aftermath of Hurricane Agnes and the C & O Canal, a treasure and respite in Washington DC, had been devastated. Great oaks and sycamores lay dying on their sides and I was filled with sadness. These trees had been my friends since childhood.  It would take decades to replace them and I just couldn’t shake my despair.  “What?" the Zen teacher exclaimed, "These are marvelous logs. I don’t see any trees here at all.” 

Even the Zen teacher, however, conceded that the memory of the trees and the hoped for future of new growth, existed in the present moment alongside those stalwart logs.  

Today, some thirty years later, I am impressed with the increasing recognition of the curvilinear nature of time, and the Zen master’s response.  I certainly experienced it in the fall 2002 conference I directed in Washington, D.C.  I often see its representation in popular culture, whether it is Atties’s installations, groups of “post modern primitives,” family historians offering reparative work with one’s ancestors, or a recent book, “The Future of the Past,” by Alexander Stille.  Time and task are often isomorphic.

The recognition of clinical isomorphism was described by analyst Edgar Levenson:

As we attempt to elaborate the patterns of behavior and the consistent relationships of these patterns to different aspects of the patient’s life, we see that there are not only enduring patterns but also a remarkable homology of pattern, over and over in every aspect of the patient’s life. The same structure runs through language, past history, present behavior, fantasies, dreams, and behavior in the therapy room. Recognition of this isomorphism was at the core of Freud’s clinical perceptions. Indeed, the ability to detect and elaborate isomorphic patterns, regardless of the metaphor, may well be at the core of therapy or for that matter, any creative process.14

Bion suggested – after Eliot – that our work be focused “beyond memory and desire,”15  but later he, too, found himself in the mobius loop of non-dual time.  In his later years, his own sense of the here-and- now transformed into this “multi-timensional” realm and he wrote of it in the paradoxically and appropriately titled A Memoir of the Future and The Past Presented.

In group relations work we find isomorphism and fractals everywhere else, why do we continue to exclude the isomorphism of the here-and-now?   Even more important, how do we manage and deploy it in conferences and consultation?

The Realm of Blue Notes

A last invisible realm I will speak of today emerges as an organization assumes its identity as it becomes embedded in extra-organizational life.  This is what I call the “space between” and may be roughly analogous to what some have called the “boundary regions.”  The I Ching (Book of Changes) refers to it as chi zoshiki (chi invisibility) and it is seen as a powerful invisible extension of the visible.  The boundary regions – called free space by Harry Boyte16 – are spaces not controlled by the organization and are often realms of creativity, power, and innovation in the private sector. What has been described as “unauthorized space” and treated accordingly in past conferences appeared in the form of groups named “floating world” and “blue notes” in the intergroup event of the conference I spoke of earlier. 

I often use a metaphor for the fullness of “the space between” since it is extremely hard to define what cannot be seen.  While unseen, physiologically it can be a quickening energy, undigested rawness, a chill down the spine, or a churning stomach.  Unlike pornography, you’ll know it if you don’t see it.

I have compared it in other work17 to jazz-great Thelonious Monk’s masterly use of  “blue notes.”  Blue notes comprise the music that takes place in the “space” between notes.  Jazz critics attribute the genius of Monk’s remarkable music to the nuance, phrasing, and rhythm of the spaces between the formal notes. That space of course, is completely invisible.  But it is the relationship between notes that makes them powerful, not the notes themselves.  If we extend this analogy to leadership, invisible leadership takes place in the space between people or in the spaces between organizations.

The space-between is of course not new to us. Clinician and Washingtonian Harry Stack Sullivan’s use of object relations is a therapeutic equivalent. Sullivan, who worked with Rioch at Chestnut Lodge in nearby Maryland, demonstrated that the space between patient and doctor would replicate past dysfunction.  Drilling down into the “space between” is everything you need.

So what bearing does this have on organizations, on our organization? For maturing organizations, particularly in the 21^st century, it is the space between organizations – again, the so-called unauthorized space – that yields the harvest.

During this time of AKRI  transition and change, it would be wise to look at the “space between” between WBC and the “other” – whether other affiliates, AKRI, or even our co-sponsors.  What can we learn by exploring these realms?  What activities have the “floating world” – perhaps the virtual world? – engendered? What creative but unauthorized activities are happening there?  Have we publically addressed the competition and collaboration between and among centers/affiliates/AKRI?  If we drill down deep into unauthorized space we might find where the real work occurs.  What has happened to the notion of linear time when we discover the child who birthed the mother institution is collaborating in being re-organized away from the mother? In mobius time, is the child now the father to the man?  (I am speaking here of WBC’s role in the founding of our former organization.).

The etymology of “innovation” is from the Latin innovare to renew, and from novare to make new again. Can we dare innovate, and by that I mean honor and examine our roots in the here-and-now?   Can we remember and reclaim our history to work reparatively and creatively in the future knowing that all ideas and foundings must by definition be imperfect? Do we dare know and forgive?

I think we can be fearless in this fearful world, because we have been given by Bion and Rioch and so many others the capacity to see what is unseen and to speak to it. In Zen, we say: “return to your original face, the face you had before you were born.” 

Let us venture into the mystery, on beyond Bion, beyond memory and desire, beyond innovation and no innovation, beyond authorized space, beyond linear time, beyond harvest/harness, to our original face.  A place deeply creative, new, and yet familiar, too.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.18

Conversation with James MacGregor Burns

…on ideas and change

Ideas are needed to create a different future. Ideas are central to change, obviously. The first idea related to a change effort, is the idea of change itself.  Then the question is, evaluating the idea against a backdrop of a whole set of values, – ethical values and moral values.  These values offer you opportunities to test and measure the impact of your ideas.

An organization is conceived around this original idea you speak of, and takes into account the behavior and motivation of people.  One must survive the enemies of the early period and then persevere through periods of innovation and change. That calls for leadership: visionary leadership, creative leadership, compassionate leadership. I think leadership is the answer to the kind of questions you are asking.  Constant, creative, re-creative, renewing – that above all, is the job of a top leader.                                                         

It is crucial that the mission is broad enough to capture your idea.  If there is going to be a new vision, it is probably better to start a new organization. It’s very hard to change organizations anyway, but to change a mission is a huge wrenching operation.  I think it’s often better to set up a new organization. 

…on transforming leadership

I see transforming leadership – large scale change – involving five central components:

First, it must be articulated.

Second, it is planned.  We’re talking about change that is not just happenstance.

Third, it is comprehensive and systematic-it can involve some of the smaller elements, but only ones that lead to more comprehensive change.

Fourth, it is enduring, lasting. Not like the French government, for example, which starts with a monarchy, then has a revolution, and then slips back to a monarchy, then a revolution again. This would not be enduring change.

Lastly, it is measurable by values – moral and ethical values – and by results. In other words, real change. Results mean actual change measured by values.

This is an interesting point in terms of change; usually we feel the most effective change is something that's comprehensive, let’s say the establishment of the TVA, or the New Deal, that sort of thing.  The big changes are shaped by a guiding idea.

And that is true to some extent true of the highway system in the US, for example. The federal highway system is one of the most amazing systems we have in the US.  And it’s a good example to use when we talk about big change and a guiding idea, because we can look at the great mixture of efforts geared toward one big idea, highway safety. 

Highway safety is kind of a negative idea, because it’s preventing something from happening, instead of making things happen.  Still, I’ve often reflected on how a single solution approach to highway safety would not work. It’s such a collection of so many efforts and things…the quality of the car, the experience of driver, the regulations, car safety inspections, driver education, as well as a myriad of little things like truck runaway areas for faulty brakes on mountains.  All this takes tremendous regulation, too.

There are literally dozens and dozens of efforts. And while we still have terrible death tolls, we have done a lot, too. . To me, those efforts are all aspects of incrementalism and a scattershot approach – do I do this? or do I do that?  Try something else.  There are literally scores of changes that are tried. But they are all done under one very specific idea, which is safety.  So when you have a central organizing idea, you can organize every effort around that idea.  In this case safety.   Bottom line in all this, you’ve always got to have an idea, a lasting idea, to lead major change.

…on how new leaders should transition into leadership

The first the thing would be to talk with everyone who is relevant to the organization, not just the …other leaders, but the people way down the line, talk to the workers, janitors, secretaries, as a starter. 

You’re coming into a group of people, and the first step is to talk with the people, find out their views of the present organization, grievances, and their own ideas about the organizations.

Too often we think of institutions as entities, even bricks and mortar.  But really organizations are a collection of people.

I think the founder has to have a very clear sense of the liabilities as well as the strengths, and the one liability, whatever worked for the founder, may not work for new leadership. 

…on core missions and change

The core mission of an organization should not change, but new items would be added and some dropped. The main thing about a new person coming in after the founding period, is that now  the best time to make changes, that’s why I suggested right away to try to find out what people think.  There is a lot of good will with a new person coming in, and people expect that person to make changes.  In fact, if the new leader didn’t, there might be some questions asked.  They should use that early period to strike while the iron is hot.

...on the founding period

Once you get past the turbulence of the founding period,  you get into an establishmentarinism mode, I think the real tough thing is how do leaders carry on the vision and mission of the original organizational idea,  because that is a powerful force, it created the organization.  Beyond the founding period, it takes preserving the original idea and lots of innovation, keeping one’s moral compass, often through great changes…

It’s very tough to do…it really calls for inspirational leadership.