Understanding Group Relations Conferences

Group Relations Conferences are experiential learning events that explore the dynamics of leadership, authority, and group behavior in real time. Rooted in psychoanalytic and systems theory, these conferences offer a unique space to examine how individuals take up roles, respond to authority, and influence group life—both consciously and unconsciously. Participants gain deeper insight into themselves and the groups they’re part of, fostering personal growth and organizational awareness.

METHODOLOGY

This is a different kind of conference, one in which learning will be primarily through experience. Within a structure provided, participants will co-create a temporary organization and culture, engage with each other in that living system, and continuously reflect on the collective and individual experiences they are having.

Using their here-and-now experiences, participants will seek to better understand both conscious and unconscious systemic processes encountered in the exercise of leadership, authority, and power, with particular attention to the ways in which these processes connect to the conference theme. By focusing on both conscious and unconscious processes, participants will learn to better see and hear both what is above the surface and what is beneath it. Participants may find themselves developing new narratives and testing new ways of increasing group and individual effectiveness.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR LEARNING

Participants will have opportunities to:

Observe, take part in, and analyze both covert and overt group processes through participating in groups that vary in size, structure, and task.

Observe, take part in, and articulate underlying patterns of group interaction by forming groups, establishing leadership structures, and relating with other groups and the institution as a whole.

Observe, experience, and articulate how we collectively and individually take up roles, negotiate authority, accomplish tasks, cross borders, and manage anxiety in a changing context.

Observe, experience, and discuss the fluidity of power and authority; the way power, roles, identities, tasks, and boundaries might shift or become more rigid in response to an emergent context.

Observe, experience, and discuss the difference between the stated task of a group and the task it appears to be pursuing.

Observe, engage in, and articulate collective and personal reactions to well-defined authority and clearly delineated boundaries.

Observe, experience, and articulate how varied aspects and perceptions of individual identity such as race, class, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and education level are used by groups with and without the conscious awareness of the individuals involved.

PRIMARY TASK & PURPOSE

The primary task of this conference is to study conscious and unconscious dynamics arising in the exercise of leadership, authority, and power—and the relatedness of these dynamics to the conference theme—as they unfold in the here-and-now through the taking up of roles in a temporary system.

The purpose of the conference is to build leadership capacity for one’s life outside the conference and to develop a spirit of inquiry into the lived experience of organizational life.

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