Come to New Orleans for a Group Relations conference.
At a time when much of the world seems to be fracturing into adversarial chaos, a Group Relations conference offers an opportunity to examine – as a microcosm – the systemic forces that are impacting us as individuals and as members of numerous groups and identities.
Join a diverse membership from the USA and abroad as we explore the seen and unseen world together through creativity, awareness and curiosity.
This is an intense leadership development experience where participants have the opportunity to engage in a living laboratory to study how they impact and how they are impacted by the many groups and organisations in their lives.
The staff provides a structured and highly reflective environment where aspects of leadership, followership, membership, personal identity, difference, conflict, collaboration, competition, surprise and understanding can emerge over 6 days.
New Orleans and the historic Loyola University campus (fully air-conditioned) provides an environment that is rich with history and a gumbo of language, culture, politics, tragedy and triumph. This background fertilises the conference as a microcosm of the world.
The Theme
“The Other” has always been a driving force in social and political life, whether openly or secretly. Today we find ourselves in increasingly polarised societies, where conflicts and misunderstandings based on “otherness” abound. The potential richness of diversity and difference has become a world of Us and Them.
Finding the authority to lead is complex in such challenging times. Leadership (and followership) also differ depending on the context. For example, a community organisation, a multi-national corporation, a political party, a democratic country, a non-democratic country and a military organisation each have unique leadership challenges, as well as ways of addressing—or ignoring– “the other,” and of working across difference.
A Group Relations conference offers the opportunity to bring in the real world for study. This requires courage, openness and ability to look within ourselves, and offers opportunities to learn to see outside ourselves, to comprehend the systemic patterns and forces at play in our shared world. In this conference we will find many differences as well as commonalities, in a deeply felt and challenging experience that offers no easy answers but a safe space to experiment.
Conference Director Eliat Aram
This was a Skype presentation, therefore there is a video lag.
Recording courtesy of A K Rice Institute.
So join us in New Orleans, bring your friends and colleagues and help us create some moments of inspiration and learning together.
This will be the 53rd Annual A K Rice residential Group Relations conference. Our CEO, Eliat Aram, has been invited again to direct the AK Rice Institute national Group Relations conference in the USA.
The dates are: 21 – 26 July 2017 and the venue is Loyola University, New Orleans –
Apply by 21 June.
The conference website is www.leadershipakrice.org or email Jack Lampl, conference administrator for more information.
