The first international face-to-face Group Relations conference in Dubai will be based on the Tavistock experiential learning methodology. The conference is offered by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and Group Relations Kazakhstan and will be conducted in English.
About the conference
The Group Relations Conference is a learning event, offering participants the chance to explore group dynamics, leadership, authority, and organisational structures in a safe and supportive environment.
This experience fosters profound professional and personal growth, enhancing participants’ understanding of their roles within groups and organisations.
Who should attend
This conference is ideal for individuals and groups from diverse professional backgrounds, including: leaders, managers, consultants, educators, therapists, researchers.
Aims of the learning event
The conference aims to provide opportunities for participants to learn about, understand, and identify conscious and unconscious group processes and then apply these insights to their groups and organisations.
Group relations & methodology
Groups are integral to our lives from birth. Leadership, authority, and organisational and systems psychodynamics impact us all. Understanding these processes is crucial for mature, reflective leadership. The conference is designed to enhance participants’ leadership capabilities by encouraging them to:
- Examine, interpret, reflect on, and make sense of their experiences during the events.
- Develop a clearer understanding of their organisations and their roles within them.
- Use imagination to explore their leadership roles and responses to others’ leadership.
- Focus on culture, structure, and tasks, and understand their roles in collaborative and competitive contexts.
This learning approach requires attention to personal experience, openness to others’ experiences, tolerance of uncertainty, readiness to interpret events, and the courage to communicate and act on those interpretations. It involves developing more awareness of both conscious and unconscious behaviours and broader social, political and economic contexts.
Learning from experience
We use accelerated “immersive” learning, i.e. learning through experience. This conference is radically different from any other leadership development seminars and trainings. The difference is that participants do not just receive information about some tools or methods but directly learn from experience in the here-and-now.
During the conference (4 days), staff and participants create a “temporary organisation” and explore the dynamics of what is happening here-and-now, tracking the influence that emotions and their unconscious reactions have on it. The participants will have the opportunity to understand their own emotional manifestations and become more aware of both conscious and unconscious group processes that arise. As a result, participants will view dynamics in groups and organisations differently.
By further applying this experience to their work and daily lives, participants will be able to expand and deepen their ability to manage and lead teams, take up their authority more effectively, exercise their leadership skills, continue to explore and develop their relationships with colleagues, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of teams and their organisation as a whole.
Conference primary task and design
The Primary Task of the conference is to study the exercise of authority in the taking up of roles through the interpersonal, inter-group and institutional relations that develop within the conference.
The conference is designed around working together in various small and large groups, with staff consulting to the process, so that participants can explore relations between themselves and the group, and their group and other groups, developing their own learning.
Participants will learn to:
- Explore the group’s actions in relation to its tasks and structure.
- Form hypotheses explaining conscious and unconscious group dynamics.
- Recognize the group’s influence on their own actions and experiences.
- Act with awareness of group processes and influence the group meaningfully.
Each event offers learning opportunities which can then be applied to back-at-work groups and the organisations participants belong to.
About the organisers
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations will be organising this conference with Group Relations Kazakhstan.
Since 2023, Group Relations Kazakhstan has been providing group relations conferences in Kazakhstan, in partnership with the Tavistock Institute.
Rachel Kelly is Director of the conference. Irina Ponomarchuk is the Associate Director. Dalia Osseily is administrative manager.
The Consultants are:
Tatiana Ezhova
Dmitriy Myslin
