The World is starting to open, lockdowns are easing, social distancing and cleaning regimes are getting ready for the return to the new normal or the new reality.
What this means for how we will live work and learn together is to be discovered. Through all the turmoil there has been a still, small light of hope and optimism burning amidst the gloom of the rising death tolls. That light of hope and optimism is the staff team of the Leicester Conference 2020, Task Authority Organisation: 4C’s C-Change. The CEO of the Tavistock Institute, Dr Eliat Aram endorsed her wholehearted support the strategy: “to hold on to the possibility that the Leicester Conference could take place person to person, as it has every year since 1957”. If it is safe and possible to do so, we will have it. A decision will be finalised on 3rd July 2020.
There are a number of interventions and digitalised excursions to test the transfer of Group Relations Conference learning to an online modality: a workshop staffed by Eliat Aram and Coreene Archer in Russia and a one day GRC directed by Fabio D’Apice initiated by Barbara Williams and John Wilkes. Now a team is working together to deliver an online GRC co-sponsored by Group Relations Institutions.
How we think about the nature of learning for leadership in the digital era will be fruitful for us to think about, and in particular as humans and machines interface more closely, we will be able to ask a-fresh, what does it mean to be human? As a human being, living increasingly atomised lives, “sheltering in place” or working primarily from home: how do we hold our organisations in mind? And what does authorisation from role look and feel like, as opposed to authorisation from person?
The Leicester Conference 2020, with authority at the centre, holds the candle alight for those willing and able to venture out to study together, what this post Covid-19 work-world might mean for us individually and collectively.
Dr Leslie B Brissett
Director, Leicester Conference 2020
Director, Group Relations Programme, TIHR
For further information, contact Emily Kyte.