Taking up a role from which to think

The Tavistock Institute is delighted to be a partner in this 27th International Group Relations Conference organised by Il Nodo Group.

Being and becoming a Leader, a Follower, a Citizen in today’s world

Dear potential participant,

We live in a time when the coordinates of collective life seem to have shifted. Populism, algorithms, leaders who display power without shame: phenomena of the same family.

Conflict has not disappeared: it has turned into something harder to name and to think.

Intermediate bodies, like political parties, trade unions, churches, professional associations, even therapeutic institutions, have progressively lost the capacity to act as a third between the individual and the mass. 

It is a time of direct affective aggregations, without symbolic mediation, where the bond does not pass through discourse but through immediate emotional identification. 

At the same time we find ourselves interacting with a surprising tool, Artificial Intelligence: it allows us to think, to debate, even to be contradicted, while removing the risk of the relationship. No real exposure, no other who can truly surprise or hurt us. And this is perhaps the most precise sign of our time: we seek interlocutors without risk, belongings without bonds, thought without body.

In this field, each of us oscillates between temptations: dissolving into belongings that relieve us of the anguish of choice, or withdrawing into an isolation that sees everything and can do nothing. 

Between these exits there is a more difficult alternative: taking up a role from which to think. 

Finding a place from which one’s voice can count, in groups, in organisations, in society. “Who am I in my role and what can I do?” has become urgent for anyone living and working in a collective system, not only for those who deal with groups professionally. It belongs to the manager leading a team in a changing organisation, to the clinician working in a system under pressure, to the citizen trying to understand the world they live in.

Taking up a role from which to think is not a definitive acquisition. It is a daily, fragile practice that requires favourable conditions: space, time, interlocutors willing to do the same. 

We have learned that a Group Relations Conference can provide for those conditions. A place where the role is not taken for granted but experienced, tested, observed from within, in the tension between what we truly are with our history and our belongings, and what we may become. A temporary, real system, in which the function of the third (the boundary, the role, the task) is deliberately rebuilt and held, so that it can be studied live. 

This is not to offer answers, but to inhabit questions together. And what may be learned has a precise destination: returning to one’s organisations, one’s roles, one’s life as leader, follower, citizen, feeling a little more the author of one’s own choices. 

We invite you to come and work with us in Brisighella. 

Francesco Noseda

Director of the Conference

Martijn van der Spek 

Associate Director of the Conference

Information

Conference website