The Leicester Conference
Application deadline 24th July & update on new Director of Training Group

Leaders and those taking up leadership positions are looking for support to take their careers to the next level, and process consultants and coaches want to take their consulting practice deeper. You recognise the need, but where do you go to get this type of learning when you have a list of credentials as long as your arm, and a filing cabinet full of certificates and professional association memberships?  Many of our organisational and leadership consultancy processes talk about working with people challenges in complex and uncertain contexts, learning to master change or complexity. You’re asking yourself “What does it mean to have Presence?” or to “be fully present”?

To answer these increasingly nuanced behavioural challenges, learners often become “Seekers” in other traditions and realms, often spiritual or spiritually oriented.  These spiritual programmes often talk about working deeply and at length, for example, Byron Katie’s 9 day School for The Work, Anthony Robbins’ Mastery University or 10-day Vipassana Retreats, Werner Erhard/Landmark’s “The Forum” all have declared benefits for attendees, many of whom are senior leaders in organisations.  However, it is the challenge of working at the level of the Group for 14 days that makes the Leicester Conference so challenging and insight-yielding.

It is the Leicester Conference that for 60 years has been, quietly, providing a learning space that takes you deeper into the capacity to work with the “here and now”, understanding how taking a role in a system is not just about you as a personality construct, but is about how the group can work in and through you – and all that you represent, often in hidden and complex ways. The Leicester Conference is a total, temporary organisation sustained over 14 days where you are able to make use of every moment of the 24 hours in each day to study in events and in social spaces, and even in dreams, what it means to be in roles in systems.

Leaders and followers, therapists and healers, consultants and coaches and any human being with a wish to explore how groups work in organisations and society.  We invite you to come and play and work, in the community of this temporary organisation, as we engage with: Presence in Absence: IN & OUT @ Work; Task Authority and Organisation, the TAO of Tavistock at the University of Leicester.

More information about the conference can be found here. For a brochure or if you have any questions, please contact Rachel Kelly, Conference Administrator.

The closing date for applications is 24 July.

UPDATE:

New Director of Training Group at Leicester Conference 2017

Professor Susan Long will be joining the staff at the Leicester Conference in the role of Director of the Training Group.

In her main role, Susan Long is Director of Research and Scholarship at the National Institute for Organisation Dynamics Australia (NIODA). She also teaches at INSEAD in Singapore and supervises research students at other universities. Susan is a past president of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations, founding President of Group Relations Australia, a past board member of the Judicial College of Victoria and is currently President of the Gordon Lawrence Foundation. She has directed or been on the staff of over 60 group relations conferences in many different countries and is the author of six books and many scholarly articles.

Rosemary Viswanath had to unexpectedly withdraw at short notice, so we are very pleased that Susan Long could make the time out of her busy schedule to come and work at Leicester this year. As a horse whisperer, Susan brings a unique insight into the dynamics of role and authority relations, helping to capture the unspoken, often subtle embodied dimensions of role taking. It is a welcome addition to the staff team, bringing her wealth of creativity and experience.

The Training Group’s purpose is an opportunity to deepen their consultancy practice within a tailored programme, designed to meet the demands of advanced learning at the Leicester Conference.

Presence in Absence: IN & OUT @ Work –  we look forward to seeing you there, if not in the Training Group, then in  Sub-Conference A or B.

e: r.kelly@tavinstitute.org
t: +44 (0)20 7457 3927