Core Module 1: The Consultant in the System - the Consultant as Container

Thu 4 June - Sat 6 June 2026, in-person in London

Participants enter a temporary learning institution to explore consulting in real-time. Practitioners rotate through multiple roles - member, consultant, convenor, administrator - while working directly with projections, enactments, and resistances.

The module cultivates “negative capability”: the ability to remain present under pressure without rushing to premature certainty.

Core Online School

2026: 24 June, 15 July, 2 Sept, 23 Sept, 14 Oct, 4 Nov, 2 Dec.

2027: 6 Jan

The programme continues as a living online institution with ten three-hour sessions, with themes including:

Faculty-led theory seminars on socioanalytic, psychoanalytic and systemic concepts and other methodologies

Co-designed seminars shaped by participants’ emerging questions and contexts

Supervised Review & Application Groups examining national and regional GRC landscapes, with experienced international faculty

Self-organised study groups for peer-led reflection and peer-supervision

Required staff role at a recognised GRC (with pre/post-conference supervision).

The sessions will be three hours long and take place on Wednesdays 13.00 – 16.00 GMT/BST

Core Module 2: The System in the Consultant - Critical Incidents & Beyond

Thu 28 - Sat 30 Jan 2027, in-person in London

Participants work closer to the system’s edge, encountering institutional crises, container ruptures, and ethical dilemmas. A Critical Incidents Event examines moments of breakdown and unexpected learning. 

Participants design and direct an experiential event in the period between Core Module 1 and Core Module 2, and then present and analyse it during Module 2. The event may be in-person, hybrid, or online, depending on the opportunities available to the cohort and their local organisational context
 

For those called to direct Group Relations Conferences.

Format

3-day in-person intensive (London) + 4 months of fortnightly 2-hour online study groups.

Dates

Weds 30 Sept - Fri 2 Oct 2026

Focus Areas

· Holding the entire system in mind as primary container

· Ethical dilemmas and intense projections directed at the Director

· Designing GRCs across formats: residential, non-residential, in-house, hybrid, online

· Managing staff dynamics and institutional transference

· Navigating sponsoring organisation relationships

· Working with critical incidents, crises, breakdowns, and "failed" conferences

· Casualty prevention and management

· Power dynamics with sponsors and societal contexts.

This module is less a course than a community of inquiry - a space where the burdens and gifts of directing can be thought about collectively. 

It is for those who are ready not only to lead conferences, but to keep learning from the institutions they create - and from each other - in the enduring spirit of the Tavistock tradition.

Portfolio

Critical examination of designing/directing a GRC (past or planned), integrating personal experience, theoretical insight, and systemic understanding of the Director's role (up to 4500 words).

Qualification

Advanced Professional Development Certificate in GRC Directorship. Includes an invitation to publish in the TIHR’s 80th Anniversary Occasional Papers series.

For practitioners working in digital and hybrid environments; and for those with an interest in digital media including AI applications. Covers: Designing, Directing, Consulting and Administrating.

Format

3-month online programme culminating in 3-day participant-organised online symposium.

Dates

Weds 21 Oct - Fri 23 Oct 2026

Focus Areas

· How digital environments reshape authority, proximity, embodiment, boundary, participation and collaboration

· Unconscious processes in digital spaces (fragmentation, hypervisibility / invisibility, dissociation, surveillance anxiety)

· Designing psychologically containing structures in online platforms

· Managing transferences onto platform, staff and institutional authority

· Digital administration and platform choreography as institutional design

· Cross-time zone participation and international online learning communities

· Camera-off dynamics, digital silence, and fear of disappearance

· Hybrid authority and socio-technical containers

· AI and GRCs.

Portfolio

Digital GRC Design & Leadership Framework (up to 5,000 words) including institutional task, boundary management strategy, authority configuration, socio-technical risk analysis, and ethical considerations.

Qualification

Advanced PD certificate in Online GRC Design, Direction, Consultancy, and Administration. 

Includes an invitation for participants to develop their final submission for possible inclusion in the Tavistock Institute 80th Anniversary Occasional Papers Series, contributing to the growing body of international GRC scholarship and practice.

For translating GRC methodology into large-scale interventions – from the organisational to the wider community or society.

Format

3-day in-person intensive (London) + 3 months online collaborative study.

Dates

Mon 1 Feb - Weds 3 Feb 2027

Focus Areas

· Translating GRC principles (task, role, boundary, authority) into organisational development architectures

· Integrating socio-technical and socio-analytic approaches to large-scale change

· Designing interventions that engage with resistance, anxiety, and institutional defences

· Marketing and selling in-house GRC adaptations

· Working with organisational intervention evaluation indicators

· Co-design and participatory methods (Future Search, Open Systems, Theory U) with psychoanalytic awareness

· Sustainability, digitalisation, and intergenerational adaptation

· Building GRC-informed learning communities within organisations.

Portfolio

Systemic Intervention Design Framework (up to 5,000 words) describing a GRC-informed organisational/social development intervention, including diagnostic use of GRC concepts, design principles, ethical considerations, and anticipated resistances/barriers.

Qualification

Advanced PD certificate in GRC-Based Organisational and Social Development Design. Includes an invitation to publish in the TIHR’s 80th Anniversary Occasional Papers series.

For institutional leaders and programme sponsors.

Format

2-day in-person intensive (London) + 3 months online (seminars, peer dialogues, field-building groups).

Dates

Mon 13 May - Tues 14 May 2027

Focus Areas

· Sponsorship as institutional authorisation and ethical imagination

· Containing institutional anxiety, learning and risk

· Working collaboratively with Directors while retaining institutional responsibility

· Sustaining the working group and preventing splits within sponsor organisations

· Ethics of publicity, marketing, social media and visibility

· Power, politics, and unconscious contracts between institution and conference

· Co-design principles for hybrid and cross-cultural GRCs

· Future Search and socio-analytic foresight for long-term field development

· Building capacity, succession and institutional memory

· Engaging new generations and diverse stakeholders.

Portfolio

Sponsorship Charter & Institutional Futures Framework including institutional purpose, ethical/political boundaries, futures-informed vision, communication strategy, and sustainability plan.

Qualification

Advanced PD certificate in International GRC Sponsorship & Institutional Partnership. You will be invited to publish in the TIHR’s 80th Anniversary Occasional Papers series.

 September 2027

Part of the TIHR’s 80th Anniversary celebration, this collaborative working group event brings together the international GRC community to co-create new vehicles for communicating and sustaining GR methodologies and the GRC tradition.

Format

Online weekend event.

Dates

Mon 20 Sept & Tues 21 Sept 2027

Themes

Participants will work in labs:

· Narrative & Story

· Visual Language

· Sectoral Application

· Digital Presence

· Sponsorship Deck

· Embodiment & Metaphor

Members will develop accessible GRC narratives for different sectors, prototypes, and communication strategies, whilst maintaining depth, nuance and ethical integrity.