Free online talk, with optional donations
Free online talk, with optional donations
Group relations is notoriously hard to explain. Where to even begin? Returning home, Leicester Conference attendees reach for words to describe the experience, facing blank stares from friends and family.
“Although rating their learning highly, participants often found it hard to put into words what this learning was,”
Dione Hills, Tavistock Institute
The Tavistock intellectual community offers a robust technical vocabulary to parse the experience, but the abstract nouns of systems psychodynamics are often lost on the public, appearing as buzzwords. At worst, the conference strikes the listener as merely a high-octane corporate retreat or the therapist Olympics.
If explaining Tavistock-method conferences is hard, it’s likely because talking about group experience in general is hard, as many of us well know, especially at a moment when groups aren’t what they used to be. People feel atomized, lonely, and disempowered; many work in increasingly isolated, “flexible,” gigified conditions; technology relentlessly complicates how people take up roles and exercise authority; authoritarian groups run rampant.
What can group relations offer to outsiders under these weird and dismal circumstances?
In 2024, Lily came to the Leicester Conference as a (relative) outsider—an occasional reader of psychoanalysis more often in grassroots political organizing spaces than business centres like CIM Moor Hall—and left as a (relative) insider.
Designed to engage Tavistock outsiders and insiders at once, this talk brings first-person narrative about Leicester together with the tools of psychoanalysis, anthropology, systems thinking, and cultural criticism to share what Leicester taught Lily about the present moment.
This session grows out of Lily’s recent essay about group relations and political work, which was published in n+1 and selected as an editor’s pick by Longreads. The piece reconstructs for the public the experience of crossing the boundary into the world of group relations and picking up tools for narrating group life; writing it was an ethical and technical challenge, but also a necessary act of translation, when few people can attend Leicester and yet we all need group savvy more than ever.
About Lily Scherlis
Lily Scherlis is a writer, artist, and PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. She has written on group relations, the crisis of soft skills, and other topics in psychology for The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, and Parapraxis. Her performance lectures have appeared at the Renaissance Society, daadgalerie, and the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. She is a member of Groups Group, a working group associated with the Psychosocial Foundation that focuses on group dynamics in social movements.
Lily’s fun fact: When she was four years old, Lily was headbutted by a baby elephant.
