Experiential learning

Group Relations

Learning about groups, organisations and their environments through experience.

A Group Relations conference brings people together to study what happens as they form groups, take up roles and encounter questions of leadership, authority, belonging and difference. The environment is part of that study: a room or digital platform, the institution that hosts the conference, and the wider social field all shape what can happen. Participants can explore these relationships through their own experience.

There are structures and boundaries for the work, but no prescribed lesson that everyone must reach. What happens between participants and staff, and in relation to the physical, digital and social environment, becomes material for inquiry. People may leave with new questions about their roles and the systems of which they are part.

To explore the language of this work, see authority, boundaries and primary task in the glossary.

Roots in the Tavistock tradition

The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations ↗ is the institutional home of the Group Relations method. Developed through its work on groups and organisations, and drawing on Wilfred Bion’s thinking, the method took shape in the Leicester Conference in 1957. It has since grown into an international tradition of learning from experience, with the Institute remaining a central place for its practice and development.

Adapting the method

My work belongs within this tradition. I have directed Group Relations conferences and worked with colleagues and participants to adapt the method for new cultural, institutional and digital settings. Each setting brings its own questions about the task, authority, boundaries and the relationship between the organisation and its environment.

For me, adaptation means keeping faith with the method’s commitment to learning from experience while allowing its design to respond to the people and place involved. The aim is to create conditions in which participants can study what they are forming together, and carry that learning into their lives and work.

From practice

Different settings, different questions

01 / Online

Learning in a virtual space

Learning in virtual spaces has deepened my understanding of the setting as a sociotechnical system. Technology participates in the field: it shapes how we meet, what we notice, and how presence, absence and authority are experienced. I have learned to attend to how people and technology together shape the conditions for learning.

These questions informed the development of The Territory, a virtual environment organised into rooms where people can meet and explore their experience together. Developing and testing it opened questions about the psychodynamics of technological development: the hopes invested in a new space, the anxiety of uncertainty, and the pressure to make something work before we fully understand what it makes possible.

The latest beta-testing session led me to rethink boundaries and containment as aspects of a co-created field. The platform’s rooms and rules provide a framework, but how we inhabit them—through our presence, expectations and responses to uncertainty—shapes their meaning and capacity to support learning. Containment emerges through the evolving relationship between participants, technology and the setting.

Explore The Territory ↗Curious about the conference? Request the report ↗

02 / Switzerland

Working in psychiatric services

In Geneva, I adapted elements of Group Relations for professionals working in child and adolescent psychiatric care. At the HUG Maison de l’Enfance et de l’Adolescence, an institutional workshop made room to study roles, authority and the emotional demands of care through reflection and embodied experience. The hospital, its services and the wider networks around children and families were part of the environment to be considered. I later directed a Group Relations conference in the hospital context.

The work asked how staff and institutions might think together when the task of care is under pressure.

Request a case study of what is possible in psychiatric settings ↗

03 / Organisations

Culture and change at work

I have also developed adaptations of Group Relations and related socioanalytic methods in telecommunications, finance and energy. These were part of complex interventions concerned with organisational culture and change. The design in each setting had to take account of its task, authority relations and history, as well as the sector and wider environment in which people worked.

Discuss an organisational setting ↗

What might this method make possible in your setting?

We can begin with the question your group or organisation is facing.

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