Socioanalytic Practice
The Territory is a virtual venue for experiential learning events, including Group Relations Conferences, Listening Posts, Social Dreaming Matrices, World Cafés, Focus Groups and Hackathons.
Primary task: to provide a setting for experiential and experimental learning, and for research, about the psychodynamics of virtual work and how the setting's sociotechnical design and evolving technologies shape them.
Choose where to gather. Explore what happens between people. Learn how a virtual setting shapes the experience we create together.
A map brings the event's rooms into relation: plenary and group spaces, the Socioanalytic Cafe, boards, staff and management rooms. Their purpose follows the event's design.
Each room has its own seating form. Choosing a position makes proximity, visibility and role available for reflection.
Each room's layout, number of chairs and way of seeing can be prepared before an event, and a room can change its layout during it.
An event has a map of rooms, and each room a set number of chairs in a shape: a circle, a spiral, plenary rows. People choose a room, a chair and who to sit beside, and those choices are visible to everyone. On a video call the software places you in a tile. Here, structure triggers dynamics, and a shared virtual place does not give everyone the same view or experience.
The Territory was designed based on experience of Group Relations within the Tavistock Tradition, for studying authority, role and boundary. Its architecture follows conference design: plenary, small and large group rooms, staff and management rooms, the Socioanalytic Cafe, and boards for each part of the event. Its architecture was designed from Group Relations practice and built on open-source video technology. How people work together becomes material for learning, alongside what they produce.
The infrastructure is accountable and part of what is studied. The technical lead is visible and answerable to the event, a sociotechnical research role can study the platform as it is used, and when something fails it is disclosed and worked with openly. Members can study the platform alongside the work, and what they ask for shapes how it develops. This is a stance more than a feature.
The Territory grew from a question that became urgent during the pandemic: how could we continue to gather, learn and work together when familiar meeting places were no longer available?
During the first lockdown, in Geneva, I participated in the VersusVirus hackathon with Dr Benedikt Hegner, a physicist and computer scientist, and my husband. What stayed with me was the creativity and joy of people working together on a shared task. The experience prompted me to reconsider my reservations about online Group Relations and imagine a virtual environment in which people could move, choose where to sit and find their place in relation to others.
I brought my experience of adapting Group Relations to different organisational and social settings. Benedikt brought the technical knowledge to give those spatial ideas a working form. In April 2020, we discussed the early architecture with Dr Leslie Brissett, former Director of the Group Relations Programme of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, who contributed through several conversations to the platform’s name and initial logo. In March 2021, we piloted The Territory in a Latin American Group Relations conference that I co-directed with Dr Leslie Brissett, beginning with entry, negotiation and contracting in Zoom before moving into the new environment. In 2022, “Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Exploring Tavistock Group Relations in the Digital Age”, a talk and workshop for the New York Center for the Study of Groups, Organizations and Social Systems held inside The Territory, let participants meet the spatial design through experience: the virtual setting itself became part of the work.
I write as one of those who built The Territory, so what follows is a reading from inside, partial and open to correction. The platform was created during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when restrictions on gathering and travel removed the shared physical setting around which our Group Relations practice had been organised. Looking back, I think its creation may be read, tentatively, in relation to what David Armstrong called ethical imagination.1
It began from a practical dilemma rather than a theory. We did not know whether learning about authority, role and boundary could be held at a distance at all. Building a platform was one attempt to find out, among the many ways colleagues in the field were responding at the time. Its design kept the architecture of a conference—plenary, staff and members’ spaces, small groups, boards for communication across boundaries—but placed it where presence, containment and boundary had to be thought about again. In this modest sense it may have been an attempt to reimagine a form of association. A Latin American conference held on it in March 2021 was conceived by us as a pilot, rather than a replacement for residential work.2
The movement also met resistance, and much of it was our own. Among colleagues, we encountered a preference for the in-person setting and reservations about whether online conferences could be Group Relations Conferences at all, reservations that were not without foundation. In ourselves there was a reluctance to let the concept grow. We tended to replicate the model without changing the consultancy stance, and to treat the technology as a medium rather than as part of the system being studied. We also experienced difficulty in building a partnership with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in those years, some of which we understood as resistance. That relationship has since developed constructively.
The Territory found a home with the New York Center for the Study of Groups, Organizations and Social Systems, a relationship that led to the virtual conference Exploration in Human Relations in Shifting Virtual Environments (26–28 September 2025).3 That conference began in Zoom and then moved into The Territory. The migration itself, and the testing of a platform still in development, became data for studying the psychodynamics of testing a platform in development, through a sociotechnical research track in which members and staff worked together.
Whether the platform carried what Armstrong called a developmental undertow, I cannot yet say. If anything in The Territory deserves the name of ethical imagination, it lies less in what it achieved than in an effort, not always sustained, to treat itself, and those of us who built it, as part of what was being studied, and to accept its incompleteness.
Do you know of other initiatives that have tried to hold Group Relations work online, or of experiences that might resemble those where Ethical Imagination is found? I would be glad to hear of them, and to learn from them together in our Ethical Imagination discussion group.
Dr Mónica Velarde Lazarte
Primary task: to explore, through direct experience, the dynamics of presence, accountability, authority and leadership within evolving virtual contexts, positioning the conference as a temporary learning cooperative.
Its design studied in real time the process of testing The Territory while it was still in development, so that members could learn how the structure of the technology shapes behaviour. A third of the members were attending a Group Relations Conference for the first time. Members also differed in language, time zone and profession (consulting, psychology, education, business, the non-profit sector and the arts), and in their digital fluency; time zones affected attendance, particularly for members in Asia.
The method, adapted. The Group Relations method of the Tavistock Institute, carried into virtual environments: plenaries; small study groups of up to twelve members with a consultant; a large study group of the whole membership with two to four consultants; the Institutional Event; and Review and Application Groups to carry the learning into members' own roles.
The architecture was part of the study. The conference opened in Zoom and migrated into The Territory, so that members could study what happens to authority, belonging and accountability when the environment shifts beneath them. Rooms, chairs, permissions and the move itself were offered as material for learning, not as background. Questions that usually stay in the background came into view: Where do we meet? Who decides when we move? What happens to membership when someone cannot enter a room, hear or be heard?
Members took part in shaping the setting. The Institutional Event had a double task: to build the cooperative in the new environment, and to run a Sociotechnical Research Track studying how the virtual format influenced the method. Up to four members could join staff in a Sociotechnical Research Team; two did. In each working session, one chair in management was open to a member. Groups could ask to change the number of chairs in their rooms, altering the technical structure of the venue in a small but real way.
AI was named openly. Staff disclosed that they used AI tools for administration and reflection, and invited members to study this as part of the event.
In the opening plenary the director named her double position: appointed by the Center, holding the conference's boundaries, and co-creator of the platform members were working in. Members were told that technical problems were expected and would be treated as data.
On the first day, right after the opening plenary, some members moved into The Territory on their own before the migration was launched; the platform became congested and the conference briefly split into two realities. The director asked them to return to Zoom, so that the move could happen within a shared container.
On the second day, during a session of the Large Study Group, the US hosting provider suspended the main server after classifying its traffic as suspicious. Traffic moved to fallback servers in Europe, one of which had too little network capacity: voices disappeared, images froze, and some members were dropped from the room. Management asked the Sociotechnical Research Team to obtain a post-mortem from the technical lead, and its findings were shared with the whole membership. The next day a move to Zoom was ready, and management left the decision to the Large Study Group team: the convenor of the Large Study Group stayed in The Territory, because the group was still working on its task. In the Institutional Event plenary, offered a choice between returning to Zoom and continuing in The Territory, members chose a third option: plenaries in Zoom, where clear communication mattered most, and Review and Application Groups in The Territory, where smaller groups had been working well. The closing plenary was held in Zoom; at the end, members gathered in The Territory's social space.
Two roles were kept apart. The Technical Support Lead, who built the platform, was present and answerable to the conference, not a silent programmer behind the code. A Sociotechnical Research Lead, a new role, worked with a staff member and two conference members to study the technical lead's interaction with the code, its impact on the system, and how technology shaped institutional life. Sessions in The Territory were not recorded.
| Offered to members | What happened |
|---|---|
| Four places in the Sociotechnical Research Team | Partly taken up: two members joined. |
| An open chair in management | Partly taken up: members visited management during the Institutional Event. |
| Changes to the environment | Taken up by request: groups asked for a different number of chairs, through the research team to the technical lead. Nothing else was changed. |
| Changing the platform's code directly | Not taken up. |
| Studying the use of AI in the conference | Largely not taken up: attention went mainly to the platform and its failures. |
| Co-authoring the post-conference report | Not taken up. |
Why these offers were taken up as they were is not known: members were not asked, and the account does not speculate.
The negotiated use of the two platforms leaves a question for future work: how can a group respond to practical difficulties while preserving its capacity to think, participate and work?
Hosted by the New York Center for the Study of Groups, Organizations and Social Systems; sponsored by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, the A.K. Rice Institute (AKRI endorsed conference), Group Relations International and Socioanalytic Practice, which provided The Territory. Much of what has been built since came from requests made through the Sociotechnical Research Team, and every event now agrees a fallback procedure with its host beforehand. This account draws on the conference's circulation-safe case study. A psychodynamic report, Authority, Containment, and Cooperative Agency in a Socio-Technical Group Relations Conference, takes up the interpretive work and awaits publication.
The first version of The Territory, built by Dr Benedikt Hegner, already ran on its own servers. In October 2026 it was transformed into Alpha, at alpha.socioanalyticpractice.com: a new version built on all previous experience, including what members and staff asked for in 2025. It is now in pre-production.
From October 2026, The Territory is in pre-production. We are inviting colleagues to test it with us before it hosts its next events.
We would like to hear from members and staff of Group Relations Conferences, Listening Posts, Social Dreaming Matrices, World Cafés and Hackathons; from organisations considering an event; and from researchers interested in observed sessions and Focus Groups.
In a test session you find your way through the venue, take a chair, use the boards and captions, and tell us what you noticed, including what you felt in the room. A short feedback form follows.
Fees: taking part is free. If you are happy with your experience, you are welcome to give a testimonial or make a voluntary payment to support the pre-production phase.
To take part, get in touch through the Contact page with a line about yourself and why you would like to test. You will receive an email with a link to set your password and the date of a test session.
From January 2027 we plan a monthly Socioanalytic Cafe: a space for practitioners to meet, think together and share the conversations that matter in their work, followed by a guided tour of the venue.
We are living through a profound technological and information revolution. The Territory offers a space to investigate, through direct experience, how new technologies enter human behaviour, relationships and collective life.
Taking part in a setting that is still being developed brings uncertainty into the room, and with it questions about confidence, trust, authority and collaboration. When familiar competence no longer tells us how to act, do we experiment, withdraw, seek reassurance, or expect someone else to restore control? Can participants criticise the platform freely when its creators also hold authority in the event, and how can feedback lead to repair without being felt as disloyalty or failure? A fault needs a practical response, and its emotional meaning deserves inquiry; studying one must not hide the other.
From field theory: how do devices, bandwidth, homes, workplaces and wider circumstances shape someone’s capacity to take part?
From psychoanalytic thinking: what hopes, fears and expectations of authority arise between people, and how can they be explored without giving anyone’s experience a fixed meaning?
From sociotechnical thinking: how do infrastructure, roles and decisions organise participation together, and who can explain, act, repair and review?
Every online event relies on people and on technical systems, some of them outside anyone’s control. Participants need the developers and one another; the developers need participants’ experience to see difficulties and possibilities they could not anticipate alone. Who carries the uncertainty, and who does the work of adaptation and repair? How can mutual reliance support initiative, shared responsibility and the freedom to question?
Hosting brings an event's purpose into conversation with its virtual setting, its participants' needs and its technical arrangements. We agree these with each host before the event.
Directs Socioanalytic Practice and designed The Territory for Group Relations work. She conceptualised and coded Alpha, the current version, within an action research project carried out with a team of AI agents, studying the psychodynamics of programming in hybrid (human/AI) teams.
Built the first version of The Territory, translating spatial ideas into infrastructure for online gathering. He is the technical lead for Alpha and its quality assurer, and leads its integration into Winnicott, our server in Germany, which has relayed sound and video since 7 October 2026.
Explore the concepts, see the venue, and consider the conditions your event needs.