Group relations conferences

Our iconic conference aims to increase your personal effectiveness in any organisational role. Development happens through experiential learning.

What is a group relations conference?

A group relations conference is not a didactic conference but rather an experiential one. It offers members the chance to understand more about group processes and how they behave in a variety of group settings. This includes areas such as leadership, followership, authority, diversity, hierarchy and power structures, in a live way and how they impact on individual responses and group behaviour.

The conference is a world within a world and provides a structure in which a temporary organization is co-created by members and staff. This can then be studied by all members and staff of the conference; it is a place to experiment, to play, and to try and better understand the dynamics of organizational life. There will be opportunities to look differently, to listen with imagination, and to understand the impact when this isn’t possible. As with any organisation, this ‘temporary organisation’ will present the tensions of working in particular roles, in different levels of authority, and with differing assumptions about the task and about each others’ capacities to lead and to actively follow.

Participating in a group relations conference offers the potential for deep and transformational learning about both oneself and the dynamics of groups and organizations.

Upcoming conferences in 2021/2022

Please see below for our upcoming conference:

Discovering Leadership: The Challenge of Belonging

Type: Conference Location: The Tavistock and Portman Date: Full days September 5th-8th 2022

Postponed conferences

Due to the Coronavirus outbreak, we've had to postpone the events below. Please keep checking back for updates or follow us on social media.

We've also helped compile a set of reflections about how Group Relations thinking can assist people and systems to explore the COVID-19 pandemic. Download the GRC response to COVID-19 guide.

Back to the Future: Authority, vulnerability, continuity and change: A Group Relations Conference celebrating 100 years of Tavistock thinking

NB. This conference has been postponed. However, we are currently we're trying to collect views on how and when to reschedule it via this survey:...

Type: Conference
Location: The Tavistock Centre, London
Date: 10 July 2020 09:00 to 12 July 2020 19:30

On whose authority? - exploring leadership in contemporary organisation, Geneva group relations conference 2020

A Group Relations Conference in Geneva

Type: Conference
Location: Geneva
Date: 15 May 2020 09:45 to 17 May 2020 15:30

Hear more from one of our conference directors, Lydia Hartland-Rowe

Video transcript

We're living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty and fragmentation, conflict within organisations and the society we live in, and between nations; we're facing a lot of conflict. You could say we're constantly all of us living in 'group relations'.

So what's the difference between the way that we live and a group relations conference?

The task of a group relations conference is to give the whole membership the chance to notice, to understand and to reflect on what is going on between people and between groups within the whole conference. We form what's called a 'temporary organisation' for the duration of the conference. So it's not a conference in a traditional sense where you have papers and experts and speakers and an audience, it involves the whole group trying to understand some of the complicated and difficult things that go on in organisations, as well as some of the creative things that can happen.

Staff are there to manage the event, and also to consult. This involves observing the group, helping to notice the kinds of things that are taking place and putting forward some hypotheses about how these can be understood. It's a chance to have a relationship within an organisation, and have a chance to think about that. They get to have some strong feelings about that, as they are in group and organisational life; people get confused, competitive, excited about what they're doing.

The difference in this context is there is a chance to reflect on that and understand it. So there's an opportunity to really develop your leadership and try things out in a different way - think about what goes wrong in the organisations that you currently inhabit. Perhaps more importantly at the moment, especially in the public sector, the chance to really think about robust followership; how is it possible to both support and challenge when you're working in the middle of an organisation – 'leading from the middle'.

Our experience is that having an opportunity to learn about leading from the middle, and learning in the middle of a complex organisation, is something that a group relations conference really allows you to do.