The Art of Group Analysis in Organisations

The Use of Intuitive and Experiential Knowledge

Gerhard Wilke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429920127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Leaders, teams and organisational consultants are faced with a situation of permanent transitions. The current world of organisations is full of beginnings and incomplete endings. The author assumes that the endless re-structuring of living networks of relationships in organisations generates, over time, post-traumatic stress disorder in individuals, groups and the whole system. The book deals with the paradox that continuity is the most important factor in change and that leadership alone solves very little. Even the most heroic figure flounders without the help of the various groups in the organisation, which make things work. The author reflects on his practice of developing teams, professionals and organisations with an approach rooted in group analysis and social anthropology. The dominant way of looking at performance, motivation and leadership focuses on individuals and fails to take into account how we work together, how we fail to co-operate and how inter-dependent we are.

PART I

EXPERIENTIAL AND INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER ONE


Group analysis in organisations: what it takes

Focusing more on the group and less on the individual

The founder of group analysis had the dream that after the end of the Second World War, applied psychoanalysis would be as successful as clinical work and make a contribution to democratising society. The ultimate aim of applying group analytic knowledge in the wider society represented for the émigré generation an inoculation programme against the recurrence of fascism. Foulkes thought that group analysts could put people into a group to learn to trust in life, other people, and themselves enough to relinquish defensive manoeuvres that cut them off from the social connections that they needed and depended on. Group analytic consultancy represents, within this tradition and at the simplest level, the effort to reconnect people in groups or organisations with the social nature of their being and the interdependence of all the groups within the foundation matrix of the whole organisation. The message is, nothing gets done alone, and all outcomes depend on interdependence. In contrast, the prevailing myth of the age is: it is all up to you alone and it all depends on the leader.

When Foulkes and Anthony (1971, pp. 258–260) talked of the matrix, they meant the family and the group analytic therapy group. Here, the term is used metaphorically to capture the invisible network of relationships and mutual projections that hold us together or split us apart in a group, such as a multi-disciplinary team. Foulkes linked his idea of the group matrix to that of a foundation matrix to capture the idea that each matrix is invisibly connected with a meta-matrix that is historical, cultural, and social. The logic of this argument suggests that each person, group, organisation, and culture has its own mind and a shared mind. The social anthropologist Geertz (1975) thinks about culture in a comparable fashion and argues that we all live suspended in a web of meaning that we ourselves weave through daily social interaction. A collection of such webs of meaning constitutes a culture, which is a phenomenon that is not fixed in time and space but is continually remade and preserved by people re-enacting its meaning in their various group contexts, such as in work, in festive rituals, and meetings. If this line of reasoning captures some of the complexity of how the social order is re-created through daily interaction, then it makes sense to argue that we evolved into group beings, we depend on groups to grow up, and we work and perform in and through groups. It is time to think less about the dynamics of individual development and focus on what it takes to animate and help groups develop and achieve what they have set out to do in interdependence and over time. In terms of a catchy consulting phrase, an organisation changes from conversation to conversation, on contact between its parts, and by paying attention to the daily interaction rituals that give it a sense of community, an identity, and makes it work.

What can a group analytic consultant offer?

The fashion for heroic leadership at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first created the myth that organisational performance and success depend on the imposition of the free will of the leader on the mind of a collective which follows that person. The prevailing surge of organisational modernisation, driven by transformational leaders, suggests that organisations are in a permanent fight against an adverse external environment and the drag of tradition, outmoded work practices, and ways of thinking. To be successful, these leaders split future, present, and past into good and bad. Only the future is good: the past is bad and the present is part of the past. It is, albeit in a milder form, the language of the European dictators of the twentieth century and the simplest and most brutal way in which the energy locked up in human groups can be bounded and directed. What is denied, in this latest version of seeing the social world in terms of the survival of the fittest, is the interdependence of parents and children, families and the wider culture, leaders and their followers. Organisational teams, and their departments, too, can only function within a wider system and culture. What is currently blanked out is the dependence of everyone on an external world that does not just threaten, but also feed them. This interdependence within a social system and dependence on an external reality exists not just as a result of willed visions and a wished for strategy, but is a pre-condition for any organisation to be born, to survive, and to grow. The dependency of organisations on each other in a network of exchange and the inseparability of the private and public sector of the economy and the state become painfully apparent in a real crisis, such as the “credit crunch” and all that followed from it.

Before the crisis, the heroic leaders followed the path of hubris and denounced anyone who wanted a degree of regulation as an enemy of the free will of the market, which is simply an abstracted version of their own childish and selfish greed and desire for absolute and immature independence. In the crisis, these omnipotent but fallen leaders in the banking sector asked for mother state to rescue them from their own folly and protect them from stern, father-like politicians who might want to impose more control on their unbridled and immature greed. As is the collective predisposition of this particular professional group, they wanted to have their cake and eat it. The banking crisis exposed something else, too: the foundation myth which underpins modern society—free willed and independent individuals making their own luck and regulating their own affairs via an unbridled market—has yet again been found wanting. With the unsecured credits, the illusion of absolute independence collapsed and society and its members were made aware again that human beings are social animals and can neither succeed nor fail without having an impact on the group or society of which they are a member. It is time that we humans re-learn the facts of life, which are that we are always vulnerable and liable to need help and that we are replaceable and will die. What will outlive our selves are the groups that nurtured us, that we depended on, and that we made a mark in.

Implicitly, I argue that a group analyst, in the role of organisational consultant, can help people relinquish their wish to be absolutely free and learn to make choices within the limits that the outside world, and the groups people work in, has set over time and in a given context. Group analysis involves the mastery of the art of the possible, not the fantastical. A group analytic consultant can translate the as yet unnamed energy invested in the symptomatic problems identified by those who call for help—such as under-performance and high levels of conflict and stress—into a shared communication about the causes of the organisational dis-ease and find a way out of the situation with the help of the group affected. Group analysts see problems in groups or individuals as an indirect expression of the need for an adjustment in a matrix of relationships to a changed environment. The assumption is that the problem person in a team, or the malfunctioning department in an organisation, signifies and personifies a taboo subject, which everyone colludes in keeping secret, but that needs to be aired if everyone is to make progress. Of course, someone’s underperformance can be explained in terms of the individual’s personal pathology, but the social environment has a trigger function in the process of this vulnerability becoming visible and having an impact on others. The analysis of the group’s and the individual’s involvement in the problems that organisational life generates for some members can help a leader understand what, in general and in particular, diverts the energy flow within a team from the pursuit of the task to egocentric and defensive manoeuvres that undermine responsible ways of co-operation and performance. The precondition is that consultants and leaders learn to think in terms of social scenes and begin to notice who reveals their character flaws, or deviates from the defined norm, under what circumstances, and on contact with whom. The current fashion is to define normative ways of behaving and working so that they can be classified, quantified, measured, and complied with. What I would encourage my clients to do is to resist normative and abstract ways of thinking about organisational behaviour and, instead accept that, in groups, people permanently negotiate and adapt the shared norms and values by deviating or conforming to them in each social encounter. Behaviour norms are subject to interpretation, just as the meaning of words is interactively constructed when people meet and talk. The human species itself and its cultural edifices are subject to adaptation and diversification in interaction with the environment.

Group analysts understand that every top-down change programme results in new forms of defence and regression before it produces observable and better ways of working. During periods of rapid change in an organisation, significant amounts of energy are projected outward into imagined persecutor(s) who drive the unwanted change. Many organisational managers and members adopt the position of a bystander or victim who suffers change and, by complaining, invokes sympathy and pity. Group analysts would, if they accompanied a change management process, reopen the boundary between people who see themselves as victims and perpetrators and try to understand how mobbing, scapegoating, and the need for dependency and security are a normal part of human groups. We can aspire to decent and civilised behaviour, but we cannot always live up to the ideal. When we deviate from the ideal, it is more helpful to understand why it is happening in this group and at this moment than to blame an individual or an outside body for the non-compliance with an abstract and, therefore, inhuman norm. Like physicists, group analysts hate chance coincidences and would see it as the shared responsibility of the leader and the group to notice, name, analyse, and solve the problem of unhelpful dependency or scapegoating in a work team. This can be done because everyone is involved in what occurs in the group, not just the leader and the goodies and baddies. The location point is less in any one person than in their relationships with each other. Facilitated work on the group dynamic in the team will show relatively quickly that any group is performing and regressing simultaneously.

In the force-field between performance and resistance, three subgroups tend to form and become visible: the yes people, the no people, and the do not knows. Just as in any classical Greek drama, these subgroups embody the hero, the anti-hero, and the chorus. When groups and their leaders regress into a perpetrator, victim, and bystander scenario, a group analyst can be a witness and act as analyst, translator, and facilitator, someone who finds words to describe that which cannot be named and is instead acted out as resistance. My preferred way of doing such work in an organisation is to accompany people on their journey through a transition in their normal work situations. The role I adopt is that of a life coach who, like a basketball coach, can call time out and reflect in the moment of an important meeting on the way people are working together or how they are avoiding it. When I intervene in the work of the meeting, I describe the group process by pointing out what happened, what did not happen, and then explore, jointly with the participants, what sense they make of the parts that did not work and what adjustments can be made to maintain the work flow in future. It is a method of intervention that I have called consultancy-cum-qualitative research, or Accompanying and Action Research, as it has been named at Ashridge Business School, where I work as an associate (Binney, Wilke, & Williams, 2012).

How can consulting, research, and accompanying be combined in one approach when a group analyst is called in to make sense of unconscious group processes that seem to block effective ways of working together? Analytic consultants can conduct background research and, by talking to a cross-section of the organisation, capture the responses to change in metaphors that contain and hold what is felt and experienced and, thereby, make what is already known and perceived exchangeable through storytelling. Small and large group sessions in various combinations can help reconnect the flow of communication between different levels of the hierarchy and allow the organisation to let go of policing methods during periods of transition and find ways of adopting a learning model to change management. This approach works because it addresses the taboo of acknowledging openly that organisations are made to work just as much by the informal as by the formal system.

Recently, I was asked by a senior European politician to facilitate a workshop on the theme of “Talking less about each other and more to each other”. To make people aware of the fact that gossip cannot be controlled, but can be worked with, I asked them to feed back to the whole group what relevant and important topics were talked about over coffee and over lunch. In the formal sessions, I had asked them to work normally on strategic issues and change implementation issues, which were in need of review. During the discussions, I acted as coach and focused on how the group members helped or undermined each other, the idea being that leader, group, and consultant work best together when the task and process level of a work group is recognised as of equal importance. Regular group sessions, involving frank dialogue, within a secure setting, facilitated by a skilled facilitator who can connect the formal and informal organisation, reduces the fear of freedom, responsibility, and change so characteristic of most humans. Effective work on the task and emotional level can be achieved by accompanying and life coaching because it opens up the possibility of people having a normal business meeting, punctuated by reflection and a post-meeting wash-up, which works through how people have just engaged or not engaged with each other. The approach opens up a transitional space where, in a face-to-face meeting, the members of an organisation learn to make explicit what is normally implicit. The integration of reviews of how members of a meeting connect and disconnect, how they “get real” or avoid “getting real” on a task and process level, overcomes the fear of contact and renders power relational in the group, thereby raising levels of maturity and mutual trust. More honest exchanges oblige those involved to keep each other in mind when they make their next decision and it is this mental connectivity that enables the formal and informal organisation to exist in such a way that gossip and corridor meetings are just another method of getting the work done. The subtle acknowledgement of the official and unofficial organisation through the compulsory reporting of the substance of their coffee-break gossip releases the energy that is often sought but not found during the implementation of strategic change.

Accompanying, coupled with life coaching (that is my hunch), is much more powerful and effective than away days or massively expensive change management programmes. Why? Everyone reflecting on what is held as the way we have just worked together, as an integral part of how things are done, seems to open people up to the idea that deviations from the norm, group think, or the wrong decision are primarily group dramatisations, not just a single person’s fault. This way of thinking, when it takes hold, enables an organisation to respond to a significant event that has blown the institution off its intended strategic course in reflective rather than panic mode and triggers a process of adaptation to altered circumstances and, hence, of collective and individual maturation. What such a mature process can look like, on the level of the individual, the group, and the leader, was demonstrated by the way the Norwegians dealt publicly with the bomb attack and the mass killings in July 2011.

From my perspective, we are at a juncture when group analysis needs to be applied in postmodern organisations because consultancy, management and doing the job take place in a context that feels like a social survival drama. Offices without walls, teams without clear role descriptions, conflicting expectations, and a flattened hierarchy can be perceived as modern, liberated, and efficient by some, but are a great source of anxiety for most. In such a precarious organisational setting, all those who work in it need to learn the rules of social exchange between social actors in symmetrical (equal status) or asymmetrical (unequal rank) relationships. That is, if they want to survive symbolically as an integrated human community and retain the capacity to think and act intelligently under pressure. The flattening of the organisational world has made the boundaries between hierarchies, diverse roles, and the private and public world so open that work and meetings have become an ongoing group process that is ruled perhaps more by free association than structured discussions and formalised rules of behaviour. The explosion in defined and desired behaviour norms and competency lists in HR departments is a reaction against this and not the solution to anxiety engendered by open space offices, flattened hierarchies, and permanently shifting objectives. Rules, regulations, and prescriptive behaviour norms are a symptom of the deep unease in organisations; the unease is defended against by over-compliance, fear of the boss, fear of mistakes, and manic “actionism”.

Organisational metaphors

Organisational theorists, like all social scientists, have fought an ideological battle over what an organisation is. There are roughly two camps: one is scientific and objective in orientation and the other is subjective and reflective in outlook. Each of us working in a changing institution must become clear about the way in which we conceptualise an organisation, lest we fall into the intellectual trap of having found the key to understanding the law by which all organisations function under all circumstances. Each organisational consultant, each ordinary member and manager, makes conscious and unconscious assumptions about the nature of organisational life with the help of mental images and assumed symbolic classification systems which they, like any member of any social body, project into the institutions they inhabit. This process of mentally classifying how things are supposed to work makes an organisation and our relationship to it real for us. It also makes us feel safe and blind.

Morgan (1986) in his book, Images of Organisation, tried to classify the mental images managers, employees, and consultants construct to help them think about their daily interactions in the social context of their organisation. It is, therefore, not surprising that organisations, whether they are changing or not, possess a culture which is inseparable from a genesis myth and a collectively shared symbolic order which classifies and categorises the order of all things. Each organisation has what we group analysts call a foundation matrix and justifies its way of working in terms of a foundation myth, like Volkswagen (people’s car) or the NHS (National Health Service). These ideals rest on socially and culturally unconscious assumptions about the way social order works, what holds a network of interconnected groups together as a social system, why it exists, how it was born, what it produces, and what it delivers. It is what Bollas (1991) has called the “un-thought but known” prevalence of these unconscious assumptions, as well as the organisational diagram, the role and task descriptions, and the hierarchical differentiations, that hold a living organisation together and integrate it on a formalised level as a social system. Each mental image of an organisation is simultaneously a helpful way of thinking about what we rely on as a desirable state of relatedness and organisational integration and a mental prison that traps us in us and them, right and wrong, and either/or thinking. This classification system, used by the organisation’s members to make sense of how things are done, makes it hard to envisage that other models could work equally well.

The taken-for-granted ways of thinking have an important psychological function and cannot be changed at will as they offer the members of the organisation a sense of secure belonging and a source of pride, motivation, and loyalty. Change processes come up against the boundaries of the existing and imagined self-ideal of an organisation. In short, change and continuity are not to be thought of as opposites, but as related. If change leaders wilfully ignore the organisation’s symbolic order of their evolved culture, their transformation project will probably fail, since it ignores this mental map of what made the organisation in question special and adaptable. Change, like any life event in an individual’s experience, has to be integrated into the existing mind map; it cannot simply replace a deleted document or software programme on the hard disc. The human mind and the collective mind of a group do not work like a computer on the basis of delete or save; it is a living network of relationships that can only absorb and deal with change if it is also able to imagine, feel, and master a sense of how the change and adaptation demanded fits in with the need for continuity, belonging, and identity.

As a group analytic consultant, I set out to work consciously with the dialectic of change and continuity in such a way that the tension between the thesis of continuity and the antithesis of change is not resolved in favour of the progressive side alone, but is lifted to the synthesis level of a necessary adaptation in the light of altered circumstances. The organisational metaphors that Morgan has outlined are used in an unreflected form by all the social actors in an organisation who try to accommodate a new experience by fitting it into their existing classification system of how t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Dedication
• New International Library of Group Analysis Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Experiential and Intuitive Knowledge
• Part II The Group Dynamics of Top-Down Change
• Part III The Use and Nature of the Large Analytic Groups
• Part IV Support and Development for Health Professionals
• Part V Rethinking Organisational Leadership and Development
• Part VI Ending
• References
• Index