Towards a Group Analytic Praxis for Working with Teams in Organizations

Introduction

The group analyst’s praxis in organizational work is fundamentally different from that of the clinician. Perhaps the most fundamental difference is that whereas in clinical work we bring patients into the ‘world’ of the group, created by the group analyst as therapist, the group analyst as organizational practitioner must instead enter the world of the organization with which he or she is working. In organizations, the group analyst may work with an individual, a group of people who usually work together, that is, a team, ¹ a whole department, or whole organization, or any combination of these.

Every team is characterized, like a stick of rock, with the qualities of the organization and its purpose; when working with the team that leads the organization, this is even more marked. The group analyst is no longer an originator and powerful authority figure, but instead arrives as the stranger.

I first review the available group analytic literature, then articulate the core differences between working with a stranger group and working with a team in an organization; I conclude by proposing the core characteristics of a group analytic approach to working with teams in organizations.

My focus is on teams first because in effect we always consult to a small group even within a very large organization—even a whole organization commission will usually begin with the chief executive and her or his senior team—second, every team assignment is in any case an organizational intervention; and third, group analysis, focussing first on small groups, articulates the differing dynamics of small, median and larger groups.

Literature Review

Group analysts have developed a sophisticated literature for the clinical applications of group analysis, but detailed analysis of its application in work settings is relatively sparse, and largely derived from a need to understand the dynamics of organizations providing services for traumatized individuals/people with severe mental health issues. While this is valuable, the theoretical framework of group analysis has value for a much wider range of organizational dynamics. In this article, I propose group analysis as a basis for praxis with a wide range of organizations. Furthermore, the literature often fails to distinguish adequately working clinically with a group, where the purpose is to support individuals’ healing and/or development, and applying the insights to work with teams who are brought together to achieve some shared purpose or goal.

Group analytic training is also mostly geared to clinical practice (Heinskou, 2002), and my own journey through it was not immediately illuminating as to how to apply learning in both my organizational and clinical groups. My ideas have been developed from the relatively unusual position of starting as a specialist in organizational work, and only later becoming a clinician.

Foulkes’ comments on organizational work are also characteristically sparse, but apart from founding the scientific society, he gives an account of his work of Northfield (Foulkes, 1964) and refers to organizational applications of group analysis at the end of the important late article The group as matrix of the individual’s mental life (Foulkes, 1990: 233).

In two short early pieces, Rance (1987; 1989) proposes the use of group analysis in consulting as ‘an instrument for radical individual and organizational change’ with small stranger group experience as the mechanism of group analytic consulting (Rance, 1989). While this approach certainly is valid for some forms of work group, for example, the action learning set ² (Thornton, 2016), it is too limited to meet the complex demands consultants face.

Dorothy Stock Whitaker’s Foulkes lecture Transposing Learnings from Group Psychotherapy to Work Groups (Whitaker, 1992) is the first substantive attempt to address similarities and differences in theory and praxis as between conducting therapeutic groups and work groups. Whitaker traces important phenomena and dynamics in common, notes the importance in both settings of monitoring group phenomena, and moves on to emphasize the difference in purpose of the two kinds of group. Whitaker advocates caution in praxis: ‘a prudent group therapist, a prudent group leader, takes into account the norms and expectations of group members in intervening, and does not push too far beyond them’ (Whitaker, 1992: 143), and makes the important distinction between understanding and intervening (Whitaker, 1992: 148). In what she acknowledges to be the most difficult section of her article, she rather overstates the boundary between the two: ‘it is not the purpose of the work group to benefit its members in personal ways; therefore it is not appropriate for the therapist or anyone else to pursue this’ (Whitaker, 1992: 142–143), but, also as an honest writer, acknowledges the need at times to reframe and to ‘name the unnameable’ (Whitaker, 1992: 145). Noting the additional group phenomena arising from being embedded in a larger system, such as rivalry, competition and the forming of alliances, she adds ‘it follows that some additional understanding and skills, over and above those normally developed by group therapists, are required to understand and manage work groups’ (Whitaker, 1992: 146).

Blackwell’s contributions, while rarely explicitly addressing questions of praxis, demonstrate a willingness to engage authoritatively with the reality of experience in organizations, and to design humane interventions to support those within them. His (1998) piece on ‘bounded instability’ offers an account of how groups can be useful in institutional situations of rapid change and uncertainty, by promoting dialogue so that anxiety is expressed and channelled creatively rather than destructively. He places the encounter with difference (Thornton, 2004) front and centre: ‘the important elements of the matrix are the reflexivity, the playfulness, and the humour of its dialogue and communication’ (Blackwell, 1998: 545). Blackwell is also very good on context, and many of his ideas about organizations are expressed in the context of writing about the impact of power and political violence on culture and communication (Blackwell, 2003; 2005; 2011a; 2011b; 2014).

Nitsun (1998) describes the ‘organizational mirror’, outlining how some group analytic concepts can be used to understand organizational dynamics, though again there is little concern with praxis; Rance (1998) elaborates the ‘conversational’ aspect of group analysis, a strong thread in Stacey’s work.

Stacey’s (2005) contribution over many years sets out the case for understanding organizations as complex responsive processes between people, where the particularity and complexity of each situation must be engaged with by the practitioner. His influence, particularly with regard to conversational processes and the informal organization, can be traced through several of the other writers mentioned here. He has explored (Stacey, 2012) the limitations of the dominant management discourse of tools and techniques to ‘fix’ organizations, finding in favour of ‘practical judgment’, the experience-honed choices of the practitioner in the complexity of any given situation. My own 25 years of consulting to organizations persuades me of the merit of this approach; Stacey’s group analysis has strong sociological foundations, an emphasis on conversation and a group-based educational praxis (Pennycook-Greaves, 2003; Rance, 2003).

The question of whether group analysis alone is adequate for an understanding of organizational life is tackled head-on by Spero (2003: 324) in her article about the management–educational conferences she ran for several years with Harold Bridger of the Tavistock Institute, staffed both by group analysts and Tavistock consultants. Spero posits that Foulkes was uninterested in organizational issues—a position refuted by Rance (2003) in his response among others (for example, Campbell, 2010; Foulkes, 1964; Nichol, 2000)—and that many group analysts do not fully appreciate issues of leadership, authority and hierarchy in their conducting of work groups; I think this latter challenge withstands examination today, though I would argue that there is a wider range of issues needing attention on which group analytic theory is largely silent; fortunately group analytic theory is a ‘holey cheese’ (Wilke, 2016, personal communication) which allows us to make use of a multiplicity of perspectives not necessarily published in Group Analysis. Pennycook-Greaves’ (2003) response brings forward the important question of the location of the consultant: part of the group or outside it? Spero identified the need for a ‘new working paradigm’ (Spero, 2003: 324) and succeeded in provoking discussion of some important questions; her focus is however not on consultants’ practice in organizations.

In a collection of articles on praxis in ‘the helping professions’ (Hartley and Kennard, 2009), Powell (2009) makes a useful contribution on the complexity of working as an internal consultant, Wojciechowska (2009) on the subtle interplay of the personal and the professional, and Maher (2009) illustrates the connection of group analysis with the work of Yvonne Agazarian (Agazarian and Peters, 1995).

In the sub-field of ‘Trauma and Organizations’, Hopper’s (2012) collection includes a particularly clear exposition of the fourth basic assumption (Hopper, 2016, private communication). Like Blackwell, even when Hopper’s (1997; 2012) writing is not explicitly directed to organizational praxis, his thinking provides an important underpinning, since the fourth basic assumption elaborates the most basic tension in a group: that between individual identity and group identity; this concept is central to understanding the dynamics of any work group. Scanlon and Adlam (2011; 2012) have also made a substantial contribution to the study of traumatized organizations (Scanlon, 2012).

Schermer’s (2012a; 2012b) two-part article aims to consider group psychology alongside complexity theory and to critique Bion, Foulkesian group analysis and Agazarian-style systems theory in the light of the comparison. The piece proposes, in its abstract, that group psychology derived from the paradigm of Enlightenment science. This is inaccurate, at least in relation to Foulkes and group analysis, which arose at the same time and as part of the same new paradigm (Nitsun, 1996; Spero, 2003; Thornton, 2016) with quantum physics, general systems theory in biology and a host of other mid-20th-century technologies emphasizing interconnectedness, ultimately spawning complexity theory. What Foulkes has to say about the group processes and individual/group nexus hardly reflects Enlightenment thinking:

(of Cartesian dualism) Its strict subject–object dualism is still responsible for many pseudo-problems of our time. (Foulkes, 1990: 152)

… (group processes) pass through the individual, though each individual elaborates them and contributes to them and moderates them in his own way. Nevertheless they go through all the individuals—similar to X-rays in the physical sphere … Psychology is thus neither ‘individual’ nor ‘group’ except by abstraction. We cannot speak about the individual without reference to the group, nor about a human group that does not consist of individuals. (Foulkes, 1990: 229–30)

In group analytic theory we do not orient ourselves by discerning ‘intrapsychic’, ‘interpersonal’ and ‘group dynamic’ processes. We believe and can show they are the same processes which can and must be described from different standpoints according to the task which we pursue. ‘Society’ is inside the individual, just as well as outside him, and what is ‘intrapsychic’ is at the same time shared by the group, unconsciously most of the time in either sphere, except in the group-analytic group. The borderline of what is ‘in’ or ‘outside’ is constantly moving, and the experience of these changes is of particular significance. (Foulkes, 1990: 184)

It is therefore no great struggle to incorporate complexity thinking into group analysis, since it derives from the same origins; Schermer perhaps shifts his view a little, commenting that Foulkes’ ‘intellectual frame allows for integration of diverse intellectual and scientific currents’. Schermer goes on to acknowledge that ‘some elements of complexity theory are already implicit in group analysis’ (Schermer, 2012: 489), which is not surprising if his thesis as to its origins is discounted. Unfortunately, Schermer ends by endorsing the common fallacy that Foulkes was too optimistic about groups and ignored their destructive potential, whereas attention to what Foulkes actually wrote tends to contradict that view. For example, from ‘My philosophy in psychotherapy’:

Why do we fail? The strongest factors are two. One is the enormous resistance in people to change, to learn or to unlearn. The other factor is the need for self-damage, self-destruction. This is also universal, and one could say that it is the amount and nature of unnecessary suffering that people add to that inevitable suffering which is part of human life. It may help if we conduct our analyses with the conviction that life contains great and deep pleasure and satisfaction, but inevitably is weighted on the side of suffering. (Foulkes, 1990: 275)

Foulkes’ emphasis on strengthening the positive potential of groups was not the result of myopia, but a deliberate moral and praxis choice, made in the shadow of the Second World War and personal loss.

In the last decade, a couple of successful management and coaching books have brought group analytic thinking and concepts to a far wider readership (Binney et al., 2012; Thornton, 2016), now in their third and second editions, respectively. Wilke’s (2014) more recent volume celebrates group analysis as a basis for flexible praxis and makes a particularly strong contribution to the understanding of using large groups in organizations.

A recent edition of Group Analysis features Corina Grace’s (2016) account of the dynamics of merger/acquisition, and a thoughtful response from Christine Oliver (2016). It is interesting that in applying group analysis to organizations, the contribution of female group analysts has been so strong.

Vignette

I am sitting alone in a group room, waiting for the ward team to arrive. No message. I close the door at the time the group is to start. Have I got the wrong day? No. I feel confused. Where are they? Minutes pass. I feel completely worthless, without value. Then I feel disrespected, and so, gradually, angry. More minutes pass as I sit.

After about 10 minutes, I hear a few voices in the corridor, and a little later three team members, from a ward of about 15 day staff, enter the room. The ward manager is not among them. It is explained that there has been a crisis in the ward.

This is my third meeting with this adult psychiatric ward team. I have worked hard to build an alliance with the (ambivalent) ward manager, and emphasized the importance of consistent time and venue, and attendance as consistent as possible. We have a carefully negotiated contract to provide a reflective space in which they can think about their work.

The feeling of being useless and disregarded pervaded all my arrivals to work with this team, whether the sessions were well-attended or not; I would arrive to find that the room had been unbooked, or once, that my entrance was forbidden because it was occupied by a patient group. We would find a room, one time a grand former ballroom where staff feared that a litigious patient was lurking outside the open windows, to hear what they would say about him.

Conversations were all dominated by fear:

Some conversations seemed to help members make sense of things, and even the ward manager was sometimes able to express herself. But the start of every session returned me to the powerful communication of the nurses’ own experience of being disregarded and unvalued.

Some other important differences: the group will not necessarily be a small one but may feature median or even large group dynamics, and there is a hierarchy (formal power structure) as well as the usual variety of sources of power within the group. ⁴ The presence of individuals with greater formal power and status has been a source of discomfort for many group analysts, who have experienced it as being in conflict with the fundamentally egalitarian ethic of group analysis; in some settings, this has been compounded by team members’ resonating discomfort. Failed strategies for dealing with this include excluding the managers (whether present or not, and they should if possible be present), attacking them and recruiting the practitioner as an idealized substitute. This results from an unhelpful reification of the reality that all groups contain power dynamics; the most useful approach is to encourage members to explore these and the associated fears and projections. An exploration of the dynamics of formal power can be liberating both for managed and manager.

Whereas in a therapeutic setting one of the things patients learn over time is a pretty sophisticated psychological language, the task of the organizational practitioner is to help team members to a fuller range of emotional expression at the level they can manage, in the service of the work and of their adjustment to it. In a psychological treatment team, this will likely also be quite sophisticated, but in a bank, waste disposal department or retail organization that is rather less likely. Learning the language of the team, and using it, is an essential first step in this process. The practitioner must catch the tone of the team, and then express her or his ideas to them in terms with which they can connect.

The application of group analytic theory is therefore different in organizational work, and the group analyst must hold all these factors in mind, and practise in a more flexible and responsive way to work with what the group may throw at her or him. She or he must be fast on her or his feet and willing to adapt her praxis as well as her language to engage with the reality of the team in front of her or him.

Attention to the Individual in the Group

We all start life in a group. A Portuguese group analyst, Rita Leal, wrote in 1982, ‘the relationship precedes the individual’. The individual develops a sense of self through interaction with others, and all our learning, from the earliest moments of life, occurs in a relational context (Elias, 2000). Though our western culture strongly emphasizes our need to be seen (mirrored) as unique individuals, individuals also need a group identification, that is, to feel part of something larger than themselves. We experience a lifelong tension between these competing needs; it cannot be fully resolved. The tension between individual identity and group identification is a fundamental issue for each individual in every group.

Group analysis is unusual among group methods in its stronger focus on the individual in the group, while having the group fully in mind. As we have seen above, for Foulkes, the two were inextricable; in group analytic praxis, individuals voice group concerns, and individual concerns are understood to reflect concerns felt by all in the group. ‘Analysis of the individual in the group, by the group, including the conductor’ contrasts with more group-focused approaches such as Bion’s (1961), and more individually focused approaches such as Slavson’s (1964). This responsiveness to the individual in the context of the group may be central to the effectiveness of group analysis: a capacity to soothe the anxiety of the individual about engulfment by the group. It can hold this fundamental tension.

In working with organizational teams, awareness of individuals remains a part of praxis, and seems to augment our capacity to hold them and so reduce anxiety. In an increasingly anxious world, this is important in organizational as well as clinical settings. The aim here is to improve group functioning, but paradoxically, appropriate attention to the individual seems in practice to enable freer, fuller contribution to team performance. Group analysts tend to assume that individuals are important in themselves, as well as because each contributes something unique to the total picture.

Sophisticated Grasp of the Nuances of Interpersonal Communication

Group analysis is a science of interpersonal communication, not only verbal but with all the nuance of movement, tone, glance, display, energy and so on (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957; Thornton, 2004; 2016). In prehistoric times, our survival depended upon our ability to work effectively together as a group—that is, to be an effective team. The clan, bound by kinship ties and the drive for survival, was the earliest form of group, likely initially predating the development of language (Osborne, 2015). Babies communicate emotionally before the development of words (Stern, 1985), and the nonverbal elements of communication are widely understood to outweigh by far the verbal. People in modern western societies may invest more time with their colleagues than with their families (Hochschild, 2001). Group analysts have 70 years of literature exploring how communication works in groups; when I published a popular book for non-clinicians articulating these processes, I was surprised by the strength of response and frequent plagiarism of my work; the value of a group analytic perspective is perhaps understood better by those outside our ‘clan’ than by ourselves.

Attention to Context

We never work just with a team. Any team assignment is also an organizational intervention, so we always also work with its context. The practitioner must pay attention to every layer of the context, in the team, and in dynamic administration, in particular when negotiating the beginning. The sociological strand in group analysis (Elias, 2000; Waldhoff, 2007a; 2007b) directs our attention to the broader context of what we see and hear in a team. The concept of communication requires us to ‘entertain the possibility that everything is relevant’ (Marshall, 2001)—a glance, a tee-shirt slogan, the way someone sits down.

Our stranger status and our curiosity are priceless here. What strikes us about this team? The reflection process (Searles, 1955) is also useful. Which aspects of its context are echoed in its dynamics, and of these, which patterns repeat most often? Attention to context links directly with systems and complexity thinking. The task for the consultant is not to avoid getting lost in complexity; it is to use the experience of getting lost to build with others a richer collective picture of ‘what is really going on’.

Group analysis arose from the same scientific paradigm as systems and complexity theories, and its emphasis on interconnectedness and multiple perspectives means it readily and fluidly can bring into focus issues arising in the broader system. The team, as an entry point, sits at a midpoint from which thinking can move out (what has happened recently in the service? What is happening in the broader organization? What in society has contributed to this?) or move in (Why does Fred looks upset? Is his upset shared by others? How did it come about? How does it relate to other things in the system? Does it relate to a wider disturbance in the team or in the organization?).

Tolerance and Value of Multiple Perspectives

One of the strengths of group analysis as a foundation for organizational work is that our theory is fundamentally non-fundamentalist—non-dogmatic and based in pluralism. This results from what some see as a weakness: the outline—some would say sketchy—nature of our theoretical base. Foulkes left us to do much of the work ourselves. But he did found a discipline which enables us to be comfortable with the tensions of uncertainty, holding several views of the same phenomenon simultaneously. Multiple perspectives also have immense value in the complex and uncertain milieu of the modern organisation, and a central part of a group analytic approach is bringing these together to co-create a fuller picture.

The emphasis on the value of differing perspectives positions group analysis as a uniquely well-placed framework to accommodate a range of ways of understanding modern organizational life, including, for example, several varieties of systemic thinking, complexity theory, organizational psychology. Group analysts struggle less with this than those trained within a more fully delineated theory. The team can develop greater tolerance of uncertainty, and parallel narratives of ‘what is really going on’, and the practitioner can have in mind several ways of understanding what s/he observes in the group matrix: she or he is not restricted to any single theoretical viewpoint.

Although power may not be equally distributed in an organization, if the right conditions can be negotiated (mainly if anxiety can be kept within reasonable bounds) the process of team communication facilitated by a group analyst will tend towards an equality of interaction. This enables understanding of a situation in the round, and allows the managed to feel more valued, and the manager to be more comfortable with disagreement and diverse views (Kapur, 2009). It is closely aligned to the value of difference.

Creative Incorporation of Difference

Exchange is a key mechanism of learning and change in groups (Thornton, 2004). Information is ‘news of difference’ and the encounter with new information/experience requires us to shift our world view (or, of course, shut the information out) (Bateson, 2000; Stern, 1985). This is how we learn. This learning through exposure to others’ views may be largely unspoken and/or unconscious in a therapeutic group, but in a work group will also need to be in the realm of words. The group analyst role here is to normalise learning from difference, more overtly than in a therapeutic group. We may promote the process by expressing interest in minority or left-field contributions or where one view reigns, ask ‘what isn’t being said’? If the climate is tolerant, a more diverse range of views can be considered and so lead to better decisions and performance.

A Flexible Developmental Approach to Managing Anxiety and Leadership Projections

Sixth and finally, group analysis has a flexible approach to managing leadership projections and the anxiety associated with them, contrasting with some other approaches. The beginning of any group is anxious. In Waldhoff’s (2007a; 2007b) fascinating account of the ‘C’ group, much of the discussion focuses on managing anxiety in the first meeting of a group; Bion’s style of disappointing members’ expectations is criticized, and members describe how they handle the tensions of a first meeting. Here is Foulkes:

I make it understood either by words or by conveying that it is welcome; that they can say anything they like at any time. (Waldhoff, 2007a: 493)

I do not agree that it is the conductor’s job to keep the tension at a maximum level and make the group bear as much as they can … I do not even think it is the conductor’s job to keep to an optimum degree of tension … he is out to diminish tensions and anxieties consistently in the first group as well as in all the others. (Waldhoff, 2007a: 498)

This can be understood as accepting some of the leadership projections members make onto the group analyst, in order to relinquish them, as anxiety reduces; the group analyst can become less active as the team takes a lead. This is broadly the pattern in other stranger groups which the practitioner sets up, such as action learning sets or leadership coaching groups. In working with teams too, the consultant must convey something of what is expected of members, offer a ‘steer’ in how to react to this new situation.

The situation with a team is, however, multifaceted, because there is already another leader in the group, the formal manager of the team (this is true even if they are not present). The potential here for rivalry, conscious or unconscious, is great, and further, even if the consultant makes good enough use of supervision to avoid this trap, the team leader may feel rivalrous. The team leader is in a different position in the group than other individuals, more vulnerable to projection, as is the practitioner; the potential for splitting is great. Against this background, the practitioner must forge an alliance with the leader, while maintaining the confidence of other team members, or the value and longevity of his or her work is always in question. She or he must support the team’s leader to be as effective as possible, while working to reduce anxiety about competition. She or he must respond to the waxing and waning of the team’s projections, and wean the team leader and the team from primitive ideas of leadership towards a more distributed concept, enabling the team leader to enable others to ‘take a lead’ as needed. Foulkes again:

While it is easy to become a leader—in the popular misconception of the term—it is much more difficult to wean the group from having to be led. (Foulkes, 1964: 193)

This is a both a key element in group analysis, and in an organizational context, a highly complex task requiring a different praxis.