Socioanalytic PracticeSome words carry a particular meaning in this work. I offer these explanations as a way into the conversation, drawing on the Tavistock tradition and on what I have learnt in practice. Where a term belongs particularly to another writer, I point you towards their work.
Bion described unconscious ways a group may act as if its purpose were to depend on a leader, fight or flee a threat, or wait for a pair to bring something new. These can draw attention away from the stated task. They are ways of thinking about group experience, not diagnoses of a group or its members. Bion, Experiences in Groups ↗
One of Bion’s three basic assumptions: a group may act as though a leader or another authority can provide everything it needs, while members set aside their own capacity to think and work.
One of Bion’s basic assumptions: the group behaves as though its shared purpose is to fight a perceived threat or escape it. The threat may be outside or within the group.
One of Bion’s basic assumptions: a group invests hope in a pair, or in a future event imagined to come from them, as if a solution will arrive later.
A concept explored by Jean Hutton, John Bazalgette and Bruce Reed at the Grubb Institute, and developed further by David Armstrong. It concerns the organisation as it is experienced and represented internally by a person in a role. Exploring that picture, alongside formal structures and other people’s accounts, can reveal expectations and tensions affecting the work. Hutton, Bazalgette and Reed, Organisation-in-the-mind ↗ Armstrong, Organization in the Mind ↗
Bion’s container/contained model asks how an experience that is difficult to bear or think about might be received and given form. In organisational work, I use it to ask whether roles, relationships and boundaries make room for people to think about anxiety while staying connected to the task. Containment is more than reassurance. Bion, Learning from Experience ↗
A psychoanalytic term for attributing to someone else a feeling or quality that is difficult to recognise in oneself. In a group, anxiety or hope may become located in one person or role; this is a possible question for inquiry, not a conclusion about anyone’s motives. Melanie Klein Trust on projection and projective identification ↗
Bion’s term for a person’s readiness to join in a group’s basic-assumption activity. It directs attention to the meeting between a person, a group and its situation, rather than to a fixed trait. Bion, Experiences in Groups ↗
In Bion's account, the group's capacity to stay in contact with its task, reality and one another, and to learn from experience. Work-group activity and basic-assumption activity can be present in the same group; noticing their interplay is part of the inquiry.
Eric Miller and A. K. Rice distinguished the organisation of work around a task from the relationships and identifications through which people experience belonging. These arrangements can coincide or pull in different directions. Their boundaries help us ask who does what, with whom, and in relation to the wider environment. Miller and Rice, Systems of Organization ↗
A way of studying the conscious and less visible life of groups, organisations and social systems. It brings psychoanalytic, Group Relations and systems thinking into conversation, asking what our experience may tell us about the wider situation. Group Relations Australia on socioanalysis ↗
Read the fuller introductionIn David Armstrong's account, an active response to dilemmas in organisational and social life that is also met by resistance. It involves recognising people's agency and the possibility of shaping new forms of association within the situation at hand. Read Armstrong's introduction ↗
A way of studying and designing work that takes its social and technical arrangements together: people, roles, tasks, tools and the conditions in which they interact.
A way of thinking about the relationship between an organisation's structure and its emotional life. We look at the task, roles and boundaries alongside the feelings and unconscious processes that may shape how people work. A difficulty may become more understandable when we hold the person and the wider system in view.
For further reading, explore the three books on systems psychodynamics by David Lawlor and Mannie Sher at the Tavistock Institute ↗.
A particular part of a wider task that a person, group or organisation is assigned or takes up. Formal responsibilities matter, but so do the person in the role and the expectations of others.
The wider setting in which an experience takes shape: relationships, institutions, histories, places and social conditions. Looking at the field helps us ask what is happening beyond one person or group.
Feelings, assumptions and patterns that influence what people do without being fully recognised. In socioanalysis, we may consider how these are shared and expressed across a group or organisation.
In psychoanalytic writing, phantasy names an often unrecognised inner picture of ourselves in relation to others; it is more than a daydream or a mistaken belief. Such pictures may colour how we experience a role, a group or a change. If a team responds strongly to a departure, I might wonder what the departure has come to mean for them. That is a question to explore together, not a claim to know anyone's hidden thoughts. On the psychoanalytic term ↗
The right and capacity to take action and make decisions in a role. Authority may be given formally from above, recognised by others from below, or found in one's own understanding of the task. How it is exercised also matters. This account of authority from above, below and within draws on Anton Obholzer’s work ↗.
An experiential way of learning about groups and organisations. In a conference, participants study what happens as they take up roles, form groups and encounter questions of leadership, belonging and authority in relation to the physical or digital space and the wider environment.
Explore Group RelationsAn uneasy response to uncertainty, danger or the demands of a task. Some anxiety belongs to the work itself, particularly when we carry responsibility for others. I am interested in how it is experienced and shared, what helps people stay with it, and when attempts to manage it begin to narrow what a group can think or do.
A practice developed by W. Gordon Lawrence and colleagues in which people share dreams and associations in a matrix. The attention moves towards what the dreams might reveal about a shared social world, rather than an interpretation of a dreamer's private life. An introduction to social dreaming ↗
A possible explanation offered for inquiry. It helps people think about an experience and remains open to being changed or set aside as they learn more.
Taking learning from an experiential event into everyday life and work. The question is how something discovered in a conference might help us think and act in the organisations and communities to which we return.
What both separates and connects: one group and another, an organisation and its environment, a person and a role. Boundaries of time, space and task can make work possible while remaining open to inquiry.
An exchange that includes listening and responding, in words and beyond words. Movement, song, image, drama and other artistic forms can sometimes make room for what has been difficult to express.
People forming relationships around a task or shared situation. How a group works can change with its size, boundaries and purpose, and with its relationships to other groups.
Attention to what people are doing, feeling and thinking together in the present moment. In experiential work, the unfolding situation itself can become a source of learning.
Looking at the whole person, group or situation, including thoughts, feelings, behaviour, bodily experience and the surrounding environment. The question is how these different parts relate, rather than treating any one part as the whole story.
The capacity to remain open to a possible future while facing the present as it is. For me, hope is connected to relationships and to what people may create together; it does not require certainty that things will turn out well.
Making space for different people and experiences to be present in an inquiry. A consultant listens without rushing to judge, while remaining aware that their own position shapes what they can and cannot understand.
Offering direction and helping a group work towards its task. Leadership may be held in a formal position or emerge through the contributions of different members.
Doing something, noticing what happens, and reflecting on it with others. This includes what is felt and enacted, as well as what people can explain afterwards.
In this practice, a capacity to care for oneself, others and the environment while recognising their separateness. Care can help us stay in relation when there is difficulty or difference.
Emery and Trist used this idea to think about cooperation among separate organisations facing a turbulent environment. None can act as if the wider field belongs to it alone; their relationships become part of how they respond. Here, matrix refers to relationships between organisations, rather than a company's internal reporting chart. Emery and Trist (1965) ↗
The capacity to influence what happens and whose voice counts. In a group or organisation, we can ask how power is used, by whom, and to what effect.
Following A. K. Rice, the work an organisation must carry out to continue as an enterprise. In consultation, asking what that task is can help us consider whether roles, resources and boundaries support it, and how people understand its purpose.
Being available to an encounter and noticing one's own responses as well as those of others. A consultant may share an observation or feeling when doing so helps the inquiry, while keeping the focus on the work.
What a person, group or organisation is here to do, and why that work matters in a wider world. Purpose can be revisited as roles and circumstances change.
Jonathan Lear develops this idea through the history of the Crow people and the devastation of their way of life. It is hope for a future good that people cannot yet fully describe with the concepts available to them. I use the term with care: its origins in that history matter, even when it helps us ask how to go on in another setting. Lear, Radical Hope (2006) ↗
What happens as one person leaves a role and another enters it. A leadership change may stir questions of authority, loyalty and loss across the wider system, as well as the practical work of handing over. Succession also concerns a tradition: how people receive its ideas and practices, decide what remains useful, and make room for others to develop it further.
Social defences
Patterns of work, routines or roles that can help people bear the anxiety arising from a shared task. They may make difficult work possible and may also prevent a group from noticing something it needs to face. Following the work of Elliott Jaques and Isabel Menzies Lyth, I ask what a particular arrangement protects, what it enables and what it may cost. Explore Social Defences Against Anxiety, edited by David Armstrong and Michael Rustin ↗