Leadership, innovation and the meaning of life

If you are looking for a place to develop your understanding of authority and leadership, in the context of real live change, you can't go to amazon and buy another self-help book. Instead, you might want to consider a 'full immersion experience', where there are no lectures or presentations, but a space to co-create everything yourself. Imagine the freedom!
 
I just came back from the 41st Annual International Group Relations Conference on the theme of "Being Meaning Engaging" sponsored by The Grubb Institute of Behavioural Studies in the UK. I would like to offer you some insight into how such a group relations conference works, based on some of my experiences there, and encourage you to attend one some day, because it will help you understand the connection between leadership and innovation in ways that are beyond anything you can read in a business book.

So what's this all about? 


It's a set up
The set up is different from most other "conferences" you will have been to. The group relations website promises 'no lectures or presentations, no review of the past or predictions of the future.' Instead, a group relations conference aims to allow people the optimum space to co-create everything themselves, and to watch what happens (like watching a movie of yourself and how you interact with other people), in many different kinds of events. It's a kind of behavioral learning, by studying yourself in action.


Spirit of the game
To kick off, we were asked to deal with a key dilemma: how to build organisations and teams and ensure in the process that different views will be heard. The idea was to enhance our knowledge of complex underlying dynamics that motivate people individually and in groups, but which are not always easy to manage. This includes competition, aggression, avoidance, domination, secrecy. Lots of dynamics that happen every day in every company, in every team, in every relationship...
Except in yourself, of course.
That's where we all tend to draw the line.  
'Other people may be doing all this dynamic stuff, but not me, no no no....'
And that's the challenge. To see what you do yourself, that co-creates any situation you may find yourself in that you may not be comfortable with and wish to change.


To figure this out, the consultants gave us a little magic clue. All we had to do, they said, was to "develop a spirit of enquiry into the lived experience of the conference, which was also a slice of organisational life -- no matter how temporary. Then while we were exploring, we could see how easy or hard it was to promote creativity, innovation and transformation in our interconnected groups and relations in the conference. It's a spirit of enquiry that is relentless -- you keep asking yourself and others what is going on, every day. Why do people say what they say, why you are doing things this way, how are decisions being made, how would you like to do things differently?


Real and imagined chaos
To keep us on our toes, the consultants did not let us sit there, expecting to be 'taught' something or consuming information about some topic in a theoretical way. Instead, we were asked to take up our own authority and leadership, and get into group decisions about what everything -- what it is we wanted to talk about, what action we might take on our discussion, and to take action, both individually and collectively -- as long as it furthered the shared purpose.
We had to find out how to deal with chaos, since there was no other structure given except the time frame we had to work in. So we started to create our stories.... and find ways to cope with high levels of anxiety about the chaos, as people searched around, figuring out how to connect with each other, and manage the huge freedom (and responsibility) that we had been given. 


Eventually we started to create a new way of working together. We met many of our 'demons' around power, authority, purpose, love and the different roles you might take on in organizations (ambassador, chairman, mediator, critic, inventor, messenger, scapegoat) in the process, and the consultants made sure we 'named' most of the demons so we could learn about how this was affecting our collaboration in the process.


Together with conference staff, we were able to critically examine different models of organisational functioning and appraise our personal and leadership performance. Every time we didn't hold on to the spirit of enquiry, we were challenged to come back 'into the room' and be with all of what was going on, in the present, and explore the very real engagements we were having with each other, as they happened from moment to moment.

There's method in the madnessAccording to the Tavistock institute, this kind of ‘real time’ learning laboratory setting allows you to analyse your leadership styles and experiment in expanding a repertoire of leadership skills in an accelerated way. They claim that "group relations conferences "provide learning opportunities for a new generation of leaders and managers who seek to improve their skills in developing a vision and fostering creativity in new kinds of collaborative networks." 


By experimenting with different roles in the 'safe' environment of a conference, I saw just how much this is true. I was asked to look again at my assumptions, faiths, beliefs, values, passions and judgements on things, and see how this influences everything I do. 


I understood yet again how behind the facade of what seems like a simple, objective, decision, is a whole world of potentially brilliant and powerful and also not so helpful ways of thinking, that can shape our actions as we start to take up new roles back at work. 



And I can only say, this experience will blow your mind. So go and live it and come back transformed! Enjoy.