I’m not strange, weird, off nor crazy.
My reality is just different from yours.
Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865)
Experiencing, Recognizing & Understanding Group Dynamics in Organizations
A few remaining seats remain for the conference portion of The A.K. Rice Institute’s (AKRI) Spring training series, Through the Looking Glass: Experiencing, Recognizing and Understanding Group Dynamics in Organizations. The training series is an opportunity to learn about the theories underlying group relations work, then experience the dynamics of an organization, albeit temporary, and finally, apply your experience and learning in order to offer consultation to an organization as a whole system.
Through the Looking Glass
In today’s world, organizations of every kind are under constant pressure to reexamine goals and strategies. Technological advances have accelerated communication and action simultaneously across multiple boundaries. Leaders and staff working in an increasingly diverse workplace, with potential for success, as well as miscommunication, misunderstanding, and conflict. These trends call for a renewed exploration of questions about responsible authority, leadership, and followership in groups and organizations ranging from international corporations to communities and families:
- How can we become more aware of what we are experiencing in the moment?
- How can we recognize what that experience – perhaps physical, perhaps emotional or psychological – tells us about ourselves and our organizations?
- How can we use that information to understand underlying dynamics, both overt and covert?
- What language do we use to communicate so that others can join with us toward broader and deeper comprehension of a shared organizational experience?
- How can we turn newly developed understanding into opportunities for change and improvement?
The Through the Looking Glass conference is designed to provide opportunities to examine our expectations and assumptions about authority and about all of us who take up that authority (or choose not to) on behalf of organizations and groups. It also offers the opportunity to study and reflect on how we each participate, both consciously and unconsciously, in the life of the organizations and communities in which we live.
