Contents Vol. 24.2
to be published November 2024
Articles
22nd Eric Miller Memorial Lecture 2024
“Our kind of consultancy is subversive.” Curiosity, agency and the power of changing the stories we tell.
Vega Zagier Roberts
Abstract
The quote in the title is from Eric Miller, and this paper – first given as the 2024 Eric Miller Memorial Lecture – considers the questions ‘what is our kind of consultancy’ and what might be subversive about it. Key is curiosity and the capacity to be surprised. A number of ways to retrieve this capacity are described, illustrated by case studies. These include organization-in-the-mind drawings, role analysis in groups, reflective leadership, and a consultancy exercise designed to break through either-or thinking through find a ‘third position’. All of these require containment of the anxieties unleashed by dismantling existing defences, so that we can begin to consider the possibility of alternative stories.
At a societal level, existential anxieties are rising, and so too bipartisanship, as people defend against uncertainty by engaging almost entirely with people who think as they do. One result is that each person’s version of ‘the truth’ is constantly amplified in echo chambers and less available to examination, regardless of any evidence. Attempts are described of leaders trying to open up more space for dialogue, but these often meet extreme resistance as they pose a threat both to identity and to the need for safety that can come from belonging to an ‘us’.
A systems psychodynamics approach of doctors’ intention to stay in public hospitals: the “desire for dialogue”
Héloïse Haliday
Abstract
The Problem In many developed Western countries, physicians tend to quit healthcare institutions. Factors contributing to physician retention are numerous, but young physicians’ intentions towards public hospitals still seem mysterious to senior physicians and administrators.
The Solution We investigate physicians’ desire for a meaningful “dialogue” with their institution as an overarching need determining their intent to stay. Our data was gathered during a cooperative action-research project in a French University Hospital. We hypothesize that the physician-administrator relationship is crucial because the dialogue they hold in the “outer world” prolongs the dialogue in which physicians unconsciously engage with their institution-in-the-mind.
The Stakeholders This article informs hospital administrators and managing physicians who need to insure younger physicians remain in public healthcare institutions. The article’s original clinical viewpoint will be of interest to healthcare organizations and other public service institutions wondering how interprofessional relationships contribute to professionals’ intent to stay.
Creating a holding environment in an organisational setting: A systems psychodynamic first person action research perspective
Evelyn P. Gilmore
Abstract
A key function of an organisational consultancy practitioner, working from a systems psychodynamic perspective, is to hold individuals in a psychologically safe place as they engage in difficult conversations. A key question in this regard is how the practitioner goes about attempting to create a holding environment in a complex organisational setting. This research, which uses first person action research methodology, and was conducted as part of a professional doctorate, explores the creation of a holding environment. The author, in her role as a practitioner in an organisational setting, inquired into how she created a holding environment using a systems psychodynamic lens. Inquiring in the present tense with triple attentiveness to the outer data of sense, the inner data of consciousness, and the intellectual data of her understanding, the author shows and illuminates with case material, how she attempted to create a holding environment. While others have made reference to the experience of the consultant in creating a holding environment, the contribution of this paper is to do so systematically using a specific research methodology. Seven key elements emerged in the research. These elements include (1) negotiating with key authority figures within the organisation, (2) creating psychological safety in the group, (3) dreaming and reverie, (4) communicating with group participants including attuning and mirroring, (5) creating space for needs, vulnerabilities and emotions, (6) enabling insight and understanding, and (7) holding environments-in-the-mind.
Accounts of Interventions
Societal change and psychodynamic challenge:
Vision, delusion, and reality in a major environmental initiative
Peter Szabo
Abstract
This paper explores the question in an organizational setting of the interrelationship between vision, delusion, and reality. The urgent need for societal change on a number of fronts, not least in regards to the environment, suggests the importance of advancing the understanding of designing productive societal change efforts from the outset, and, critically, driving adaptations and corrections as efforts unfold. Using a case of an evaluation of an environmental initiative, the dynamic interplay between the driving vision, delusion, and reality as experienced by the consultant, by key client participants, and by important system stakeholders, is described in some depth so as to convey an impression of their workings. Clues to recognizing dysfunction, to functioning amidst the circumstances, and to fostering some re-connection with reality are offered. The paper closes with some further reflection on additional questions related to the project dynamics and to broader considerations.
Wading Into the Mess:
Developing Social Justice Leadership Through Systems Psychodynamics
Tanya Lewis
Abstract
Social justice leaders work to create more equitable social conditions, opportunities and human rights (San Diego Foundation, 2024). They often work with people – within their organizations and with those they accompany who experience disenfranchisement within existing systems. Thus, they face highly charged conscious and unconscious emotions and demands driven by their own idealism and that of others, by their own identifications and the identifications of those with whom they work. These leaders seek ways to continue their work through inevitable despair and disappointment as well as identifying and working towards what is possible rather than what is ideal. Systems psychodynamically informed leadership development can support social justice leaders to develop insight into themselves and their organizations, understand more about the intersections between their identifications and the systems they are in and hone their listening and analytic skills to work more effectively in their leadership roles. The BKI Leadership program is described as a case example of this approach.
Speaking Out
AI and Social Cohesion: Threat to Mankind?
Olya Khaleelee
Abstract
This paper outlines recent developments in AI from various positive and negative perspectives, examining its impact on the weather, on warfare, in the workplace, in the classroom, and in agriculture. It explores how such developments will impact employment by using AI to replace workers and professionals and outlines how those developments are already having an impact particularly on call centres. AI, with its capacity to create fake news and fake people, is likely to impact on communication and on relationships. This will lead to a loss of trust for key figures through the capacity of AI to be used malignly as a means of punishing, manipulating or controlling others. The blurring of the boundary between illusion and reality and the replacement of individuals with robotics and bots in the workplace will affect the population’s relationship with employers, politicians and other powerful figures. The paper considers the likely societal and global threat on populations in terms of social cohesion and explores whether the introduction of Universal Basic Income, which is being trialled extensively in various countries, would be one way of providing the stability that loss of employment will bring.
Soundings
OPUS International Listening Posts Global Report:
The world at the dawn of 2024
Book Reviews
Psycho-Social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence Un-Housed Minds and Inhospitable Environments
by Christopher Scanlon and John Adlam
Routledge, Feb 2022, 214pp, ISBN 978-1032121130
Reviewed by Susan Long
Group as a Whole: Learning for Leadership, Authority and Organisation,
by Lionel F. Stapley.
London: Karnac, June 2024, 188 pp, ISBN: 1800131232
Reviewed by Gerard van Reekum
Obituaries
Siv Boalt Boethius
Written by Renate Grønvold Bugge
Thomas Gilmore
Written by Larry Hirschhorn and Mal O’Connor