The 3^rd Group Relations response to Covid-19

This is the third set of reflections about how Group Relations thinking can assist people and systems to explore the Covid-19 pandemic. As a third instalment, this snapshot of a moment in time comes as the countries of the world are preparing for or experiencing new waves of lockdown and increasing infections.

The contributors are members of a group which has been meeting on Zoom following since Belgirate scientific meeting in November 2018. The Group has been exploring the hypothesis “Are we Better Together?” – can we as group relations practitioners, theorists and advocates live and work through, the dynamics that we invite members to encounter in a Group Relations Conference. As a result of Covid-19 the question of being “better together” is now one for us all, as we “Social Distance”.

The Tavistock Institute continues to run counter to many of the contemporary organisational responses: before Covid-19 we had a flexible work culture with people regularly working from home. During Covid-19 whilst many offices were closed and people working from home, the Institute offices are open and working flexibly in the office.

The Patchwork that follows, invites you to engage with the eye of an artist, continuing the themes of creative responses and opening up to new ways of seeing and being. Another stream of work that is yet to fully emerge from the same group is looking at maps: of meaning, places and ideas, as a colleague in Switzerland and Australia both spontaneously arrived at a thought, “Cartography of the Soul”, pointing us toward Carl Jung and his ideas. Perhaps this synchronicity augurs the precipice of a new era of the group relations tradition?

Leslie Brissett

For more information about Group Relations programme and thinking please email Leslie on l.brissett@tavinstitute.org

You can read the third, “Tripod” Patchwork below:

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