Dr Leslie Brissett and Dr Dione Hills
Organisations with an overt spiritual or religious mission have to address the same organisational tasks as any other organisation: finding appropriate management structures, a sustainable financial model, and promoting themselves to the wider world.
But does a spiritual mission bring additional challenges? What happens in the areas in which organisational structure and spiritual experience (or practices or beliefs) intersect or are in tension with one another? At the outset of a research project exploring this topic, this lunchtime session provides a space to explore this and related questions, including what is the lived experience of authority relations in both spiritual organisations, and secular organisations headed by overtly or covertly spiritual or religious leaders.
Recording of the talk
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Dr Leslie Brissett is Director of the Group Relations Programme, Company Secretary and Co-Directs the Dynamics at Board Level programme at the Tavistock Institute. He is an Elder and ordained Interfaith Minister with an interest in Eastern philosophy and spiritual practices. He believes that the practice of Group Relations in general and the work of Wilfred Bion, in particular, operate at the edge of the “Mystery of Life” itself, opening a space to experience the human species as an interconnected whole.
Dr Dione Hills is an experienced researcher/consultant at the Tavistock Institute and longtime meditation practitioner. Her main work at the Tavistock Institute is research and evaluation of projects and programmes in statutory and voluntary sectors, recently incorporating insights from the complexity sciences alongside more traditional approaches, including system psychodynamic theory. She has recently turned her attention to organisations that might be designated as belonging to ‘new spiritual movements’. The challenges facing these organisations, however, are far from new, so the question arises: what can new spiritual organisations learn from the wider field of organisational development (OD) or from more traditional religious organisations – or indeed, vice versa?
‘The challenge of blending spirituality with organisational demands’ was presented by Dr Leslie Brissett and Dr Dione Hills as part of the Tavistock Institute’s Food For Thought series.
