Lure of the Unknown: First Online Conference in the Tavistock Tradition

It is not often that one seizes an opportunity to be the pioneer for a brand new frontier, something that has never been previously attempted for a variety of reasons. It is even harder when what you are about to attempt, not only flies in the face of logic and reason but also invites harsh criticism from peers, and challenges existing dogma and tradition.

In this paper, I narrate my experiences of hosting and sponsoring the first Tavistock-based group relations conference in late 2006, offered entirely in cyberspace. Rather than discussing in detail, the nuts and bolts of deploying Internet technology for group experiential learning, I have, instead chosen to talk about my own transformative journey that began with conceptualizing the conference in early 2006 and the events that unfolded after I invited a team of experienced conference director, small group/large group consultants, and administrative staff to join the groundbreaking event.

Introduction

A leap into the unknown and uncertain

"When we cannot talk, we must act out our thoughts. When we cannot engage or be engaged, we will act irrationally and unreasonably. Unexamined projections, both active and passive, damage engagement with the ‘Other’ and prevent civilization. Engagement is the field of freedom's exercise. Wholehearted engagement is the encounter, the essential part of a transformation. The choice to engage, the refusal to exclude, is heroism. Engagement's reward is life and richness, though not without conflict and pain. Exclusion's price is isolation and constant awareness of difference; an impoverishment paid for by a false sense of security."   -- (De Loach, 2000)

At the time that I co-sponsored the conference, there was no previously recorded precedent or literature available on “group relations in cyberspace” per se, however, a number of papers and publications are now available on the topic, catalyzed in part by the 2006 conference. I am making an online folder available to my colleagues here, should they want to explore this very rich area and download the work. You will find my contact email address listed at the conclusion of this paper.

The challenging events that unfolded during 2006 left me scarred for a period of 3-4 years following the conference, but have also contributed to my own transformative learning and development. Ironically, 2006 was the year that I withdrew from the Fielding doctoral program, somewhat embittered by a couple of unpleasant experiences at the school. The withdrawal, I feel had some bearing on the mental makeup with which I approached the conference idea. As a side note, though, I returned to Fielding in 2010 and earned my doctorate in human and organizational systems in 2014.

Why a conference in cyberspace?

Those of you that are familiar with offerings of the Tavistock Institute in the UK and its subsidiary in the US, A.K. Rice Institute, perhaps know that for decades these institutes have been at the forefront of face-to-face “experiential conferences” in the US and around the world. These conferences are typically hosted as weekend residential events, or over an entire week. The annual Leicester conference in the UK actually runs for 10 days and is attended by members from around the world. While these conferences are open to anyone who has a desire to “learn through experience” (about leadership, authority, and power), they do tend to be a bit expensive when you factor in the membership fee, boarding/lodging, travel, and other miscellaneous expenses. For the average individual who is not being sponsored or funded by an organization, this unique form of experiential learning can become cost-prohibitive and consequently inaccessible to many who are unable to afford the fee. So this became one of the important considerations, as I embarked upon the idea of mounting a conference in cyberspace, with the hope that we could circumvent some of the traditional expenses involved while offering something novel to participants worldwide.

Other considerations included deploying Internet technology to bring together a geographically dispersed (non-homogenous) group of learners and reflecting on our experience, post-conference, in order to understand the juxtaposition of group relations and cyberspace. The most important driver for me, however, was to be at the cutting-edge of something brand new, and the excitement that goes with exploring uncharted territory. I did not know at the time, what I was going to be up against.

Recruiting the conference director and consulting/admin staff:

Typically, a face-to-face group relations conference is organized by a sponsoring institution around a conference director who is entrusted with the task of naming a conference theme and recruiting her own staff that might consist of associate director, large and small study group consultants, role analysis group (RAG) consultants, institutional event (IE) consultants, and administrative assistants. Over the years, a rigid protocol has developed regarding the manner in which this process needs to unfold, how the boundaries and roles are established, who the target audience might be, and so forth.

Given the novelty of the first-ever “online” group relations conference and the lack of precedence regarding the protocol in cyberspace, the task of attracting an experienced conference director fell on my own shoulders. I had to attract someone who was not only experienced in directing and organizing a group relations conference but also brave enough to want to get involved in cyberspace. Experienced directors and consulting/admin staff become part of an elitist group over a period of time, and generally feel reluctant to push the boundaries or incur the wrath of the Tavistock old guard. Violating the norms can sometimes mean getting ostracized by peers and colleagues.

At any rate, I decided to reach out with an announcement to my online communities of practice worldwide. To my great surprise, I promptly received an email from a psychiatrist trained at Yale and the University of Chicago who had nearly two decades of experience directing and consulting to group relations conferences in the Tavistock/AK Rice tradition. He also had some experience in leading “addictions” groups online. After a few discussions via email and synchronous “text” chats, this physician (who I will hereinafter refer to as “JR”) and I decided to collaborate and move the idea forward on the condition that I attend an upcoming group relations conference that was being organized at the University of Towson in Maryland. His reasoning was that given my lack of previous experience in the group relations methodology (but not necessarily organizing and facilitating online study groups), the conference would be an invaluable opportunity to see up close what I might expect in our own conference.

I do not believe that either of us fully understood at the time, the complexities and challenges involved in undertaking such an important project in cyberspace. JR’s lack of knowledge in Internet technology (as it related to offering a conference in cyberspace) seemed to balance out my own insufficiency in group relations work. The excitement and lure of being at the cutting-edge of something so unique and novel perhaps clouded our sense of logic and reason.

We were both feeling intoxicated with the idea of pioneering the world’s first conference in cyberspace.

It is very important to emphasize here that JR and I communicated primarily via email and text chats. We did not have a single phone conversation between us, even though I was open to the idea. His rationale was that because we were going to be offering a conference in cyberspace, all the work leading up to that event must of necessity be carried out in cyberspace. As a matter of fact, to this day, JR and I have not spoken on the phone or met in person. While hindsight can be 20-20, I believe that a face-to-face meeting and/or phone conversations between us might have lent a sense of relatedness and deeper understanding between us. At the time, however, I too was carried away with the notion that all our interactions must remain in cyberspace.

Between JR’s contacts and my own connections, we were able to successfully negotiate with and attract an international team of 9 consultants and administrative staff. Counting JR and myself, we became a team of 11. We would have been 13 in all, however, 2 consultants decided to quit during our formative stage. I remember cautioning JR at the time, that we might be becoming too top-heavy. I felt that there really was no need to have so many staff members on board. My fear was that if for some reason, we were unable to recruit enough members to the conference; we just might end up overwhelming the event by the sheer number of staff. JR asked me to be optimistic and so we went ahead and finalized the team and began our staff deliberations on July 1, 2006.  It was also decided that all our staff proceedings, followed by the conference itself, would be hosted on the Invision Power Board, which is essentially an asynchronous bulletin-board type format. We also agreed that the closing plenary would, however, be hosted “live” in a text chat room.

Staff deliberations begin (pre-conference discussions):

In face-to-face group relations conferences, there are regularly scheduled staff meetings for the duration of the conference, or at the most, a day before the conference actually begins. In the online group relations conference, staff meetings kicked off in a bulletin board setting on July 1, 2006, and briskly progressed for a period of nearly 2 months, prior to the actual conference. JR’s understanding and reasoning seemed to be that the staff was not familiar with the working of the bulletin board and had to familiarize themselves far in advance of the conference. This, I believe was the second anomaly which introduced a great deal of messiness and chaos into the mix; the first being, the multiplicity of roles that I ended up assuming, such as co-sponsor, host, IT Manager, and Asst. Director of Administration, all rolled into one.

In my over-zealousness to perform and implement the conference at any cost (tacitly supported by JR), I did not speak up, but instead, continued to handle my responsibilities to the best of my abilities. I did not believe at the time, that it would become so burdensome.

It is often true that the person who handles the technology is generally thought to wield a certain amount of implicit/tacit power.

This, I think generated a good deal of envy among staff who were not privy to the technology strings. As we will see a bit later, this envy, if not metabolized and worked through, can really damage relationships between staff members.

Those of you that have previously been on the staff of a group relations conference perhaps know the rationale of regularly scheduled staff meetings while the conference is in progress. These are closed-door meetings that serve, among other purposes, as forums for staff to vent and maybe even rant and rave about the anxieties that they may be dealing with, before and during the conference. The underlying rationale is that if these anxieties are safely discharged, they may not be projected onto conference members.

Whilst I have never been on the staff of a face-to-face group relations conference per se, I can safely speculate, based on what I now know years later that what staff might actually encounter in physical settings, pales in comparison with what was unleashed in our “virtual” staff room over a period of 8 weeks.

As I look back to what transpired, I will have to confess that a dry, bulletin-board type format that no one was previously used to, increased the level of anxiety in the staff room. While the technology, in and of itself was robust and straightforward, the learning curve for some older consultants turned out to be quite steep, despite the training we offered and my own responsiveness to their frequent needs and queries. Please bear in mind that I was the only staff member in a team of 11 with no previous group relations experience; yet the one, who was wearing many important hats. This is an important point to be noted when you consider how power, authority, and envy are mobilized and dealt with in groups.

What started out as the beginning of a heated staff debate around “technology,” soon turned into serious doubts about whether the bulletin board format we were interacting in would be conducive enough to provide “containment” in an already amorphous setting such as the Internet. Given the staff members’ sentient ties with JR (the director) and the explicit authority vested in him by the Chicago Center for the Study of Groups and Organizations (CCSGO), our co-sponsor, it was to be expected that the staff members would soon find someone to project their anxieties and frustrations onto. I had already anticipated that some individuals would turn on me, however, what exacerbated the situation was my personal stake and emotional investment vested in the enterprise’s success or failure. Consequently, this strong feeling of ownership first turned into paranoia and then persecution at the hands of my peers. 

I oscillated between feelings of defensiveness/aggression on one hand and self-preservation on the other.

JR seemed to be quite adept at “dodging the bullets” when staff members implicated that he and I had perhaps hatched a conspiracy to bring them on staff without complete disclosure about what they might expect. How could we tell them that JR and I were not aware of what to expect ourselves, given the newness of the approach? JR continued to remain silent in the face of accusations, while I took the bullets. I suppose once you become an easy repository for others’ frustrations, they will continue to project onto you and absolve themselves of their own responsibility.

The staff conversations are too voluminous to report verbatim in this paper; however, I have shared a resource in my Box folder (see references at the end of this paper) entitled “Echoes from the Staff Room” in which I provide excerpts of conversations between the staff members. I have also uploaded to that folder, several interesting publications written by other authors, post the online conference proceedings. As you review the archives, you will discover the serious nature of the work we performed during our meetings. Contrary to the common belief that feelings and emotions are somewhat diminished and/or muted on the Internet because of the lack of physicality and paralinguistic cues, the reverse seemed to be true in our staff room. Some staff members showed a total lack of restraint and disregard for professional courtesy. It seemed to me as though the Internet setting for some became a passport to a form of speech that was meant to hurt and damage others. It often lacked civility. I suspect that if we were meeting face-to-face, the language used would not have been as outrageous.

To a point, I would have to say that the Internet setting lends itself to a lack of inhibition, sometimes known as the “disinhibition effect.” The senior veterans among us, at one point, became so carried away with this newfound freedom of speech on the Internet, that it really made me wonder if their so-called capacity to “contain” was but a figment of their imagination. Their behavior showed the opposite; uncontained and unrestrained postings crafted as a means of casting shame on the conference organizer, while taking no responsibility themselves for their lack of competence on the Internet. The seeds of distrust in JR and myself had already been planted in the staff room. This cancer grew quite aggressively and infiltrated the entire conference.

Recruiting members for the conference:

During our eight-week long staff deliberations, we somehow developed a consensus as a group, put our heads together and asked one of the members in my admin team to design a brochure for the conference. Typically, all staff members are not involved in conceptualizing and designing a brochure, however, it seemed that everyone on our virtual team wanted to have some input into this. I suppose it is natural for people to want to leave their footprints in a first of its kind endeavor. Having offered a number of virtual courses and seminars on the Internet, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the involvement of the entire staff in a task that could have been easily accomplished by the member of my admin team, JR, and myself.

During our contracting phase with individual staff, JR and I had made it quite explicit that we would be turning to our staff consultants for recruiting support. As the Assistant Director of Administration, I was entrusted with the task of reaching out to staff for help. To my great surprise, the staff seemed to be obsessed with the idea of the brochure, rather than helping me recruit members. Anytime I broached the topic of recruiting, the staff seemed agitated or apathetic. With the exception of JR who shared several leads (a few of which actually panned out), the staff, in general, seemed disinterested.

At the risk of theorizing, I feel that the staff’s lack of commitment to recruiting partly had to do with their own feelings of anger and distrust, in addition to a general reluctance in approaching friends and peers to try something novel.

When I started to push and put the pressure on staff, what we got back were excuses such as “conference fee is too high” for something that has never been tried or tested before. There may have been an element of truth to it, but I think that the overriding factor was a lack of enthusiasm and interest. Some may have been secretly hoping that we abandon the idea altogether, and call off the project. It is common knowledge that even in face-to-face conferences, the explicitly stated membership fee is often reduced on account of “early bird specials”, partial bursaries, need-based scholarships etc. Our regular fee stated in the brochure was $650.00, with an early bird discount of $100.00 if paid by a certain date. Despite that discount, we had very few takers. At one point in our staff discussions, a very real possibility started to loom on the horizon that we may need to call off the project. I felt devastated, to say the least. My feeling was one of “abandoning a baby,” something that I was not willing to do at any cost. At this point, we already had at least a couple of members who had paid the fee, in addition to others that we were negotiating with.

If I could turn the clock back today, I would have agreed with the director's decision to call off the project. But it’s water under the bridge now. It may well be a lesson that vehemence does not always pay. Sometimes, it is best to bite the bullet.

JR’s original target was to recruit 24 members. While this number did not seem practically feasible or doable, we were willing to host a much smaller conference. As you can well imagine, this put a great damper on staff members’ spirits, not to mention the possibility of my original fear becoming a reality (number of staff members overwhelming the small conference). After a heated round of exchanges between staff members, we all agreed after a lot of reluctance, to cut the fee by less than half, i.e. $250.00. At that fee, we barely managed to get a total of 14 conference members on board, and kicked off the actual conference on September 14, 2006.

The conference proceeded “asynchronously” on the Invision Power Board until November 15, 2006, and closed with the only “live” (synchronous) plenary event in the form of a text chat.

What actually transpired in the group relations conference is of little consequence, and pales in comparison with the events leading up to it.

Was the conference a success or just a failed experiment in chaos?

There are many definitions of success, and each has to do with how much of oneself is vested in a new enterprise, and to that end, whether the intended outcome was ever achieved. I am sure that if I ask the members of our staff to reflect on the conference today, I would get many mixed reactions, ranging from deep disappointment, to maybe even a feeling of being seduced into accepting a role in a new project that was untried and untested. Some might even say that by associating with the enterprise JR and I put together, they are still carrying some shame.

JR wrote a paper entitled “Director’s Report”, immediately following the conference in 2006, which you will find in the resource “Box” folder that I have provided at the end of this paper. JR has expressed his own sentiments in that report, given the difficult and most challenging role that he found himself in. Some other staff consultants too decided to write about the conference in particular and “group relations in cyberspace” in general. I ask you to form your own opinions, as you examine the papers.

A part of me would like to think that I broke new ground in totally uncharted territory. From that standpoint, the conference was a success and has helped open up some minds that were previously closed to the very idea of this work in cyberspace. It’s a good feeling to be known as a pioneer, however, there is another self-critical part of me that challenges the very notion of success, and instead, compels me to think through this from a transformative learning standpoint. What did I gain from being a pioneer? What have I lost? Could I have avoided some of the serious pitfalls that I encountered, in part because of my own mental makeup, fears, and anxieties at that point in my life 10 years ago? How have I transformed? What would I do differently if I were to organize such a conference today?

Important lessons learned

It is hard for me to sit here today, 10 years later and profess to know what in particular I could have done differently at the time in order to produce a better conference outcome.

JR and I created a system in cyberspace that had the makings of a disaster written all over it, however, at the time it seemed like a brilliant idea.

In particular, the amorphous nature of the Internet, the absence of a clear-cut structure (container) and boundaries, staff members’ own discomfort and lack of experience with the Internet plus my own insufficient expertise in group relations work, may have exacerbated the situation. I found it bizarre that several staff members who had a great deal of previous experience in group relations work, seemed to mistakenly assume that the Internet as a setting was no different than a face-to-face group relations event. They acted, behaved, and interacted with one another, (sometimes in a very juvenile manner) as though we were all sitting face-to-face. Boundaries, that are already porous on the Internet were consistently transgressed and violated by staff. Even the language used to address each other was unrestrained, and at times, brash and unprofessional. At one point, the systemic anxiety was so high and out of control that I wonder how we ever managed to keep the conference from imploding altogether.

Over the course of 10 years, I have experienced a great deal of transformation within myself. I am able to better contain my anxieties and exuberance. If someone were to ask me today to build another group relations conference in cyberspace, I would perhaps pause and put a great deal of thought into it. I would definitely not approach the idea hastily. I would make sure that the interactions were all “synchronous” (real-time), as opposed to asynchronous. I would not take up any staff role in the conference until I had a much better understanding of group relations work. The director chosen for the conference would be given a totally free hand to build the structure. Staff chosen for the work would ALL have previous experience with facilitating online events.

As someone who was brutally scapegoated by staff in the 2006 conference, I carried a great deal of shame and resentment for a number of years thereafter. If I was writing this paper, a couple of years after the conference, I doubt that I would have been able to work through my emotions and look at the experience with objectivity. Today, however, I have the courage to mentally revisit that toxic place yet again, and take away some learning from the quagmire of controversy and conflict that I found myself in.

Including the staff deliberations phase that began on July 1, 2006, until the conference ended in mid-November of that year (nearly 5 months later), it felt as though I was living a nightmare that would never end.

© Dr. Anil Behal (2016). All rights reserved.

Corresponding email: abehal@email.fielding.edu

Website: ORGDYNE Training & Consulting, LLC

 References:

Readings and resources (password-protected Box folder).

Click on link below:

Online Group Relations