Us and Them: Certainty and Insanity in Healthcare and Educational Institutions

Study the unconscious life of groups from the inside.

‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ Yeats - ‘The Second Coming’

The title of this conference is Us and Them: Certainty and Insanity in Healthcare and Educational Institutions. The ordinary idea we have of organisations is that a group of people come together to do a task, pooling their resources, energy and skills in order to achieve a shared goal. In reality, the mental energy available often gets diverted away from the primary task, and instead is wasted in managerial and bureaucratised processes or intergroup tensions and disputes, for example, between service users and providers, leadership and management, or those and within and those outside of the organisation. It seems that everyone is certain how things should be done but navigating so many different ‘truths’ often leave us incapable of acting for the best. We watch in stunned surprise as events unfold as though fated or compelled by forces other than ourselves. Are these difficulties based in the particular tasks and contexts of education and healthcare organisations, or emerging from within the individuals who make them up – whether residents or staff, children or adults?

This conference is an experiential and accelerated learning event which is suitable for anyone who works in groups or complex organisations, whether mental health, education, therapeutic or social work settings, emergency services, armed forces, HMPs or in corporate business.

This Conference will be suitable if you want to explore and develop your professional identity, or learn more about how you operate in groups settings, how others see you, and to practice finding new ways to contribute to organisational life. The conference itself becomes a ‘temporary organisational system’ in which individual, group and organisational dynamics can be explored ‘live’ as they happen within a series of different group contexts, each with its own set task.