13–15 Feb 2027 · Stony Brook University
About
What is a Group Relations Conference?
Learning from what actually happens
Historically
A Group Relations Conference (GRC) comes from the Tavistock tradition of learning about authority, leadership and organizational life through direct experience. In 1957, the first Leicester Conference established this as a radical educational innovation: rather than learning about organizations from a distance, participants became members of a temporary organization, investigating their own experience as it unfolded within the conference itself. Learning comes from noticing what actually happens as people work together on a shared task.
A GRC with a twist
Traditionally, for three days, a GRC becomes a temporary organization. However, for this particular GRC we will use the term temporary learning cooperative, rather than a temporary organization, because an organization implies something that can be handed down as a finished structure, but a cooperative has to be built, together, by the people inside it.
A temporary learning cooperative draws on relational psychoanalysis: interdependence is part of how the container itself is constructed, jointly, rather than simply provided — its field and its containment co-constructed by members and staff together. It's within that shared construction that ethical imagination becomes possible.
A GRC with a Twist: Becoming a Cooperative
This design stays disciplined about what a Group Relations Conference already does well — and adds a few things on top.
What stays the same
- An emphasis on learning with a clear primary task and firm boundaries of time, task and territory.
- Authority and role learned through direct experience, in the here-and-now — not through lectures.
- Traditional GRC events:
- Opening and Closing Plenary — a space to reflect and transition between daily life and the conference experience.
- Review & Application Groups — a space to review the conference experience and integrate potential learnings into life's organizations and social systems.
What’s new here
- Framed as a temporary cooperative (rather than temporary organization) in which interdependence and sponsorship are learned about in the public.
- The creation of an art installation: members will contribute to the creation of a living and evolving exhibition that will enhance the socioanalytic exploration of the larger field they inhabit.
- Revised GRC events:
- Cooperative Matrix — members negotiate and attempt to build organizational structures of their own, while they study the dynamics of sponsorship, management, and organization/s in real time.
- These have the potential to live beyond the duration of the GRC, and address a dilemma of their organizational and social field.
- This event replaces the traditional Institutional Event, an event where participants studied the relationships and relatedness between the management and staff of the temporary learning institution.
- Small Learning Matrix & Field Learning Matrix — will have the same primary task as a Small Study Group (SSG) and Large Study Group (LSG) respectively — to study the here-and-now life — but will do so from the perspective of a matrix.
- Cooperative Matrix — members negotiate and attempt to build organizational structures of their own, while they study the dynamics of sponsorship, management, and organization/s in real time.
The Theme
What is Ethical Imagination?
Ethical imagination (Armstrong, 2017) emerges in response to real dilemmas in practical life. It brings together a developmental possibility, a recognition of human resourcefulness and agency, and the capacity to re-imagine forms of human association. Such possibilities also evoke resistance — within individuals, groups, organizations and the wider social system.
For Armstrong, ethical imagination is therefore not simply about thinking differently or tolerating uncertainty. It concerns our capacity to face reality in new ways and imagine how we might organize and associate differently, in the service of human resilience and flourishing.
This GRC does not seek to produce ethical imagination; rather, it creates the temporary learning cooperative that provides a setting in which participants can study these processes through experience: how dilemmas are encountered, agency is taken up or surrendered, new forms of association become possible, and resistance emerges around them.
After David Armstrong, “Psychoanalytic Study and the Ethical Imagination” (2017).
Conference Staff
Your guides for this inquiry
Directorate
Consultants
Glossary
A shared vocabulary
Temporary Learning Cooperative
The temporary institution the conference itself becomes, built jointly by members and staff for this work of learning.
Primary Task
The core purpose the conference exists to serve; every event is judged by what it contributes to it.
Ethical Imagination
An active, and simultaneously resisted, engagement with dilemmas arising in practical organizational and social life, in which human agency and resourcefulness may make possible the re-imagining of forms of association.
New Forms of Association
Organizational arrangements that may become possible when people work through real interdependence, rather than assumptions inherited in advance.
Interdependence
The condition of depending on others for a task no one holds alone — studied here, not assumed away.
Container & Containment
The relational-psychoanalytic term for the shared, jointly built space (container) and the capacity it provides (containment) to hold and think about difficult experience, rather than act it out or avoid it.
Field
The wider web of relationships, institutions and conditions a person, group or organization is embedded in and shaped by, beyond its own boundary.
Sponsorship
The authority, resources and legitimacy an initiative needs from others in order to exist and act.
Boundary
The edge of time, task, territory or membership that marks what is inside a system and what is outside it, and makes that system available for study.
Here-and-Now
The space for learning: attention to what is actually happening among members as it happens, rather than to reported events from elsewhere or another time.
Relatedness
The quality of connection between people, groups and systems that is neither assumed nor fixed — studied here as something that has to be actively constructed, negotiated and sustained.
Social Hackathon
A concentrated, time-bounded working session in which members build directly on a shared problem, lending its pace and hands-on spirit to the conference's collaborative work.
Sociotechnical
The view that organizational life is shaped jointly by social relationships and technical or structural systems, neither of which can be understood in isolation from the other.
Small Learning Matrix
Small-group work on here-and-now experience, from the perspective of a matrix within the larger field rather than an isolated group.
Field Learning Matrix
The classical Large Study Group, with the living art installation folded in as material for the group's study of itself.
Cooperative Matrix
Where members negotiate and attempt to build organizational forms of their own around shared dilemmas.
Opening & Closing Plenary
The events that mark the boundary between everyday life and the Cooperative, and back again.
Review & Application Groups
Where members review their experience and consider its relevance to the roles and systems they belong to outside the conference.
Ready to join us?
Living Together in Difference
Authority, Responsibility, and Ethical Imagination
13–15 Feb 2027
Stony Brook University, Long Island, New York
Early bird deadline 30 Nov 2026 · Registration closes 10 Jan 2027
“We learn about organizational life so that better organizations and more ethical futures can become possible.”
