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Other Group ResourcesOther Group Resources A few
events/conferences |
Why Groups? |
| The National Training Laboratories and the A. K. Rice Center held a conference with T Group and Tavistock components in Maine, 1999. Please mail experiences of that, they'll be posted here only if you want. | |
Highlighted
sections have the most-recently updated resources.
This list is of course incomplete and grows (see Recent Changes). Thanks to you who let me know about changes, unlisted group-related resources, etc.
Named theories and practices are those that are "owned" in some sense by an organization, or are just too recent to have become an uncapitalized term yet.
General or "generic" practices
"Named" theories/practices
Applications and study of group skills in Academia, Business, Health, Activism, Civic Society, Organizations and elsewhere
EventsJanuary 20-February 21, 2002
Annual Intensive
Course in Process Work
Portland, Oregon
United States
March 21-24, 2002
International Listening Association
Convention: The
Foundations of Community
Scottsdale, Arizona
United States
April 21-25, 2002
International Society for Performance Improvement
Annual
International
Performance Improvement Conference & Expo
Dallas, Texas
United States
April 22-25, 2002
O'Reilly Conference: Emerging
Technology
Santa Clara, California
United States
May 23-26, 2002
International Association of Facilitators
Global Conference: The
Quest for Transformation
Fort Worth, Texas
United States
October 19-23, 2002
Organization Development Network
Annual
conference
Montreal, Quebec
Canada
November 9-12, 2002
Open Space
on Open Space X
near Melbourne
Australia
National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation news
Organization
Development Network
Big list. Most are on the United States east coast, but they list
some local/international OD conferences elsewhere as well.
A.K. Rice Institute's lists of Tavistock conferences and training
Ten-day intensives in Nonviolent Communication
International Association of Facilitators' list of conferences -- United States, Australia, Colombia
Jack Graham maintains a list of community building resources as a part of his unofficial Foundation for Community Encouragement (FCE) web site. There is also now an official Foundation for Community Enouragement site. FCE is a non-profit founded by M. Scott Peck & others to teach community building methods of his books Different Drum and World Waiting to be Born. They consult, help host conferences, organize trainings, and have pointers to other community-building sites. They have a very "strong" definition of community, implying a high level of good will among all in the community.
There's a massive Intentional
Communities website, with the U.S. (North America?) Communities
Directory, resources for co-ops, co-housing
alt.community.intentional
-- a newsgroup for discussion of and information about intentional
communities
misc.creativity -- A newsgroup
devoted to the topic of creativity
A creativity
web site, with an excellent list
of creative techniques, including brainstorming, mind
mapping, etc.
Dialogue is a group activity in which participants may have a somewhat 'normal'-seeming discussion, except that one's focus is, as much as anything else, on attending to and discussing individual internal dynamics--assumptions, beliefs, motivations, etc. The idea is not to eliminate them from happening, but to surface them in the conversatiuon in a way that furthers the dialogue.
'Dialogue' was recently used to mean a specific process (rather than the dictionary meaning of the word) in Dialogue: A Proposal (complete text & some comments) by David Bohm, Don Factor, and Peter Garrett. They and others have developed the practice over time, and there are a number of variants.
Finding or starting a dialogue group -- Here's CGL's list of Bay Area Dialogue groups (California, USA). There's also a regular dialogue in Eugene (Oregon, USA), and they have some notes about existing dialogues and from dialogue-seekers (on- and off-line).
Some additional commentary and information on Dialogue can be found at William van den Heuvel's Dialogue web-site, the Eugene Dialogue links page, and the Learning Organization Dialog on Learning Organizations.
A good overview of Dialogue can be found at the Dialogue Group's web site, and the Center for Dialogic Communication is another place to look for information about learning opportunities relating to Dialogue.
Facilitation is what you're doing in a group when separate
from your interests in the matter at hand, you stand up (or sit
down -- more on that later) and try to understand what you can
of what is going on and apply what you learn in a way that you
hope has beneficial effect (sometimes the best that will happen
is that participants--including yourself--learn; that's what many
meetings, conferences, exercises and workshops are for). So I
guess a facilitator is anyone who self-identifies as doing this.
There's a *lot* of discussion, information, exercises and resources
about facilitation, more training programs than you can attend
in a lifetime. Facilitation is a multi-varied thing.
One distinction made by some facilitators is between stand-up
and sit-down. Stand-up facilitation tends to be more formal (&
more likely to be recorded), is typically more explicit, for example
about roles and time issues. Sit-down facilitation tends to be
more casual, or in any case more attuned to emotions or other
"non-task" dynamics which often turn out to be affecting
the task. (I use quotes because of course some groups make explicit
that attending to such dynamics is a part of their task). Both
are useful even when you are not officially facilitating. The
greatest value in this distinction is the recognition that both
kinds of facilitation are valuable.
grp-facl
(archives available) is a mailing list about group facilitation.
There is a sibling facilitation
mailing list en Español. A list en Francais expected
this year.
You can subscribe to grp-facl online, or send e-mail to listserv@cnsibm.albany.edu with the following as the only line of the message:
subscribe grp-facl yourfirstname yourlastname
For example, Doris Lessing would send:
subscribe grp-facl Doris Lessing
Notes: These mailing lists are sponsored by Center for Policy Research and the International Association of Facilitators. grp-facl (the English language mailing list) used to be available also as the newsgroup, misc.business.facilitation.
The Resource
Files from grp-facl are a great, um, resource, they are responses
from the mailing list to various issues/questions, about team
building, group dynamics, exercises, etc.
International
Association of Facilitators (en
Español) -- They have a newsletter, journal (Group
Facilitation), conferences,
the grp-facl mailing list,
and much much more. Their mission (from their web site) is...
To provide resources and interchange in order to support and continuously improve the discipline, art and practice of facilitation. To furnish opportunities for: methods exchange, professional growth, research in the technology and art of facilitation, access to collegial support and networking, certification, and shared resources.
The local chapter is the Bay Area Facilitators Guild, based in San Francisco, California. To find out more, contact Samantha Schoenfeld (by phone: +1-650-965-4150) or Sharon Weinberg (by phone: +1-415-229-5334)
And there's a directory of Bay Area Facilitators (mostly corporate i think).
From Marvin Weisbord:
This is a process developed by Marvin Weisbord, Sandra Janoff and others for organizations and communities to bring widely-diverse stakeholders together and work in large and small groups to discover and act on common ground, exploring their past and present, generating new ideas, a shared vision, and collaborative actions toward their future. The method is based on accepting all differences and polarities wihout having to resolve them. It has been used successfully in many cultures around the world.
It's typically a multi-day meeting design using mind mapping, timelines, inter- and intra-group discussion, and other tightly and loosely structured activities.
The Future Search Network (training and networking for Future Search facilitators) web site now exists!. Other means of contact include: 4333 Kelly Drive, Philadelphia, PA 19129 or phone: 215-951-0300 or 800-951-6333 -- fax: 215-849-7360, e-mail to Sally Theilacker at fsn@futuresearch.net
searchnet is the Future Search mailing list. You can browse the archives by clicking "Visit searchnet without joining".
Group Psychotherapy has many starting points and diverse resources for the professional and the layperson, and is home to the Group Psychotherapy Discussion List.
Division 49 of the American Psychological Association (on Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy) publishes the Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice journal.
Group Therapy North East is a website devoted to exploring shame in the context of group psychotherapy. The content is all in the right column, just scroll down til you see it.
As is mentioned elsewhere on this page, there's a Drama Therapy program at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Groupware,
on-line communities of practiceThe online facilitation mailing list is for those who take facilitative and other leadership roles in on-line contexts, including mailing lists, wikis, chat, etc. To subscribe, send e-mail to onlinefacilitation-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
One issue of the Group Facilitation journal was on on-line facilitation.
Reed's law on the development of groups in a network.
The Institute for Awakening Technology web site has information about what wonderful things Peter + Trudy Johnson-Lenz are up to, and have learned. They coined the term groupware in 1978 and the first time in print defined it as: "intentional group processes plus software to support them." They have more papers about collaboration in cyberspace.
There's a more generic term (less intentional about the group processes?): Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). There are CSCW Links and a CSCW Bibliography made available by the Applied Informatics and Distributed Systems Group at Technische Universität München, Germany. The old unOfficial CSCW Yellow Pages as an SQL file is available, but quite out of date.
The broadest term would be computer-mediated communication, first discussed and created in the 1960s and 70s (see The Network Nation Revisited for some of this "early" history).
netdynam@sjuvm.stjohns.edu
This is a mailing list (there's also a Netdynam
web page) that experientially explores the group dynamics of mailing
lists! They are somewhat Tavistock oriented.
Their description: "A list to examine the group dynamics
of lists: perceptions of other participants, the dynamics of flame
wars, power and persuasion, what is effective communication and
why..."
To subscribe, send a message to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu,
with the following as the only line of the message:
subscribe netdynam
The Virtual Volunteering Project has a page of text and links about Online Culture
For hacker culture, I highly recommend the Jargon Lexicon.
Workshops by Thiagi, Inc. -- This site has training games and tips (updated every week), and other resources relating to games with a social learning purpose.
One of the Resource Files from the grp-facl mailing list is full of Ice Breakers, Energizers, And Other Experiential Exercises
Participatory Initiatives hosts an excellent list of games and exercises for learning and practicing participation, conflict, creativity and other skills.
There's a Learning Organizations web site. From the site:
A "Learning Organization" is one in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to produce results they really care about.
There's more links on learning communities as part of the Society for Organizational Learning site.
This idea has been popularized by Peter Senge's book, The Fifth Discipline.
"Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one." --Brenda Ueland
And don't forget to listen to yourself. If listening just means having your ears present, then active listening means actually caring about what is being said. The spirit is in this exercise for active listening. Here's a longer article on active listening as a leadership skill, and a list of active listening resources for educators.
The International Listening Association produces an annual conference, the International Journal of Listening, and has a list of quotations about listening. If there's no life for you in what you're hearing, what is the briefest intervention that gets you back to listening?
Strategic Questioning evolved out of Fran Peavey's work on listening. It consists of a group asking one individual progressively deeper questions, going from descriptions to bodily experiences, through feelings, visions, opportunities, and strategies, and eventually how to tap the potential for support and action. In strategic questioning one generally avoids asking for lengthy explanations or yes/no answers, but asks the unaskable questions, inviting options and movement.
The purpose of Nonviolent Communication is to strengthen our ability to inspire compassion from others and to respond compassionately to others and to ourselves. It guides us to reframe how we express ourselves and hear others by focusing our consciousness on what we are observing, feeling, needing, and requesting.
That's from the Center for Nonviolent Communication web site (available in English, Swedish, Italian and German), where you can also read chapter 1 of the book, Nonviolent Communication.
Nonviolent Communication is also sometimes referred to as Compassionate Communication. By any name, it is the attempt to express and hear ones own and others' deep intentions fully enough to achieve resolution or connection (with oneself and/or another), or at least learn something.
Upcoming ten day International Intensive Trainings
BayNVC (events)
Puget Sound Network for Compassionate
Communication (PSNCC, "peace-nik")
More local NVC
sites
Open Space is a way of running a conference (or part of a conference) where any participant can propose topics for sub-groups to convene around, then everyone chooses which sub-group they want to join (the "law of two feet" -- some don't happen because no one joins them). Then the sub-groups report back to the whole.
The Worldwide Open Space has experiences and stories of Open Space conferences, a discussion board (where among other discussions, site members can post their Open Space-related web sites), and provides pointers to many other Open Source resources worldwide: Training Workshops, Events, Practitioners, the several Open Space Institutes and more.
At the first OS on OS conference -- the annual gathering using Open Space (the practice) on the subject of Open Space (the many Institutes, the practice, etc.) -- people said that what they wanted was spaces for: mutual support and connection; mentoring and being mentored; and learning and research.
From the Articles of Incorporation of the U.S. Institute, they...
...believe inspired human behavior can be an everyday experience. And that the OSI can grow a sense of what's possible through: expanding the learning and practice of self-organizing communities; and understanding and integrating what sustains self-organizing communities; and experimenting with forming and sustaining the OSI using OS principles.
The Bay Area Open Space Network is in the process of re-creation. Currently, you can contact Jeff Aitken at ja@svn.net, or PO Box 1092, Inverness CA 94937 or 415-669-1924
There's also an Open Space mailing list, oslist@idbsu.idbsu.edu. To subscribe, send a message to listserv@idbsu.idbsu.edu, with the following as the only line of the message:
subscribe OSLIST yourfirstname yourlastname
For example, Eleanor Roosevelt would send:
subscribe OSLIST Eleanor Roosevelt
Report from an Open Space conference conducted by/for the Public Involvement Network [This is gone, they've re-vamped their website. I'm waiting to hear back from them.]
This is the science and art (not necessarily in that order) of understanding and working with organizations, which are one of the "larger" entities often made up in part of one or more groups. It is generally confined to understanding and influencing the organization's social development as it relates to the organization's purpose. This is done through interviews, restructuring, re-visioning, etc. It includes everyone from union busters, to those who question forms of ownership and the bottom line of business.
Sometimes it seems as if each school that has a department teaching the theory and practice of consulting with organizations (somehow distinct from MBAs) has to pick its own name. Some expand organization to include communities. Others change organizational "development" to "transformation" to make clear that they desire fundamental change in how most organizations operate. "Organizational psychology" is loaded with all the charge from the existing field of psychology.
Why so many names? It is another young field, and has not yet solidified. Or, it is one of many new interdisciplinary fields which question various rigidities. In my experience there is commonly a moral component to students' and practitioners' involvement in the field: about improving things in general, about helping people to be more human with one another. This can be confusing when the organizations they are serving have destructive roles in society, but it's an improvement on simply pitting unions against management.
The National Organization Development Network runs a number of mailing lists, including the original general ODNET, and lists for coaching, dialogue, GLBT, and people of color. They maintain listings of OD Events (you can submit yours), a list of local/international OD networks, and -- restricted to members -- some OD Resources, a membership roster, and a job exchange.
OIC@ursus.jun.alaska.edu
The Organizational Issues Clearinghouse mailing list is a forum
for calls for papers, announcements of conferences, special journal
issues, etc. dealing with organizational issues. To subscribe,
send a message to listproc@ursus.jun.alaska.edu,
with the following as the only line of the message:
subscribe OIC yourfirstname yourlastname
INFORMS keeps an excellent list of books & journals about complexity in general and its applications to social science in general and organizations in particular. Complexity is an emerging perspective in science for understanding non-linear systems. I recommend Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity for some understanding.
JFK Graduate School of Professional Psychology (Walnut Creek/Orinda, California, USA) offers a graduate program in Organizational Psychology. They hosted the CGL Process of the Month and CGLers have been known to teach classes there.
Sonoma State
The California Institute of Integral
Studies (CIIS) (San Francisco, California, USA) tries hard
to live the same ideals which motivate its creative list of
departments.
From a quick look at the list
of CIIS graduate programs, and B.A. completion programs, the
current group-related degrees seem to be a Human
and Organizational Transformation (formerly Organization
Development
& Transformation) concentration (as part of a Cultural Anthropology
& Social Transformation, M.A.), a Drama
Therapy M.A., and a Transformative
Learning and Change in the Humanities Ph.D. Some of these
have distance learning and/or evening/weekend options.
California School of Professional
Psychology (California, USA) offers graduate programs in
Organizational
Psychology.
Antioch Los Angeles and
Antioch Santa Barbara
each have a Organizational Management programs (Antioch
LA Org Management, Antioch
SB Org Management)
(Didn't these used to be Organizational Behavior?)
Negotiation and Mediation are two common approaches toward resolving disputes or conflicts (others include war and litigation, but we won't go there today). Negotiation is when those in dispute interact directly. Mediation (a particular kind of facilitation) is typically done by someone who does not have a great stake in the content of the outcome, and is their attempt to help the disputants achieve broadly satisfactory resolution.
Nova Southeastern University's School of Social and Systemic Studies (Dispute Resolution & Family Therapy) maintains a list of Conflict Resolution resources, including web sites, mailing lists/discussion groups, organizations, publications, degree opportunities (see below!) and more. Of note are lists of conflict resolution resources on the web and journals in dispute resolution (peace, conflict, negotiation, etc.), and a particularly lengthy and international list of Peace and Conflict Studies academic programs (including a list of more such lists!). There are many in the Bay Area, you can use your browser's Find capability to search the list for Berkeley, Sonoma, Stanford, Hayward, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and probably some I missed.
Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy -- Proponents of a model of diplomacy beyond national/popular/military leaders gathering (track one), to include citizen, civic groups, business, religious and other tracks.
Civilian-Based Defense Association -- Promoting non-violence training for everyone as an alternative to having a standing army (there are similar organizations in other countries).
Nonviolent Peaceforce -- Organizing and training an international force to physically intervene non-violently in violent conflicts.
Some PeaceNet non-violence resources.
(also see Nonviolent Communication elsewhere on this page)
The (U.S.) National Association for Community Mediation.
Association for Conflict Resolution - in January 2001, the Academy of Family Mediators (AFM), the Conflict Resolution Education Network (CREnet), and the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution (SPIDR) merged into one organization.
Dispute resolution organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area include:
Also see the Association for Dispute Resolution of Northern California
Getting
to Yes -- by Roger Fisher and William
Ury--is a decent book on negotiation, and is
less than 150 pages not counting the q&a at the end.
(I have the 2nd Edition 1991 Penguin, which is also by Bruce Patton.)
The Table of Contents
with quotes and a little commentary []
I The Problem -- Don't bargain over positions.[At least at the start...]
II The Method -- Separate the People from the problem
"Ultimately, however, conflict lies not in objective reality, but in people's heads. Truth is simply one more argument -- perhaps a good one, perhaps not -- for dealing with the differences." (p. 22)
"Understanding their point of view is not the same as agreeing with it." (p. 24)
II The Method -- Focus on Interests, not positions
II The Method -- Invent Options for mutual gain
II The Method -- Insist on using objective Criteria
[I can imagine situations where this last is unnecessary, an obstruction, or even philosophically non-existent. In any case, Chapter II is full of some wisdom that can help in negotiation.]
III Yes, but... -- What if they are more powerful?
"In fact, the relative negotiating power of two parties depends primarily upon how attractive to each is the option of not reaching agreement." (p. 102)
[So if someone's BATNA -- Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement -- is good enough, they may value it more than the connection and decide that they don't need to negotiate honestly, or with regard for others' interests. The authors suggest a number of reasons to offer those with a great BATNA that may help them to value the connection more highly. I might add that Nonviolent Communication can be helpful for this as well.Of course paying a lot of attention to your BATNA could lead to your not doing a very good job at contributing to a negotiation that works for everyone]
III Yes, but... -- What if they won't play?
III Yes, but... -- What if they use dirty tricks?
Following is a conclusion, then the authors' responses to ten questions people ask about Getting to Yes.
There are many different ways that people have come up with
to categorize one another. Many are used in a hurtful way, but
the positive idea here is to understand that there are various
styles of interacting with the world. When we get frustrated
interacting
with someone else this perspective can be helpful. It may not
be that they (or we :-) are being difficult -- we may just have
different styles. The following typologies offer some different
ways of understanding the different ways that we have of being
in the world.
The Enneagram
is an old and powerful nine-category personality type system
The
Keirsey Temperament Sorter -- Helps you figure out which of
the 16 Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator types might be
Psychological
Type Profile -- Pointers to more MBTI sites (and a section
on Jung)
Home
pages sorted by owners' MBTI types
These two newsgroups have discussions and information on various
personality typing systems, e.g. Myers-Briggs, the enneagram,
etc.
sci.psychology.personality
alt.psychology.personality
(alt.psychology.personality
website )
The
Personality Type Pages <-- Apparently defunct. If you knows
where it is, please mail me!
These terms (and others) refer to a movement often connected to academia but with an ambivalent relationship with some academic traditions. Research carried out in this movement typically involves the researcher taking an organizing role in a community; surfacing concerns and encouraging people in the community to use their power to address them; following as much as leading.
A good introductory article
on Popular Education, and Participatory Research, by John
Hurst (professor at University of California at Berkeley)
The International Council for
Adult Education is an Association of regional organizations
representing local adult/popular education organizations. They
also publish a journal, Convergence.
Note: In the United States, the term "adult education" is understood to mean learning opportunities for adults other than the academic track of college-to-university. This typically means apolitical vocational training, not necessarily with any social consciousness.
The Participatory Action Research Network (PARnet) -- a Cornell University-based "international group of students, faculty, and other practitioners who share a commitment to promoting high standards of intellectual and social integrity in the practice of social research for social change." The Action Research FAQ answers many questions, such as what is action research?
The Department of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology at Goshen College maintains an excellent list of web links to Participatory Action Research.
Note: The Tavistock Institute
now describes themselves as doing "action-research"
Participatory
Initiatives -- Based at University of Guelph, in Ontario,
Canada. To quote from their site:
Participatory Initiatives is a diverse group of people with experiences including graduate and professional work in communications, media, planning, extension, adult education, international development, participatory research, and group facilitation....One of our aims is to share and develop information on participatory methods, tools, and approaches. We do this, in part, through ongoing training within the organization.
Among other excellent on-line resources, they host a list
of exercises and the following:
PRA@listserv.uoguelph.ca
Participatory Initiatives hosts a mailing
list on participatory community development. It is not limited
to devotees of the PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) approach
specifically, but embraces dialogue about any form of intentional
change initiated and owned by community members.
To subscribe, send a message to listserv@listserv.uoguelph.ca,
with the following as the only line of the message:
sub pra yourfirstname yourlastname
For example, Malcolm X would send:
sub pra Malcolm X
The International Association for Public Participation is an organization of people supporting public participation, perhaps from a more mainstream perspective. They have local chapters and their own annual conference, and a number of resources on-line including links to Participation Happenings and Other Conferences. The Northern California chapter contact is Marian Echeverria, who can be reached at mecheverria@mp.usbr.gov.
Participation has become popular (or co-opted) enough to be criticized in some Development circles (see Assessing Participation, ed. Sunil Bastian).
Process Work is a process oriented approach to groups and organizations drawing on the theory and methodology of Arny & Amy Mindell and others. It focuses on the creative use of fields, polarities and other ways of making visible and working "edges" in intrapsychic, group and large group+ dynamics.
There is a global Process Work organization web site, hosted at the Process Work Center of Portland. It includes links to many regional Process Work web sites.
jiro Isetani maintains a great bunch of links on Process Work, also in Japanese.
pw-world
-- Process Work community international mailing list
You can subscribe
to pw-world on the web or send an email to pw-world-subscribe@igc.topica.com
pw-world is more open (and more messages/day) than...
gpn-dialog
-- Discussions about the Process Work organization
Subscribe
to gpn-dialog on the web or send an email to gpn-dialog-subscribe@igc.topica.com
Note: Around '98 all the Institute for Global Communications' mailing lists moved to Topica. [is it owned by someone else?]
A T Group (the 't' stands for training) is a group activity
in which you give and receive feedback about emotional (and other)
reactions to one another. You're likely to hear (and say) things
like, "When you say/do X, I feel Y." Participants learn
about how they are read by others, and a lot about interpersonal
dynamics in general.
They were developed partly by accident in 1946 by a group that
became the National Training Laboratories
(NTL). They were conducting a leadership conference to address
intergroup tensions. Here's an excerpt from NTL's
history:
At the start of one of the early evening observers' sessions, three of the participants asked to be present. Much to the chagrin of the staff, [Kurt] Lewin agreed to this unorthodox request. As the observers reported to the group, one of the participants - a woman - disagreed with the observer on the interpretation of her behavior that day. One other participant agreed with her assertion and a lively discussion ensued about behaviors and their interpretations. Word of the session spread, and by the next night, more than half of the sixty participants were attending the feedback sessions which, indeed, became the focus of the conference. Near the conference's end, the vast majority of participants were attending these sessions, which lasted well into the night.
National Training Laboratories
(NTL) -- The organization that sprang from, and continues to hold,
T Groups. They offer T Groups and other learning opportunities
across the USA.
Tavistock is a town in England, and refers to a theory/practice
of group unconscious that originated there. A conference typically
includes large, small and inter-group dynamics. The role of the
consultants (the conference staff) is to attend to and report
on the subsconscious level of what is going on for the
group-as-a-whole.
This may come out as cryptic, irrelevant and/or even
provocative-seeming
statements (and the consultants will not interact with the group
in any other way in the large group), but participants should
remember they are there to learn, and the practice certainly can
bring a lot of insight into group and inter-group dynamics. There
are also opportunities to interact with the staff in more 'normal'
fashion.
The A.
K. Rice Institute (edited from their text)...
is a [USA-based] nonprofit educational institution dedicated to advancing the understanding of group and organizational processes using the Tavistock group relations model. It sponsors group relations conferences, workshops, a biennial meeting, and publishes selected works in the group relations field.
Their web site has a great list
of sites related to Tavistock which includes a number of other
organizations which sponsor Tavistock conferences. They also have
a long list
of conferences. Finally, there's also a Boston
Center and a Washington-Baltimore
Center (which runs 6+ conferences a year!).
The Tavistock Institute
is an England-based, Tavistock-oriented non-profit, and publishes
Human Relations,
a journal on organisations and groups with some great past
and future
themes. Excerpted from their web site (this overview
of theirs changes!):
The Tavistock Institute is an independent social science research, advisory and training organisation. It was established in 1947.... It seeks to apply social science ideas and methods to problems of policy and practice. A distinctive feature of the Institute's work is its focus on social, organisational and policy dynamics through action-research, organisational analysis and formative evaluation.
There's also Netdynam, a Tavistock-oriented mailing list that examines it's own behavior.
Training and Development is a field addressing the educational and some other people development needs of organizations. The International Society for Performance Improvement publishes a journal and a quarterly.
Elsewhere, there's a Training and Development FAQ (a volume of resources) and a Training and Development Community Center, both have some pointers to Human Resources also.
The Co-Intelligence Institute also covers many theories and practices, most of which are directly or indirectly related to groups. Co-Intelligence is Tom Atlee's term for an extremely broad idea about how everything does (and as individuals and social systems for example we could even more) work together to create/be a system that works for all the participants.
Other CGL friends' websites typically have group resources. Send e-mail to add yours.
INFORMS keeps an excellent list of books & journals about complexity in general and its applications to social science in general and organizations in particular. Complexity is an emerging perspective in science for understanding non-linear systems. Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity is a gentle introduction.
misc.business.consulting -- a Usenet newsgroup for discussion and information about general issues of consulting as a business.
You can find many more mailing lists on topics that interest you at these sites, which host and/or catalog thousands of mailing lists: CataLIST, Topica, YahooGroups, Meta-List, and the venerable Publicly available mailing lists.
Sage publishes many social science books and journals (some on-line), including Small Group Research. and Qualitative Inquiry, from offices in California, England, and India.
Other pages/sites like this that include general group resources include the Center for the Study of Group Processes , which has a list of group process links, and Forsyth's Group Dynamics Resources page.
For a site about group (and individual, and large-group to societal scale) practices, that you can edit and converse in, see CreationMatters.
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