BEYOND
BION'S 'EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS': GROUP
RELATIONS RESEARCH AND LEARNING
Robert
M. Lipgar
The
University of Chicago Medical Center
Chicago
Center for the Study of Groups and Organizations (CCSGO)
of
the A.K. Rice Institute Experiences in Groups: Notes in
Retrospect
Although Wilfred Bion's collection of
papers, Experiences In Groups (1961) is considered by many, and perhaps
by Bion himself, to contain only sketches for a theory about group relations,
it is seminal work and is of enduring importance. We were first introduced to
these papers at the University of Chicago in the early 50's by Herbert A.
Thelen (1954, 1984). We were a lively group of graduate students who gathered
around Herbert A. Thelen (1954) to study how people worked and learned in
groups and how groups influenced how people worked and learned. We were
particularly interested in demonstrating scientifically the advantages of
democratic leadership. In our zeal, we were inspired not only by Thelen but
also by the work of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and Wilfred Bion.
For those of us who sought relief at that
time from the rigidities of logical positivism and the seeming sterility of
behaviorism, Bion's attention to states of emotionality, covert processes, and
the group as an organism was refreshing. For those of us who were concerned --
more than a little apprehensive -- about man's capacity for inhumanity to man,
Bion's sensitive examination of the individual in relationship to the social
context was especially meaningful. The idea of a 'group mentality' as a 'pool
for anonymous contributions' gave us new ways to think about our group
experiences. The fact that silence gave consent, resonated deeply with our
post-WWII mentality. Bion's attention to, and respect for affect combined with
his commanding intelligence, assured him a special place among us.
Key Elements of Bion's 'Experiences
in Groups'
Here are elements of Bion's thoughts on
groups which continue to be instructive and thought-provoking:
1. ". . .group mental life is essential
to the full life of the individual, quite apart from any temporary or specific
need, and that satisfaction of this has to be sought through membership of a
group" (1961, p. 54).
2. Learning from experience, required for
development, entails psychological transformations or changes so profound and
the surmounting of resistances so strong, that Bion posited a hatred of learning.
3. ". . . it takes some time before
individuals cease to be dominated by the feeling that adherence to the group is
an end in itself" (p. 63). "[This feeling that belonging is an end in
itself] . . . conflicts very sharply with the idea of a group met together to do
a creative job, especially with the idea of a group met together to deal with
the psychological difficulties of its members" (p. 64).
4. Groups can be observed to be engaged in
two kinds of mental activity simultaneously: the work group (W)
and the basic assumption group (ba). Following Freud's basic
insight concerning primary and secondary process, Bion did not
believe that the emotional, non-rational state (ba) was random or
unlawful.
5. Bion assumed human behavior in groups to
be organized in part to adapt to reality requirements and in part to ward off
or manage fear of fragmentation and terror of annihilation, psychotic-like
anxieties.
6. As a "group-animal," the human
being finds himself to be in dual dilemmas of needing to relate to reality
demands without benefit of knowledge of consequences sufficient to make action
rational while also needing to engage with one's group without losing one's
ability to think and act in responsible ways.
7. Bion conceptualized a group mentality:
". . . the pool to which the anonymous contributions are made, and through
which the impulses and desires implicit in these contributions are
gratified." (p. 50)
8. Through silence, and often without
awareness, we give support to various initiatives, thereby colluding anonymously:
" . . . there is no way in which the individual can, in a group, 'do
nothing' -- not even by doing nothing." (p. 58) " . . . all members
of a group are responsible for the behaviour of the group." ( p. 118)
9. Bion found these anonymous collusions to
occur in patterns associated with particular clusters of emotions and implicit
assumptions toward leadership and authority. He identified three of these
patterns: baDependency, baFight/Flight, and baPairing.
10. Bion conceived of group culture
as resulting from the conflict between the desires of the individual and group
mentality.
11. The sophisticated group is one in
which members are able to manage the human need to belong, to express their
"groupishness," in ways that enable them also to advance the group's
realistic and adaptive work. "Action inevitably means contact with
reality, and contact with reality compels regard for truth and therefore
imposes scientific method, and hence, the evocation of the work group."
(p. 135-136) Here Bion links sophisticated work in groups, learning from
experience, with seeking truth and the scientific method.
12. Bion reserved the word cooperation
for "conscious or unconscious working with the rest of the group in work .
. ." (p. 116). For the ". . . capacity for spontaneous instinctive
co-operation in the basic assumptions," he used the word valency
which he saw as "more analogous to tropism in plants than to purposive
behavior . . ." (p.116-117).
13. Emotional Oscillations and Schisms
occur when the ambivalence in the group toward its leader is so severe that it
spreads to surrounding groups or splits the group into opposing sub-groups.
There are implications here for how to
contribute effectively in groups and organizations whether one is in a
designated formal position of leadership and authority or in roles less clearly
authorized for leadership. Group relations conferences in the A. K.
Rice/Tavistock tradition, deeply influenced by Bion's thinking, have become for
me a most important venue for investigating group and organizational life,
authority and leadership. I have participated as director and/or consultant in
more than 20 group relations conferences and participated as a member in five
residential conferences.
By studying groups and organizations in
carefully bounded working conferences derived from the model developed at the
Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, it is possible to increase one's
awareness and understanding of how the need for group belonging and one's
personal valency may compete and interact with the group's adaptive tasks and
other members' valencies, values, and attitudes toward authority. Bion's
insights are still profoundly relevant to those of us who have immersed
ourselves in learning about groups from our own experiences as members and staff
in working conferences.
Bion's 'experiences in groups,' however,
leaves many questions unanswered and many experiences uncharted: What
consultative/leadership stance? What kind of leadership enables a group to
manage its ba activity and productively transform these energies on
behalf of task achievements, adaptation and the accomplishment of sophisticated
learning? What forces move a group from one basic assumption mode to another?
Are other distinct clusters of affects and influences operative as other ba
activities?
Bion offers examples of interventions as
well as a number of guidelines (Lipgar, 1993a). He states explicitly that
'interpretation,' is primary and strongest contribution the analyst/consultant
makes to the group's ability to work. With regard to timing an interpretation,
he offers the observation that he speaks up when something appears to be
obvious in the group but unspoken. His 'experiences in groups,' however, hardly
address a myriad of technical questions that arise with regard to effective
performance in the consultant/leader's role. There are subtleties in the timing
of an interpretation, as well as in choosing among other interventions -- e.g.,
whether and when to express, acknowledge or reference one's own feelings and
behavior in role as part of an interpretation, how to assess the impact of
different interpretive styles -- e.g., choice of phenomena to be attended to,
use of metaphors and humor, length of the comment, the citation of data upon
which interpretations are based, and tone of voice. In order to advance our
competence in these and other areas of critical concern, as well as advance our
theoretical understanding of group life, empirical and quantifiable research as
well as learning from experience is, in my opinion, required.
Bion's Concept of Leadership: the
'Quality of Contact'
J. D. Sutherland reports that when, during
WWII, he and Trist were working with Bion on the task of selecting candidates
for officer training, Bion often remarked "on the need to judge the
'quality of contact' the candidate had with others" (1985, p. 49). They
felt many different personalities could make good officers, but Bion sought
that "crucial quality, which . . . [is] 'a man's capacity for maintaining
personal relationships in a situation of strain that tempted him to disregard
the interest of his fellows for the sake of his own'." (op. cit.)
In different situations and under different
circumstances, this rather simple phrase refers to a variety of abilities, such
as the ability to: reflect and review; sense one's impact on others and effects
on you; adjust that which Eric Miller (1985) refers to (giving credit to Andrew
Szmidla) as the "in-line" of one's understanding of self and the
"out-line" which is defined and controlled by others; restrain one's
self from action; overcome ambivalence and conflict in order to take action;
contain anxiety; manage boundaries between past and present, fantasy and fact,
feelings and reason, needs and wants, time to mourn and time to want. All these
and more, such as the ability to maintain an empathic attunement with others
while engaging as well with the requirements of the task -- to maintain
"personal relationships in a situation of strain that tempted him to
disregard the interest of his fellows for the sake of his own." (op. cit.)
Bion's contributions have implications for
leadership selection, development and training which are in sharp contrast to
those approaches which focus on traits, skills and techniques. Bion leads us to
think about leadership in a more interactional and contextual way, or as Morris
Stein (1996) recently put it, "'effective' leadership depends on the type
of person involved and the type of situation involved." Rather than seek
particular leadership traits and skills, we are directed to assess such matters
as a person's ability to manage one's self in a variety of challenging
circumstances and cope with ambiguity, anxiety, and floods of feelings,
possibly irrational or non-rational influences from within and without.
Work in group relations conferences enables
us to exercise our capabilities for maintaining the 'quality of contact,' and
to develop hypotheses about the dynamics of leadership and followership, the
exercise of authority, the conflicting desires of individuals and the 'group
mentality,' collusion with 'a pool of anonymous contributions,' as well as many
as yet unnamed group phenomena. Testing hypotheses, however, in ways that
contribute to a body of knowledge, public and reliable requires the disciplined
case studies and quantifiable, reproducible research which meet the
requirements of the scientific method. In this way, we would extend Bion's
concept of 'binocular vision' to include another duality; not only would we
study the individual and the group in depth but also we would examine our
experiences of both with more sophisticated qualitative and quantitative
methods.
William Stephenson and Q-Methodology
As a graduate student, I was devoted to
learning from experience (my own) and to engaging others in such learning and I
still am. I have also been dedicated to the value of objective, quantifiable
and repeatable investigations of reality. I look to the scientific method as an
antidote to, or substitute for politics, as the best way to resolve conflicts
and choose among rival hypotheses. As a graduate student, I wanted to
understand values, attitudes, feelings and fantasies as well as
decision-making, problem-solving, and other behaviors. I wanted to understand
the relationship between the phenomenology of inner experiences and outer
appearances, and also search for the lawfulness of psychological determinants
of such experiences, appearances, and behaviors. I believe in a reality beyond
consensual reality. These were my interests then and remain so today.
Fortunately, in my formative years as a
psychologist, one of my professors was William Stephenson, a British
psychologist from Oxford with an unusual educational, practical and academic
background and unusual range and combination of professional interests and
vision. As the originator of Q-methodology (1958), he provided us with a
flexible yet powerful method for investigating the interior life of
individuals, making the objective and quantifiable study of subjective mental
activity possible (Brown, 1984, 1993) (McKeown and Thomas, 1988).
At the time I began learning about
Q-methodology from Stephenson, I was unaware of how much he and Bion had in
common. Both had extensive training in more than one field: Bion in history,
philosophy and psychiatry; Stephenson in physics and psychology. Both had made
contributions to the assessment and selection of British military personnel
during WWII. Both valued getting things done; 'work' and 'task' being anchors
for Bion and 'getting on with it' being a favorite exhortation of Stephenson's.
Both were intensely interested in how knowledge was gained and shared, and both
valued subjectivity as well as the tests of science. Both read widely, covering
many fields with a special appreciation for literature, James Joyce in
particular. I learned only recently that they both had had analyses with
Melanie Klein. There are, of course, important differences but examining these
is beyond my aims for this paper.
What is at issue here is that in
Q-methodology, we have a set of empirical techniques as well as an approach to
scientific inquiry which is especially compatible with the systematic
experiential study of groups pioneered by Bion, A. K. Rice (1965) , Eric Miller
(1985) and others, and continuing now in the United States by the A.K. Rice
Institute (AKRI) founded by Margaret Rioch. This methodology can be adapted to
serve case study research and theory building, hypothesis formation and
testing, about individual personality systems as well as group and
organizational social systems.
Group Relations Research in Chicago
Both Cytrynbaum and I had been exploring
group relations independently since the 60's. In 1988, together with a small
number of other colleagues and students, we formed the Chicago Center for the
Study of Groups and Organizations (CCSGO) in 1988 and affiliated with the
national A.K. Rice Institute in 1990. To deepen our own 'learning from
experience' and to promote scholarship and research about group life, we have
collected and analyzed data from more than fifteen group relations conferences
over a twenty-year period. During these years, extensive data including
audio-tape recordings have been collected on small study groups and large study
groups, member-reports of conference experiences, member- evaluations of their
learning and of particular aspects of the conference, member and staff views of
leadership, and staff views of the consulting role (Lipgar, 1989). Many
analyses of these data have already been reported (Bair, 1990) (Bradley, 1987)
(Cytrynbaum, 1993, 1995) (Culver, 1995) (Granda, 1992) (Lipgar, 1993b, 1995)
(Lipgar & Bair, 1997) (McGarrigle, 1992).
These efforts, I believe, are extensions of
Bion's own commitment to science. Bion's Grid and his other efforts to codify
and communicate the unique work of psychoanalysis (1962) is illustrative of his
valuing the methods of science as the way to make knowledge public and
responsible. More recently, Edelson (1988) addresses issues of a science of
psychoanalysis, delineates the discipline required to use case studies
scientifically, and cites the appropriateness of Q-methodology to the
scientific inquiry of psychoanalytic hypotheses (Edelson, 1989).
Bion's concepts have been used by other
group researchers (Stock and Thelen, 1958) (Karterud, 1989). What is
distinctive about our research work now is that the data are collected as an
integral part of the 'working conference' and the integrity of the conference's
primary task, design, and methods remain essentially intact. Analyses based on
these data shed additional light on the life of particular group relations
conferences and enable us to make case studies in depth of the structure and
process, as well as seek normative data. By using Q-technique together with
factor analyses of the person-to- person correlational matrices composed of members
and staff from more than ten conferences, we have been able to add to our
understanding of a number of important aspects of the staff culture, member
culture, and staff and member learning.
The first factoring of the staff views of
the role of the small study group consultant (Bradley, 1987) (Lipgar, 1993)
produced an interesting grid, or set of dimensions with which to think about
what we were doing and how we might do it better. We identified four basic
approaches to the role: Factor I, 'group interpretive analyst;' Factor II,
'group facilitator;' Factor III, 'collaborative analyst;' and Factor IV,
'protective manager.' We also found that each factor corresponded quite nicely
with each of Bion's famous categories: 'work,' 'baD,' 'baP,' and 'baF/F,' respectively.
This opens up fascinating possibilities for exploring the interplay between the
consultant/leader's orientation, the group;'' composition in terms of
member-valencies, and learning outcomes.
Since these dimensions continued to emerge
as major orientations, defining differences among subsequent conference staffs
even though the personnel of other staffs changed by 40 to 70%, these four
dimensions require further consideration as building blocks of any theory of
consultancy and leadership. Although additional clusters of opinion were found,
these four basic orientations continued to define differences among us. We also
found that the dominant orientation, that of the 'group interpretive analyst'
was represented by the conference directors, consultants with more training and
experience, and those who took up leadership roles in subsequent conference
staffs. Over a four-year period, we found that the dominance of this
orientation gave way to more faciliatative (Factor II) and collaborative
(Factor III) views, in the sense that in subsequent years these other two
factors were represented by more staff. This finding is congruent with trends
within A.K. Rice and within the culture at large as more and more emphasis is
being given to collaborative and facilitative leadership models.
When we examined the matrices of
correlations for gender differences, we found that the more nurturing and
collaborative stance had more dominance among the women than among the men on
staff, i.e., more women loaded on Factors II and III and more men loaded on
Factors I and IV. McGarrigle (1992) and Culver (1995) investigated these four
basic orientations further by examining in detail the actual interventions made
by consultants with different orientations and their impact on the group
process and member-learning. More such follow-up research is needed to develop
further our understanding of consultancy, the requisite competencies, and of
the relationship among values/orientations, behavior, and impact.
Recently, we have completed another kind of
study using Q-methodology. We have compared member and staff views of
leadership before and after two conferences, 1995 and 1996. We wanted to find
evidence of change and to see whether the change among the membership was in a
direction of understanding and internalization of staff values. We also looked
for changes among staff as these might result from their interactions with
members and each other. We also considered whether we had objective evidence
that one conference was more effective than another in terms of effecting
changes in member and staff learning. Having this information, we can then
review our work in the conference in our various management and consulting
roles with more objectivity.
The factor analysis findings are dramatic:
in the 1995 conference, seven out of ten members' orientation toward leadership
changed in the direction of staff views of leadership. This was true for both
men and women that year. Closer review of each sub-group (the one that
identified with staff and the smaller one that did not) permits learning about
the complex interactions of variables that may have effected these outcomes. By
combining the Q-findings with peer and research observer ratings of staff
performance, as well as member-evaluations of their own experiences, a wide
range of hypotheses about staff and conference functioning and effectiveness
can be systematically examined. (Lipgar & Bair, 1997).
For instance, in the examination of the
findings for the 1996 conference, there is clear evidence that the small study
group consultant whose leadership orientation places him on the same factor as
the conference director is also the one whose small group members questionnaire
ratings of their conference experience is higher than the norm for this conference.
Of the five factors found, the staff were represented on three and of these
three, only this small study group consultant and the director held this
orientation both before and after the conference. Of the five factors, this was
the one most clearly combining Bion's dual emphasis on head and heart, task and
belonging, authority and participatory presence (being fully present), and
responsibility and independence.
Whereas such findings may technically be
considered only as trends and not as rigorous tests, they are definitely
encouraging and intriguing. They hold the promise of not only distinguishing
the different kinds of learning that may be promoted by different leadership,
but also of demonstrating the relative merits of different orientations.
Linking particular outcomes to particular orientations would strengthen as well
as give direction to our staff training efforts and to our ability to mount
more effective educational experiences for others.
Toward the Future
There is yet another important aspect of
Q-methodology, which is the power of factor analysis. Given that the matrix of
correlation coefficients (each individuals subjective view recorded with
Q-technique compared statistically with every other individual's view in a
particular set or sub-set of a population) can be mathematically reduced in
terms of the maximum number of independent points of view (number of factors),
it becomes possible to uncover a psycho-social structure within a conference
culture and identify sub-groups of values and attitudes which were not
otherwise apparent. Steven Brown at Kent State University has reported a subtle
study of the developments in a single small study group (1994) which
demonstrates the flexibility of Q-methodology and its suitability in testing
theoretical assumptions about group structure and changes that occur during a
small study group process.
We face now the challenge of integrating
powerful methods of quantified inquiry for objectifying the subjective with our
educational aims. As a group relations conference director, I plan to revise
the conference design in ways that will bring research findings to the staff
and the membership and make it part of the learning process. Computer
technology makes this possible; statistical analyses can be available within
hours. It is, I believe, incumbent upon us to find ways to bring research
findings and 'learning from experience' together.
The Tavistock model of 'working conferences'
continues to be a most powerful way to learn about authority, leadership,
responsibility, power and influence. By employing additional technologies, even
more can be learned about how personal, often private and sometimes
unconscious, feelings and fantasies are inter-related with the functioning and
behavior of social systems. It is of critical importance to the maintenance of
a humane society that we know more about the inter-play between the private and
personal and the social and public. Without such awareness and reliable
knowledge, we cannot manage the boundaries intelligently, nor distribute
responsibilities appropriately. Bion instructs us that we neglect these 'group'
issues at our peril.
Searching for more sophisticated ways to
understand and communicate what we learn from our 'experiences in groups,'
continues, after all, for us as practitioners, consultants, clinicians,
teachers and leaders, our common task and responsibility. In this pursuit, we
extend Bion's work, his inspiration and legacy into the 21st century. We stand
at a threshold looking beyond the methods and procedures of the past, seeking
to test hypotheses as yet unformed and illuminate knowledge yet to be born.
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