AUTHORITY, LEADERSHIP & INTERSECTIONALITY
CREATIVITY @ WORK
WED JAN 15 – SUN JAN 19, 2020
THE CONNORS CENTER
DOVER, MA
An Experiential Conference in the Tavistock Tradition
SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF GROUPS AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS
Welcome from the conference director
Director
Dr. Candice A. Crawford-Zakian
“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
- D.W. Winnicott
We’re living in a time of rapid change. Businesses and social enterprises must constantly innovate and experiment just to stay afloat. For organizations that hope to thrive in this climate, recognizing intersecting aspects of difference and leveraging them to discover new pathways to progress is critical. Yet understanding the impact of intersectionality on authority and leadership is difficult, and the landscape is only becoming increasingly complex.
This conference explores two primary layers of organizational life – one that we think we see and know, and another that is hidden out of awareness yet driving much of our activity. The ability to exercise leadership, mobilize roles and make decisions is significantly impacted by dynamics that are unconsciously held within groups.
Examining dynamics beneath the surface and learning how they take shape in organizations can lead to the discovery of uncharted possibility and reveal buried challenges. Yet the opportunity to examine the nature of organizational life, what we import into it and our collective influence on it, is rare or non-existent. This conference is your opportunity to creatively explore that work.
Working together over five days we will create a temporary institution to explore leadership, authority and intersectionality in the context of creativity at work.
"Hands down, this was the best (and toughest!)
professional learning I’ve experienced as a senior leader."
- Matthew Randazzo
President & CEO, The Dallas Foundation
Authority, Leadership & Intersectionality: Creativity @ Work is a residential, group relations conference in the Tavistock tradition, designed to help participants learn first-hand about unconscious activity in social systems and its impact on organizational life.
The primary task of this conference is to provide opportunities to learn about the exercise of leadership and authority in relationship to intersectionality and creativity in organizational life.
Rather than learning in the traditional format from teachers or experts, the approach is based on learning from experience itself. This conference offers direct experience of the challenges of managing the complex forces that impinge on the work of groups and organizations, and how these interact with the experience of individuals. It is a setting in which these dynamics can be experienced and explored, within groups, between groups, and within the system as a whole.
"The conference is an extraordinary opportunity to tune
into a frequency of group and organizational life that is
always operating but virtually never accessible."
- Robin Ely
Diane Doerge Wilson Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School
Who is this conference For?
Anyone wanting to develop their ability to act effectively within groups, networks and institutions, no matter age or walk of life. No prior experience is necessary. A wide variety of organizations and industries have been represented in the conference membership, including but not limited to:
Non-Profit
Creative Arts
Health Care
Business
Administration
Consultants
Sponsorship & Endorsements
We are a group of people who are inspired by and passionate about group relations work, social justice and spirituality. The three are intimately connected with each other.