For this first conference in what I regard as the "real," "old," or "deep" South (in my mind, Houston and Florida do not conform to my understanding of the South, although geographically they are located in the southern U. S.), I sought to implement, with staff's help, support, and participation, a design and orientation that would focus learning on the role of human diversity in social systems rather than in human groups.  There are many diversities, but in the "real" South, race remains, in my experience, the basic diversity of conscious and unconscious concern to most of its residents.  I, who am male and white, once suggested to a black male friend that for relaxation and spiritual renewal he might take a drive through the country (as opposed to the urban) areas of the beautiful State of Mississippi.  "Yeah, right," he exclaimed.  "An aimless jaunt through the country for a black person in the South is not a relaxing pastime and, unless you are eager to get to Heaven or believe in re-incarnation, not spiritually uplifting either."  And, even in 1997, he is of course right.

But the shift in focus that I wanted to bring to the conference is not semantic and represents a change or innovation that in various ways and on various levels seemed to stir fear, shame, reluctance, and excitement among a staff accustomed to "knowing" the rules and procedures of the more familiar, more American group model of conference work, from which I have recently maintained some distance.

In terms of institutional politics, I believed that a system focus would be 1) most useful to the participants and their engagement in the institutions in which they work and study and 2) less likely to cause conflicts and disharmonies that would have negative repercussions on future efforts at group relations training in the same institutional setting (a principally black southern American university).

In addition, my personal belief is that a system focus is more immediately useful to persons engaged in most contemporary institutions.  Lastly, I believed (and believe) that the system focus assures profound learning opportunities for staff persons well versed in the group focus that is the more usual paradigm encountered in Tavistock group relations conferences in North America.

I elected to invite an international staff.   I sought staff participation only from those persons with sufficient skill, competence, and experience to be able to at least recognize and contemplate crossing the boundary into a different, more systemic approach to their tasks.  Human diversity also played a prominent role in my invitations to join staff.

All three of these parameters, I thought, ensured that staff would be as involved in an experiential way in the work of learning as the members, who were expected to be inexperienced in conference work.  I foresaw a direct and positive correlation between the call to genuine engagement in staff's work and the genuineness of the members' learning.  Related to these perspectives, Review and Application Dialogues (RADs) were scheduled after each set of 3-6 here-and-now events.

A number of innovations, including some that were transformations of innovations that I had seen, experienced, and reflected upon in France, were incorporated into the conference design and staff's working agenda and format.  The degree of rejection and resistance that they caused surprised me.

For example, administrative office hours were added, so that members would have a legitimate avenue for approaching administrative staff regarding any issues of concern or conflict and so that members and administrative staff would have the possibility of more easily understanding that conference administration has a direct relation to members and is not just an element of staff that attends to staff's needs and worldview.

Staff were paid during the conference work, both as a way of replicating "real" organizational patterns in other institutions and, on a more unconscious level, as a way of compensating staff for the expected duress related to the changes in design and implementation.  My intention was, in that way, to support staff's struggles to learn through innovation and transformation.  This intention was further buoyed by the plea of one black, female staff member, who, when I asked her how much compensation she thought was appropriate, commented: "At least $150 for the weekend--and more would be appreciated."  I found her statement profoundly moving and found myself wondering how many black professionals work for less than they deserve or for whatever "handouts" a white director/boss might be disposed to offer.  That this valued staff member has since died does not diminish the frequency with which I recall her remark and reflect upon the dynamics behind it.

The reluctance to engage in innovation (because it risks setting in motion a process of transformation in/of other institutional patterns in extra-conference settings?) was manifest around the issue of payment; rather than distribute the checks in a formal way, with appropriate verbal expression of gratitude from management, as I proposed in the conference agenda, the administrative staff unilaterally instituted changes in the staff's work agenda in order to ensure that the checks were in fact distributed hurriedly, at a time not scheduled, and without any verbal acknowledgment.

Perhaps innovations of this nature engender a sense of shame or discomfort or even embarrassment.  One ancillary hypothesis is that because staff did not receive equal payment (i.e., managers received more money due to the longer time span during which their work had consequences for the members' learning), the notion of hierarchy, usually covert or avoided in conference work, was introduced and was reinforced by the separately functioning management and consultant staff components.  Jealousy, envy, or discomfort with hierarchical organizational membership may have motivated the way in which payment was distributed.

Management and consultation were defined as separate functions and were in general maintained as such during all here-and-now events, most publicly in the Institutional System Event (ISE).  In this schema, management of the institution is regarded as "shared" management, with functions sometimes being more clearly as consultant and at other times more obviously as management.  The Director remained in an essentially management role throughout the conference--to the degree that such a stance was permitted by the staff and/or judicial from the point of view of protecting members' learning opportunities.

During the pre-conference staff work, two days before the conference actually began, staff were explicitly asked to verbally reconfirm their authorization of the director to direct the conference on their behalf.  This was done in some cases reluctantly.

The entire written history of the conference, including all letters, negotiations, faxes, and written exchanges with staff, potential members, and sponsoring institutions, was available in the staff room so that staff had access to the development or transformation of ideas and plans eventuating in the instant conference.  The budget, with conference costs and projections for payments to staff members, was also publicly available to the staff in their workspace.

Initially, my hunch was that these last two items would be useful to the membership as well; I have not abandoned that hunch, but I have no data to prompt me to recommend that conference members have access to it.  It remains unclear to me whether a public conference institution, which exists solely to be studied, need or need not be open to public examination of its finances.  But, perhaps so.  Financial decisions always represent management decisions and the study of management is central to the conference task and purpose.

All of the consultants' here-and-now  work took place as scheduled.  During the Institutional System Event (ISE), extra-team and general staff discussion of this here-and-now work properly took place within the management or within the consultant subsystems, that is to say, not in the staff gathered together as a whole system.  Such work clearly constituted management behavior, which was stated to be done only in public during the ISE.  This discrimination and the need for it were extraordinarily difficult for staff consultants to imagine or maintain.

An overarching concern for me as director was that what and how staff work developed would be coherent with the stated conference task.  Naturally, it is precisely this coherence (or lack thereof) that indicates the degree of work (or reluctance to cross the work boundary) present in the institution.

The relationship of primary task coherence to staff's intention, motive, and behavior is never static.  The didactic assumption is that engaging in the boundary negotiations (between task and non-task orientation), both interpersonally and intrapersonally, is the conference work and behavior that lead to learning about authority and leadership in organizational settings.

An example of how a lack of coherence (or, difficulty in translating the conference themes--in this case, of diversity) was demonstrated, with predictable consequences of boredom, lack of interest, and anxiety-reducing comfort in the well-known, familiar, and already-tried, is contained in the following observation: although there are approximately 85 different sodas available in 2-liter bottles, administrative staff's provisions ensured exposure to only 4 of those (Coke, Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, and Sprite). While certainly adequate to represent the black and white races, there were no other "colored" sodas made available to staff or members.

Coherence with the stated task through publicly examinable provision of opportunities to learn even before the conference actually began was important in fostering cooperation, collaboration, and trust between the enterprise and the University that co-sponsored it.  Support grew as the University institution became convinced of a general absence of ulterior, political motives (e.g., trying to change the institution or create a competing organization).

Although I felt authorized and supported by the Chicago Center for the Study of Groups and Organizations (CCSGO), I found it hard to experience the authorization of A. K. Rice Institute (AKRI), perhaps because its authorization was channeled through CCSGO.  Upon reviewing my opening discourse to the members, staff noted a lack of adequate acknowledgment to these two institutions.  Staff members also expressed a need for the participation (principally economic and through provision of material resources provided by the St. Augustine Stewardship Fund of the Norbertine order of priests and brothers and by the International Forum for Social Innovation) of other institutions than the co-sponsors to be acknowledged in the conference opening discourse.  I joined with their reasoning and request and do not regret having done so.  It was a excellent example of shared management in action.

Applications were received steadily throughout the enrollment period.  Diversity was present in the membership and in the staff.  No aberrations or psychopathological behaviors were exhibited by the participants.  A psychiatrist was on formal standby, but calling for her advice or assistance or otherwise employing her did not arise as a possibility or urgency during the conference.

Comments on staff deployment and participation

In the Large Study System (LSS), a white male/black female pair were assigned, convened as a team by the female; since as director I did not work directly with the LSS, a potentially productive degree of competition between the team and the director and his style and leadership arose early on.  Working in pairs is dangerous and not easily managed, for the pair often seems to be something intensely engaged because it denies the existence of a reality larger and more positive outside itself, of which it can maintain only little awareness.  That reality is often a singular authority figure, perceived as threatening both because of his or her singular status and because of her or his role as an authority figure.

In the three Small Study Systems (SSS), two females (one black American/French and one who was routinely accepted as Arab-American) and a black male Southerner consulted to the members, with the Arab-American woman asked to be the convenor of the team.

The Associate Director was a black male, a Southerner, also a Catholic priest and a professor at Jackson State University (JSU); the Conference Administrator was a white female, a Yankee.  The Director, a white Southern male in visible or outward terms, a Mexican-American in sentient terms, was de facto the director and convenor of the management team.

The conference design, implementation, and staffing provided adequate and even accepted and cherished containment for the members' work of learning through encounter with innovation, diversity, and transformative possibilities or opportunities.  Conflict between the staff and the conference director was typical, in my experience.  No other "conclusions" seem wise or warranted at this time.

The overall theme through which members and staff worked on and elaborated their authority relationships and understanding thereof involved the need to maintain separateness and uniqueness in order to avoid the dangers of engagement in human and institutional forms of diversity (said dangers to be primarily those of implied responsibility for the implementation of future transformations in work and social environments elsewhere, and secondarily, to involve a perception of a sense of submission or emasculation in openness to or engagement in the novel or different).

This conference contained significant moments of synchronicity, surprise, perplexing coincidence, mystery, and magic.

For logistical reasons, a formal or informal discussion of members' and staff's work in this conference was not scheduled as part of the conference program.  Such a discussion would be beneficial and useful both for staff and for the members.  A large part of this work was never made available during the conference in a public forum.  The purpose of this report is not to disenfranchise conference participants (members or staff) of the intellectual and emotional work properly performed by them, but rather to briefly provide an element of appropriately inconclusive feedback to representatives of the two institutions, JSU and CCSGO-AKRI, that co-sponsored the enterprise.  Inasmuch as participants included faculty and students of JSU, two (in addition to myself) CCSGO-AKRI members who participated as staff and a third who did so marginally, in addition to a CCSGO-AKRI member who participated as a conference member, other sources of data useful for learning are available to satisfy the interest or curiosity of these institutions.

In this medium, I wish to publicly express my gratitude for the support and freedom to learn that both co-sponsoring institutions provided and that they supplied so unambivalently, maturely, and graciously.
 

STAN  DE LOACH, Ph.D.

Submitted: 24 xi 1996