What is an underlying question that gives form
to your work or interest in this field?
My interest has long been in the area of community building,
conflict resolution, collaboration, and in the creation of holding environments
that enable opposites to co-exist within groups and organizations. A
guiding question is:
How does one create an environment that allows the whole
person to emerge, and in so doing, how will the collective look?
What is your personal experience of collective
wisdom in groups?
My strongest experience of collective wisdom in a group
was at a Tavistock Group Relations Conference where, on the one hand,
group members battled fiercely with one another over racial and gender
issues, and at the same time struggled to hold the group together, and
to find a way to collaborate with one another in their learning.
What is it about the work in this field that excites
you and connects you to your own deepest self?
I am originally from Alaska. Before I went to New York
to complete a Master’s degree in religion and religious education
at Fordham I had been teaching religion at a boarding school in a small
Eskimo village in Western Alaska. I learned a great deal from my students,
and from a worldview that centered on the collective and its relationship
to nature. When I went to Fordham and began studying Old Testament traditions
I found it was necessary to take up a group perspective in order to
truly understand the people of the Old Testament. I realized that the
transition to the prominence of the individual that we currently see
in western industrial societies began to take shape in Christianity.
While the emergence of the individual from the group has enabled tremendous
development it is becoming increasingly clear that we needed to learn
the art of re-entering the group and re-locating ourselves in community
in order to take the next step in our evolution. Mapping the field of
collective wisdom begins the process of figuring out how to re-enter
groups in order to recreate communities of healing and development for
all involved.
Please provide a brief storyline or snapshot of
what brought you to this work.
While at Fordham I participated in my first Tavistock
Group Relations Conference. The conference methodology focuses on the
experiential study of the group unconscious, focusing specifically on
unconscious attitudes toward leadership, power and authority as they
are manifest by the roles individuals take up on behalf of the group.
I have continued to work on these conferences for the last 25 years
in order to continue my study of the unconscious dynamics in groups
and organizations. George McCauley, S.J. was my first consultant at
a group relations conference, a professor at Fordham while I was there,
and a long time friend and mentor. His work, illuminating the ways in
which unconscious group dynamics impact what gets said in churches about
God, has had a significant impact on me. Verneice Thompson, Ph.D. trained
me in group relations work and her constant innovation of the conference
design has led to a persistent interest in how to assist members of
groups and organizations learn from their lived experience. The work
of Bruce Reed on oscillation theory and Lowell Cooper’s work on
unconscious planning in groups has also guided the evolution of my thinking.
How would you like to be available to others in
this field?
I am more than happy to talk to others interested in
the field of collective wisdom, or to get involved in joint projects
that would enable a continued investigation of groups, their unconscious
dynamics and their capacity for collective wisdom.
