Kate Regan Kairos Consulting Group 242 Alameda de la loma Novato, California 94949, USA (415) 382-6567 email

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.

Links to this site or others:

Beyond Innocence: Creating a Space for Wisdom in Organizations