BOB GOSLING MEMORIAL LECTURE 2003

 

IS THE VERY SMALL GROUP THE FAMILY AT WORK?

 Olya Khaleelee

 March 2003

Introduction

In this lecture I would like to talk about Bob Gosling’s ideas regarding Very Small Groups and to make some links both to family life and to work, with particular reference to relationships with authority figures.   Then I am going to invite you to do an exercise and give you an opportunity to discuss my talk during and after the coffee break within the very small group at which you are now seated.   Finally we can re-join this large group for a sharing of experience and discussion.

I first met Bob Gosling in the 1970s at the conferences run by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations held at Leicester University – these became known as the ‘Leicester Conferences’, a 2-week residential event devoted to learning by experience about authority, leadership and organisation.   I had the great privilege of working with him when I was invited to join the staff of the conference as a youngish ‘sprog’ in September 1978.  I realise that telling you this in 2003 – 25 years later - dates me a bit, but you need to think of me as very young and precocious at that time!

I recall that at the end of that conference I drove Bob back to his home in London in my red Datsun 240Z, an E-type Jag lookalike.  Having emerged dazed from the world of the conference which has its own life and is a bit like being on another planet, we roared down the M1 at a mad 120 mph in the days prior to the existence of road cameras with Shostakovitch’s 10^th Symphony blaring from the speakers and Bob commented that the experience was like being shot out of a cannon.   We made the 90-mile journey door to door in under an hour!  Inexcusable, exhilarating delinquency, which  dissipated some of our envy of the freedom the conference members had enjoyed.

I loved Bob for his many personal qualities, his modest and calm nature, his warmth and delightful sense of humour, his psychoanalytical insights, not to mention his beautiful voice and compelling good looks to which no woman could remain immune.    So when he died in February 2000 it was a great loss for all of those connected with him including, I am sure, the Bridge Foundation, of which he was Patron.  It is therefore a very great pleasure for me to be invited to give this Memorial Lecture in his name.

Apart from spending most of his professional life as a psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic, later as Chairman of the Clinic, Bob made a study of training in small groups for GPs, probation officers, dentists, teachers and clergymen, with the aim of helping them to identify and cope more effectively with the psychological problems of their daily work.

This arose from and intertwined with his work during the 1970’s in taking up consulting roles at the Leicester conferences.  These conferences had developed originally from the work of Kurt Lewin on small group dynamics which had flourished in the USA under the auspices of the National Training Laboratory, which led in the UK to the development of all sorts of group experiences in the 60s and 70s including the encounter group movement which some of the older generation here will remember – ‘touchy-feely’ groups – great fun. 

Bob came to the realisation that many of the people who attended these conferences spent much of their working lives engaged in groups consisting of 5 or 6 people, a group size not at that time – in the mid-seventies - available for study within the Leicester conference setting.  The study of the VSG was implemented alongside other group meetings – small groups, large groups, intergroup meetings and so on within the conference in 1976 and the new experience from the VSG was something that the staff were very excited about.   Bob’s paper:  A Study of Very Small Groups highlighted some of the aspects that particularly characterised VSGs as opposed to what occurred in groups of other sizes.

It might be useful just to think for a moment about various different sized groups.  For me the group starts with the twosome, originating with the foetus in the womb.  All of us come from a relationship with another – none of us developed to term outside the womb, so we all originate from within mother and this gives the pair, whether same sex or other sex, its powerful strength and often lifelong attraction, occasionally lifelong avoidance.  

The threesome is more problematic whether at work or at home.  In terms of family life, the threesome might be the partner pair plus a child, the pair plus another family member, three siblings, cousins and so on.   The complexity of the threesome is highlighted by the tendency to enact dynamically a pair plus one within the three-some, A, B and C.  What often happens is that the primary pair bond oscillates so that the pair may first be A and B, later A and C, later B and C.  The third party in the dynamic generally suffers some feeling of exclusion, no matter how temporary.   Threesomes therefore embody tension, not least that associated with the Oedipus Complex, where unconscious murderous feelings and the wish to eliminate the third party, dominate.  I would like to talk to you later about what happens when that gets translated into workplace settings.

It is not surprising therefore that foursomes can feel more comfortable because pairings and therefore co-operation are more possible.  However, rivalry and competition especially for the attention of the primary care giver, whether mother, father or someone else, is likely to be strong.   How far a foursome represents the current family model is debatable – we are in a much more fluid state in terms of family dynamics than Bob was when writing about VSGs in the 70s.

I would like to leave examining the characteristics of face to face groups of 5 to 12 for a few minutes while we briefly consider larger sized groups.  Much has been written about large groups.  All of us who have worked in organisations have been part of large groups where not all members may be see-able, visually at the same moment.   They are not face-to-face groups.  In the groups relations world I and I expect some of you will have participated in what are called median sized groups as well as large groups.   Median sized groups range from approximately 14 to about 25 members and large groups exceed that number.   Schiff and Glassman described 9 variables relating to increasing group size.  They included an increased tendency to sub-grouping, less opportunity for individuals to speak, a diluting of affectional ties, decreasing familiarity with others as individuals and correspondingly, a tendency to stereotype;  a skewing of participation with the leaders being more active and the less active members more silent and finally, a greater threat to the individual.     

Lionel Kreeger who edited that well known work:  The Large Group also noted that the sub-groupings that arise within large groups tend to have the function of trying to resolve tension, conflict and anxiety.  He also pointed out the more psychotic mechanisms, which are present in large group interaction.  These he said can be seen as a parallel to the infant’s primitive perception of external reality.  The threat to the individual’s identity and his sense of self, the difficulty of maintaining his own personal ego-boundary are common experiences.   Paranoid anxieties with massive projective elements are manifested as well as manic flights into gaiety or sexual fantasy, particularly as a defence against the deeper depressive preoccupation of the group.   Alongside these phenomena there is a tendency of the large group to regress into a dependent relationship on someone and battles for leadership are common.

So what are the characteristics of very small groups?   Bob Gosling compared them to the kinds of group that Bion was writing about – groups of 8-12 – perhaps the size of group you might find when the family gets together at Christmas – or on other significant occasions to mark an event.   At work this size group might represent the organisation itself, if it is a small firm, a department of an organisation or a sub-department of a larger organisation.   Or it might represent a level of management or of the administration – a group of people who work together and share a common task.

In his paper, A Study of Very Small Groups, Gosling highlighted the following characteristics, examining each of these groups as though seated in a circle and simply looking at behaviour: 

1.      In a VSG there is no need to turn one’s head in order to see the person next to you, which you would need to do in a group of 8-12 and you are more likely to know who has said what and to read their body language clearly.   Gosling gives an example commenting that ‘when a member starts to tilt his chair backwards and to balance on its back legs, to the other members it speaks loudly of his momentary anxiety, his wish to take up a mid-position in the matter that is being considered, his wish to be half in and half out of the group.  In a group of 8-12 although the same event would certainly have an impact, its precise message might, as it were, be just out of hearing’.   Recall of who has said what in a group of 8-12 is more likely to be inaccurate and with statements wrongly attributed.   Because of such tendencies, the pull on one’s individual identity is therefore greater in groups of this size.

2.      In the VSG it is relatively difficult to hide behind another member or to remain anonymous or silent, whereas in a group of 8-12, inevitably some personalities will be more prominent than others and hiding within the group is easier.   Therefore absence from the VSG is immediately noted whereas it might take a few minutes to work out who is absent from the group of 8-12 and in larger groups it takes even longer.

3.      The knowledge of membership of the VSG gives it a solid feeling and this is linked with a sense of familiarity and certainty, which soon builds up.  The VSG can get very absorbed in it’s own experience as though the rest of the world does not exist.   It is therefore an intensely personal experience where each member recognises the other’s contribution.   The splitting, stereotyping and use of other members for projective processes associated with the group of 8-12 is therefore much reduced but this means that what appear to be contradictory statements may often be noted because the VSG embodies the whole person including their ambivalence or mixed feelings.   The observation of mixed messages is therefore not uncommon, so the complexity of communication is greater.  In contrast the group of 8-12 may succeed in attributing fairly coherent roles to each of its members by ignoring non-verbal communication or other statements, which would contradict the group’s wish for clarity and simplicity.   Essentially we are always trying to make the world simpler than it really is.

4.      Another characteristic of the VSG that Gosling comments on is the physical proximity of everyone to everyone else there.  Members are much more self conscious about how close their arms or feet are to the other, awareness of breathing, coughing and looking.  In other words, it feels extremely intimate in a bodily way and this can be exciting or threatening, often moving from one to the other.  Frequently the initial feeling is of intimacy and safety, but as time goes on it feels more dangerous as though there is a fantasy that an orgy could take place, so the tendency is to be more cautious, for example, about the expression of sexual feelings than would be the case in a group of 8-12.

5.      Relating to other members of the VSG in an empathic or sympathetic way feels more possible than to other members of a group of 8-12, where alliances form, where there is greater possibility of rejection or attack, where splitting into the strong and the weak is more possible and where fragmentation is greater.   Being sucked in, spat out, scapegoated and otherwise used is more likely to happen in the larger group setting, compared to the more benign expectations of the VSG.

6.      Lastly the VSG always has within it the pair, so a symmetry of pairing often emerges no matter how much members may try to talk to each other evenly.   The person answering is generally sitting beside you or opposite; issues are captured by a pair of members and the pairings will frequently change so as not to become too intimate but they are always present.  The pair or dyad is both a promise and a threat.   In contrast, the group of 8-12 will tolerate pairing as a defence for a considerable length of time because it may be helpful in keeping other dynamics at bay, in dealing with the more obvious power plays being enacted or by giving some structure to what otherwise appears incomprehensible.    I have also noted on occasion that in VSGs sometimes six-somes will become two threesomes sitting opposite each other like a mirror. 

Gosling goes on to discuss the various psychological models, which form useful analogies and how he himself was viewed as a consultant when working with a VSG.   One such model was the image of the nuclear family, which repeatedly came up.  He said that notions about the family are usually expressed with pleasure as if something reassuring had been discovered, this despite the fact that it later transpired that at least some of the members had had anything but reassuring experiences in their actual families.   He went on to say, talking about his part:  ‘In this state I tend to get cast in a parental or grand-parental role, adoptive or generative, or as an enfant terrible, or occasionally as a suitor from another family’.

I would now like to take us into the workplace and to consider how aspects of family life may get played out in our working lives.  Of particular interest is the question of authority relations and the extent to which early experiences of authority – with our mother or father – may get re-enacted or compensated for through our relationships with authority figures at work, or through our choice of the type of work we do, such as self-employment where we avoid having a boss and therefore having to deal with a direct authority.

One of my own roles as a self-employed corporate psychologist often involves working in a group of 3-5 people.   A familiar scenario would be as follows:   a very senior executive, often a chief executive, finds that he is suddenly out of a job.  The Chairman and the Board have turned against him and very frequently he has not seen his own demise coming.  But as part of reparative actions by the organisation, he may be given outplacement, in order to ‘contain’ him, make him feel better and help the rejecting organisation mitigate feelings of guilt.   The objective purpose of the outplacement process is to enable him to re-think his career strategy and decide what to do next.

The first contact for the now ex-chief executive will be the outplacement consultant, who essentially has the job of picking up the pieces.   Frequently, the executive is in a state of shock, often having had an extremely successful career up to this point and, given the usual extreme task focus of such individuals, emotionally quite unprepared for what has happened.   A process of recovery has to be engaged with so that the executive can begin to digest the experience.   Often such individuals have been so career focussed that they have neglected their family lives.  Suddenly they are at home – a mixed blessing for some wives and a big change for the children.   Financial security is rarely a problem because executives of this calibre frequently have up to a year of leeway before they need to worry about money.   However, they are often highly driven to find a new role because the rug and their professional identity has been pulled from under their feet.

The outplacement firm provides a transitional organisation or ‘holding environment’ for the displaced executive, who, in this time of turbulence, may develop quite a strong attachment to it and dependency on it, experiencing it almost as an alternative temporary home.   The role of the consultant, who sometimes also mobilises another colleague to help in the work, is crucial in helping the executive not to regard it as too permanent a home and to begin to think about themselves and their future working lives.  For many executives it provides an almost life-saving opportunity to pause and consider the balance between family life and working life.    As part of developing their career strategy and in order to help them understand themselves better, the consultant recommends that they should have a day of personal exploration with the firm’s psychologists.

At this point the pairing of the consultant and executive shifts and the executive is temporarily handed over to me and my male colleague.   The consultant provides us with a CV and a draft strategy.  He may have specific questions for us, such as was it the case that this executive was fired because he or she was not really up to the job, having been promoted to the point of or beyond their competence?  Or, was it that he or she was so task focused, they failed to keep their political antennae operational and lost the trust of the Chairman?  The consultant may be puzzling over a number of issues and may need help or confirmation of their own gut feelings and perceptions in order to work with the executive in refining the career strategy. 

This phase needs to be completed so that the executive is primed in terms of his or her thinking about career issues and in the stability of their emotional state.  The primary task is to achieve a state of clarity and readiness so that the executive can go back into the marketplace both with a plausible statement about why it is that they are looking for a new role and with good-enough presentational skills to make the necessary relationships either with executive search firms or with the relevant networks.

When the day of exploration is set up, one of us – either my colleague or I – prepares the executive by phone about the content and the purpose of the exploration and invites the person to consider what they might like to get out of it.   There may, for example, be issues worrying the executive, which he or she has not felt able to discuss with the consultant and would wish to keep private.   On the day itself, frequently the consultant brings the executive in and introduces him or her.  In this way a transition takes place from the dyad to a triad.   

The purpose of the exploration with the psychologists is to explore the personality and emotional development of the executive and to consider how his or her career has developed to date, what has happened to them most recently and what the implications might be for their future career strategy.  

The day consists of data gathering and hypothesis formation through participation in 4 exercises and two discussions.    One of the exercises is a family sketch in which we look at the family system, going back to grandparents on both sides of the family and tracing the pattern of livelihoods as they come down through the generations.  What we are also interested in is where the individual falls within their family system, relationships with siblings, whether they are the eldest, middle or youngest child, an only child, whether the family has been a conventional nuclear family, whether parents have separated, re-married, had more children, and so on. 

The other exercises consist of a problem solving test which gives us ideas about how the executive approaches problem solving – how analytic versus how intuitive they are, how logical, how far they are able to work with a blank canvas, whether they have long term vision, whether they can move in and out of the detail and whether they are flexible and innovative in their thinking or tend to use tried and tested methods more.   We are also interested in how much intellectual vitality they display, how confident they are in their intellectual equipment when challenged and whether they can explain their ideas clearly to others.  

A third exercise involves creating a fixed pyramid structure using different colours.  It is more creative and playful and provides hypotheses about the conflicts currently being managed.   It tells us how the person is feeling on the day:  about ambition, thoughtfulness, creativity, levels of aggression and energy, active as well as passive, the capacity to stay with a problem or dig one’s heels in rather than give up, as well as other current feelings such as more depressive tendencies, that might otherwise remain unvoiced.

The final exercise, which is particularly useful is called the defence mechanisms test.   This was developed by Kragh in the mid fifties using a perceptual process beyond awareness.  Using a tachistoscope, the executive comments on a number of pictures, which are flashed up very quickly.  The technique identifies and measures the defence mechanisms the individual intuitively mobilises to protect himself or herself from stress.   Much research has been carried out since then applying the test in various settings.  Essentially it provides a profile of the individual’s emotional development over time and pinpoints within a reasonable time range, significant features of their development and where defences have arisen.  We generate hypotheses about whether this person is an early or late developer, how resilient they are and how well or little defended.

Further hypotheses are formed about the effects on functioning at work, which is explored in an intensive discussion about working life.  For example, whether someone is a good initiator, perhaps entrepreneurial, is often related to fast early development. Those better at consolidating work, frequently have had slower, more regular emotional development.  The pace of personal development will affect how they function at times of organisational change and growth.  Their managerial style is discussed, including how they believe they are perceived by bosses, subordinates and peers, who basically constitute the family at work.  This is combined with their perceptions of how they are seen by significant people in their personal life.

In a later discussion, we come back to the family sketch and look more thoroughly at formative experiences.  We are interested in the effects of any changes as well as hearing about relationships with authority figures within the family and at school.  We inquire into  the kinds of roles the individual might have taken up in groups within the school setting, as well as the various changes in school or home setting that the individual might have had to cope with.   What we are interested in is trying to understand patterns of relating and looking for signs of the early exercise of leadership in formative settings.

Simultaneously and throughout the day, my colleague and I are examining what is happening to us consciously and unconsciously while working with this individual.   As a pair, we are often related to as though we are parents there to take care of the individual and to help them and with some anxiety about how we might judge them.  Because of this and because most people in this situation are in a more regressed state than they would normally be, we are able to make tentative hypotheses about early authority relations and what impact they might have had later on in working life.    Body language is an immediate important source of data.  Often the executive will focus his or her attention more on one than the other with their body turned towards that person.   Sometimes the body will be turned towards one person and the feet towards another.  Sometimes one of us will feel quite excluded from the conversation, as though irrelevant, harking back to what I was saying earlier about 3-person settings.  We think about these experiences in terms of the development of emotional attachment within family life and the development of authority relations.

For example, where the executive had whilst growing up a good, benign relationship with father, this experience will come into the workplace as an expectation and may be evident from the warm way in which the executive relates to my male colleague.  Equally the relationship may have been one lacking in respect whether to father or to mother.  In this case, the underlying contempt will be communicated subliminally and sometimes more overtly within the psychological exploration to one or other of us.  We, as the ‘parental pair’ might find ourselves rather split in our feelings about this executive, sometimes to the point of privately arguing heatedly about him or her.  On other occasions, we might find ourselves more in harmony.  Our counter-transference experience enables us to think about what might have happened to this individual in their authority relations at work and particularly in the events, which have brought them to us. 

Thus, might it have been that they were unconsciously contemptuous in attitude towards their Chairman?  Might this have played a part in them losing their job?  

Equally, other factors may be at play.  For example the executive may have experienced family life where mother was a dependable much loved authority figure, where father was absent and where the executive had to grow up prematurely and be more responsible and mature than they really felt inside.   The repressed child within might possibly communicate an unconscious need for a supportive, almost ‘maternal’ authority figure, which could well be played out at work and may or may not fit with the culture of the organisation or with the personality of the chairman.   Within the exploration, this might be experienced as the executive turning towards me and in various ways asking for re-assurance.  At work, such a person would work most effectively with a supportive, enabling superior rather than a boss who is emotionally more distant. 

The loss of a parent may also play a part in the development of personality characteristics and there is some evidence to show that a man who loses his father at a young age may have a tendency to be more driven to prove himself, with statistical implications for those in leadership positions.   A few years ago I carried out some developmental work with the 8 members of the top management of a ferry business.  By chance it emerged that every member of the management had lost a parent whilst young which led me to wonder whether being in the business of crossing the water might be something to do with unconsciously searching for the lost parent.  When I fed back my findings to the Chief Executive, who had not been part of the assessment process, he said:  ‘Oh, not again, I always collect waifs and strays.’  It then emerged that he himself had been orphaned at an early age.   I thought that this was a fascinating finding. 

Coming back to our exploration process, time is also taken to consider peer group relationships and how family life and the existence of siblings may influence such relationships at work and may unconsciously affect the ability to exercise authoritative or effective leadership.   For example, the consultant may have said to us privately, speaking of a chief executive who has lost his job, that he really can’t see him as a number 1.   An immediate reaction to that would be to wonder where the executive falls within the family, because one might later develop a tentative hypothesis about the difficulty in being number 1 when one is a second or third born child and especially if an elder sibling is of the same gender and has been successful.  So the dynamics of family life and relationships with siblings are important data in understanding how the individual has developed their leadership skills and what their capacity might be for the future.

Taken as data and put together with other information from test results and work discussion, this enables us to form good enough hypotheses to help the person understand better what has happened to them, connecting up the past and the present.   From this we can highlight the factors that need to be incorporated into the career strategy to optimise the possibilities of future success for the executive.

The feedback session a week to ten days later involves four, occasionally five of us, the consultant with or without a colleague, being brought back in to participate in discussion of feelings about the day, joint consideration of the report and implications for career strategy.   The gap between these meetings is an important part of the process – a reflection space.   Again the group has shifted both in size and orientation.   The executive is now usually allied both with us as more ‘benign parents’ and with the consultant(s) as his primary support.  The consultants are looking to the pair of psychologists for information and reassurance that they are on the right track.  We, the psychologists, are concerned to ensure we have accurately added sufficient information to optimise the fit between the executive and his next role.

Finally, I would just like to give you an example of someone we saw recently. This very engaging Scottish executive, with a strong Glaswegian accent, and a thrusting, forthright ‘take me as I am’ approach, gave the impression of being a rough diamond, with a lot of energy.  He was an accountant by training and having done his articles he spent all of his working life, save one short diversion, in the clothing business.   He gradually worked his way up to Finance Director then Chief Executive.   His choice of organisation seemed to represent something about working at a part-object level:  he spent several years with an organisation well known for its manufacture of corsets.  He then progressed into brassieres at the time when we heard ‘only the ball should bounce’.  From there, legwear and hosiery became his focus and it was from this company that he was booted out without ever seeing it coming.     This brief history gave rise to the hypothesis that he would have an introverted defensive profile with a tendency to focus on task and to withdraw from too much contact with people.   In short, we expected him to have a specialist profile.

What was interesting was just how wrong this prediction was.   His test results indicated that he was very extrovert and would normally have been expected to become a marketing expert.   He perceived threats early, implying a high level of sensitivity.   However, his capacity to perceive what was coming was defended against by isolation – compartmentalising his feelings - and a turning away from the threat.  So although he perceived it, unconsciously he defied it and denied it.   He was not going to take any notice of it.

He became an expert in change management with a capacity to turn around a failing organisation very quickly.  He was a man of passion and mission.   Subordinates and those lower down the organisation loved and idealised him.   Peers and bosses were more ambivalent.   This seemed odd, given that he was apparently doing such an excellent job.   He confessed that he saw himself as the champion defying the odds, saving the organisation and becoming the hero.   He was the knight in shining armour rescuing the damsel in distress.   The esteem accorded him by others and other positive projections swelled his head.  He talked about becoming a little grandiose and this in turn would have affected how peers and bosses perceived him.   Thus, although he perceived threats early, he deliberately diminished them in his mind, believing he could overcome all problems.   The defence of reaction formation, that is, smiling in the face of adversity, helped him to mobilise this form of denial.   As a result our hypothesis was that he generated destructive envy in others and despite being a highly intelligent man at the intellectual level, his emotional intelligence was less well developed.

He came from a very interesting background.  He was from Irish stock on both sides of the family, born and brought up in Scotland.    His father, an alcoholic, made life very unpleasant for his mother.   He was the only son, special and favoured.  His sister 3 years older, was described as wild, reckless, rebellious and irresponsible.  He largely ignored her and profoundly disapproved of her behaviour.   His test results indicated strong identification with the parent of the opposite sex and a tendency to have an old head on young shoulders, taking responsibility for himself and others very early in his life.  

He described a childhood in which he was on his own a lot without much attention because both parents were at work.   It was poor environment in which he was deprived of normal possessions.   He was very angry with his father and was abusive verbally towards him.   He felt very protective towards his mother, who may have represented the damsel in distress during these formative years and he left home at 18 unable to bear being there any longer.   (Father, who had had many different jobs, frequently losing them because of his alcoholism, gave up drink 15 years ago, became dry and began to have a completely different relationship with BD’s mother.   They made a fresh start and now apparently have a happy marriage.)   We might therefore wonder about unresolved oedipal issues being played out at work, where the organisation to be rescued represents mother and the boss and peers who are ignored, represent his father and sister.   It is not hard to envisage how issues of contempt and envy might be transferred unconsciously into working life.   But whereas, during his formative years, it was he who left, now it is more likely that the ‘father’ in the organisation throws him out for his blatant ‘pairing’ behaviour with the organisation representing ‘mother’.

I hope that this example will help us think further firstly about how the very small group of the family internalised by each of us, infiltrates the workplace and has an impact on the kinds of roles we take up at work.  Secondly, about how the very small group dynamics clarified by Bob Gosling – particularly the visibility, complexity of personalities and pairing, whether vertically with the boss or horizontally in alliance with peers – are unconsciously enacted in organisational life.   I think that perhaps this is an appropriate place to stop.

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