ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on working at Kids Company Children’s Centre in London. Group analytic thinking was used to understand the organization’s unique, complex structure and dynamics, particularly focusing on the keyworking model. Perhaps more than any other aspect of the Centre’s work, this relationally based model exemplified how the Centre worked creatively at the edge of chaos, allowing/providing space for members to develop emotional attachments. Part one of this chapter focuses on the use of group analytic thinking to contain organizational chaos and work creatively. Kids Company had a complex structure and dynamic before its traumatic and abrupt closing. Considering similar settings, and reflecting further on the organizational complexities and dynamics, demonstrates the importance of group analytic thinking in understanding organizational chaos and considering/discovering how to work creatively within such contexts. Questions must be considered regarding the limitations of such understanding: is creative thinking and understanding of the chaos sufficient to hold, contain, and facilitate changes in such settings in the long term? A common factor among these organizations, all charities, is that they have become economical substitutes for statutory institutions as the result of government’s neo-liberalist policies; ‘economical’ in the narrow sense that they are without the resources, capabilities and power of the statutory sector. The second part of the chapter explores the fundamental and decisive impact of such policies on leadership, function and ultimately on the survival of such organizations.
