ABSTRACT
Group analysis is a highly useful discipline for consulting to organizations and working with teams in complex post-modern environments, because its concepts, particularly ‘matrix’, can accommodate a high degree of complexity. The importance assigned to context, and the value placed on multiple perspectives as holding elements of reality, mesh with systems and complexity theories so that group analysis offers a coherent intellectual framework for understanding interplaying systemic processes in the system, from individual, through team, departmental and organizational, to societal and global levels. The chapter articulates some core contextual differences between clinical and organizational applications of group analysis, and goes on to explore six characteristics of group analysis important in organizational praxis: attention to the individual in the group, sophisticated grasp of the nuances of interpersonal communication, attention to context, tolerance and value of multiple perspectives, creative incorporation of difference, and a flexible developmental approach to managing anxiety & leadership projections. The group analytic concepts ‘communication’ and ‘translation’ are explored, and a fragment of dialogue between the book’s contributors on these themes closes the chapter.
