Group Relations Conferences can be understood as “temporary institutions for learning through direct experience”. They are designed to provide a variety of opportunities for members to exercise leadership and authority, take on roles, explore and experience the possibilities and resistances encountered in doing this, and the implications for one’s roles in back-home systems. 

The focus in a GRC is on exploring how one’s conscious behaviour, thoughts and emotions are significantly influenced by unconscious processes: those that take place beyond one’s normal awareness, within oneself and in the groups and systems that one is part of.  

Thus GRCs provide a unique opportunity to experience and study how one relates to authority with reference to the unconscious ‘pictures in the mind’ that one holds. These explorations and insights have the potential to result in transformed ways of being and relating in a range of interpersonal, organizational, institutional, and societal spaces. 

Group Relations Conferences offered by GRI are residential 6-day learning events.