What happens when the fragility of the leader meets that of the practitioner?

In this session, we will explore how we collude with others and delude ourselves to manage our own anxiety and shame.

The field of Organisation Development, and indeed many others, encourages us to be critically reflective. ‘Self as instrument’ started out as a radical invitation to use one’s own experience of self as the primary sense-making lens, an invitation to treat everything as data in the here and now in service of forming hypotheses and devising invitations in response to messy reality. Yet this is set in the context of client-helper relationships where the overarching need for clients is to find someone onto whom their projections of ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’ are validated. This requires those of us working with clients to be aware (enough) of our own ego ideals, the intoxicating effect of projections that feed our narcissism and the lurking shadow of shame.

What is little acknowledged, or discussed, is what happens when the fragility of the client or leader meets that of the practitioner. What do we do when our shame – whether related to our work identities and roles or more archaic – is evoked? Do we really embrace ‘self as instrument’ and do our work, or collude by keeping the inquiry relatively superficial? It is all well and good gathering in communities of practice to reflect, and the question arises as to how deep we are really prepared to go.

Join Steve Hearsum, author of a new book on how unconscious processes driven by shame and anxiety fuel collusive behaviours that maintain the market for quick fix/’Silver Bullet’ solutions. In this workshop, Steve will host a conversation and inquiry that explores how we may be part of the problem, both colluding with clients, each other and ourselves. Come prepared to engage in useful discomfort in service of your own and collective learning; and bring your sense of humour, because even in the darkest moments absurdity lurks.

Steve Hearsum is a consultant, coach and supervisor, and the author of ‘No Silver Bullet: bursting the bubble of the organisational quick fix’, which looks at how leaders and organisations unconsciously collude with the purveyors of quick-fix, Silver Bullet solutions for complex challenges.

He is a trustee of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, former co-Chair of the OD Network Europe and is on faculty for the Masters in People & OD at the University of Chichester. He lives in Brighton, in the UK, with his wife, daughter and fluffy hound.

*** SPECIAL OFFER: Register for the Preconference Workshop and the Conference and receive your free copy of Steve Hearsum’s book, No Silver Bullet: Bursting the bubble of the organisational quick fix.