Remembering Ralph Stacey
Professor Ralph Stacey M.Inst.GA.
10/9/42 – 4/9/21
The outstanding career of Ralph Stacey, who died in September 2021, is well described in his entry in Wikipedia and in his obituary on the Complexity and Management website at the University of Hertfordshire, (where he had been Professor of Management since 1992) and I do not need to repeat them. This is a personal reflection on his contribution to both management consultancy and group analysis
Ralph qualified as a Group Analyst in 1998 and this interest became a major element of his Complexity thinking and practice both initially as a clinician and then as a promoter of group analytically informed consultations to organisations and their management. It is in this dual context I would like him to be remembered. He was, and still is, an inspiration to many of us group analysts who are interested in the dynamics of organisational life, and who, like myself, have also practiced for many years as a clinician. I used to write about the tripos of Psychoanalysis, Sociology and Systems Theory in Group Analysis. I have, since knowing and working with Ralph, replaced Systems Theory with Complexity Theory. Let me explain why.
In the year 2000, as the Chair of the Applied or Organisational Section of the IGA, I was approached by Ralph and two of his Ph.D. students Patricia Shaw and Doug Griffin. They had planned to establish an MA in Management at their recently founded Complexity and Management Centre at the new University of Hertfordshire. However the University required them to be sponsored (validated) by a ‘Competent External Institution’. An agreement with the HR Department of IBM had fallen through when they demanded curriculum control over the programme. Would the IGA consider sponsoring the programme in collaboration with the Applied Section? Ralph and I both shared a dissatisfaction with our Group Relations organisational experiences, his at the Tavistock Institute and mine at the Grub Institute. It seemed a real possibility.
After some persuasion the IGA Council agreed to this so long as we took the responsibility for it all. They were not particularly enthusiastic but a £500 per student subvention helped. We were also closely vetted by the University before they would agree to admit the programme. The four of us, joined by Wil Penneycook, another Group Analyst, then set off to recruit the first cohort and choose a location for running it. At which Ralph suffered a bleed from a brain aneurism and was hospitalised for quite a while. We managed somehow!
Over the years I have had a number of Group Analytic teaching experiences, at the IGA, the Judge Institute of Management at Cambridge, the London School of Economics, numerous NHS teaching courses and many others, but it is true to say that the only academic role I really thoroughly enjoyed was working with Ralph. He was great fun to be with professionally but he also entertained at his home in North London with his partner in a very kind, generous and supportive way. I was sitting in his garden when I first heard, shockingly, of the 9/11 disaster the previous day, (I still don’t have a television in London). One endearing characteristic of his was that he was always very enabling and invariably took everyone’s suggestions for work projects seriously even though as Professor and Director he had to take the ultimate responsibility. Although our ways had diverged somewhat before he handed over the Director role to Chris Mowles in 2011 and moved on, I still have very fond memories of our working together.
The structure of our Hertfordshire programme was very group analytically oriented. It was designed to be at least two years long with some 5 4-5 day long weekends per year. The second year of cohort A running interspersed with the first year of cohort B and so on. Very soon the University decided that the standard we had set was more appropriate for a Doctorate in Management by Research. The research being based on the current careers of the participants. Many were very senior executives and some already had at least one Ph.D. Some of the students continued with an MA degree. The difference being merely the nature of the final thesis.
Each day started at 7am with a Social Dreaming Session (voluntary but well attended) based on the weekends we had put on at the IGA with Gordon Lawrence. The first main session after breakfast was a general one, a median group of the whole programme’s 30 or so members. Run along the lines promoted by Pat de Maré, it was a truly free floating and very creative experience of a social conversation. It was indeed, as in Pat’s words, “a miracle of psychogenesis”. It was left by Ralph to be carefully conductor-less although the faculty, randomly distributed, sometimes had a privileged input. The rest of the day was taken up by, initially self-selected, learning groups of some 6-7 students led by a member of the faculty (each chosen from our group of supervisors by their group). The day ended with another median group but this time more work oriented, based on the day’s progress.
Ralph has written a lot on group work as applied to organisational life. Of the dozen or so books he has produced the most developed and highly recommended is his 2012, ‘The Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the challenge of complexity’. The title is typical of his sometimes enigmatic approach as he goes on to use the book to explain that there are no useful tools and techniques, only a philosophy of mind. It was at one with his leadership style in the faculty, very charismatic and good fun, although his enthusiasms were sometimes quite idiosyncratic and wilful!
His philosophy of mind was based on his social, group analytically informed, development of the physical Complexity theory (sort of out of chaos theory, uncontrolled local interaction, no ultimate intention and no boundaries). He described human social interactions as complex responsive processes of relating. Although initially we saw the programme as a transfer of group analytic and other concepts of relating to the realm of management, it became clear to me that the transfer of the ideas developed by the programme could also influence the further development of ideas the group analytic clinical process itself (in as much as one can distinguish between the two spheres). I touch here on some important concepts, central to his thinking, that we worked with together, but he deserves to be read in his own words. He reads extremely well.
Firstly, from George Herbert Mead, Ralph saw that for each conversational gesture and subsequent response, the response gives meaning to the gesture for both. It is complete and has little or no necessarily direct influence over subsequent gestures. This means we can never determine the outcome of a series of gestures and responses of a conversation. We can only recognise a pattern of understanding as it emerges. The inputs, as it were, have no control over the final output. The concept of a teaching or planned learning outcome is meaningless. The only possible process is a joint learning route to a place not definable in advance. It is often difficult to sell to an anxious manager that he is in charge but no one is in control of the outcome of a conversational consultation or subsequent managerial decision.
Another key concept, the joy of our late colleague Doug Griffin whose enthusiasm for it was infectious, is the Hegelian concept of Thesis, negation of Thesis and then negation of the negation, transformed subsequently to Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis by Hegel’s follower Chalybaus who tended to miss the point. Hegel meant A, -not A, -not-not A. This indicates a series of timeless events, more accurately an infinite series of events without a timeline. Being held in being by a self-conscious memory of shared meaning or understanding but with no future expectation and no boundaries. Causality and cross-boundary systemic transmission are not to be found in the world of Complexity.
The Hegelian process means that creative learning only occurs when the response or ‘not-A’ is different from the gesture or ‘A’. If they were the same there would be no identity and no progress. The difference is a negation, a disagreement, elaboration or a non-causal, realised potential modification. To propose that it should be one of conflict or aggression at the local interaction is unhelpful. This does not encourage the further emergence of meaning. Conversational conflict, per se, hinders a creative meeting of views and tends to become the static airing of a dogmatic position. There would be no progress to the ‘not- not A’. No further gesture or reply is possible. This is a key understanding for a successful group analytic conversation.
For Ralph, the society of individuals of Norbert Elias is bound together by social values and norms which could ideologically corrupt a valid response to a gesture. He likened it to viewing an idea ‘through a lens’. The lens might be being used by the responder but can also be missed or ignored by the gesturer. We have to accept that this lens, its distortion and colouring, is largely unconscious but needs to be taken into account as much as possible when realising an emergent patterning. Is the outcome valid or is it distorted by the lens of the responder and the subsequent misunderstanding of the gesturer?
One major feature was Ralph’s introduction of the Danish Improvisation Theatre Group ‘Da Capo’, which went on to have a significant influence on the programme. Indeed Ralph spent much subsequent time at the University of Copenhagen and I also established lasting Danish connections. The Improvisation theory of the Argentinian Augusto Boal in the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ was that the play, the players and the audience are all one and the same. Improvisation means no ‘control’ but recognition of meaning as it arises in and for the group of ‘actors’ acting spontaneously together in the moment. The same, can of course, be said of a group analytic group which also has no ‘controller’. In the Impro Theatre there is the role of a ‘Joker’ or ‘Consultant’ whose job is to intervene at the boundaries of the power network of relationship and contribute to the emergent pattern of meaning when appropriate. A good manager or group conductor in fact.
There has been a continuing Group Analytic input to the programme since Wil and I moved on. Farhad Dalal was on the faculty for a while. Nick Sarra is currently one of the supervisors on the course. Chris Mowles is an Associate Member of the IGA. Ralph himself retained a benevolent oversight until his recent retirement. However, the transfer of his many insights back into mainstream clinical Group Analytical thought and practice still seems waiting to be done.
This was initially due to a lack of interest in the IGA which, I felt, never really took the programme to heart despite our attempts to inform the Curriculum Committee. Few seem to have grasped the real possibilities of the application of Ralph’s work to the clinical development of group analysis. Ralph and I held a series of Saturday workshops for those few members who were interested, stressing the inter-operability of all these concepts. We also both contributed to a voluntary organisational module on the Clinical Qualifying Course which I think eventually faded away.
The theoretical underpinning of Christine Thornton’s IGA sponsored ‘Diploma in Reflective Practice in Organisations’ is well reflected in her compilation ‘The Art and Science of Working Together’ to which many group analysts have contributed. It is a very good follow-on to Ralph’s organisational work but still largely considers the transfer of ideas from clinical to organisational rather than the other way round. A specific retro-engineering of Ralph’s Complexity thinking could, I think, be a real contribution to the ongoing debate of ’What is Group Analysis?’ in the more clinical setting.
C. K. Rance
ckrance@btclick.com