Groups and workplaces on Creative Leaps

Team development, and what it can and cannot fix

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Team development borrows from psychotherapy, and the borrowing is not unreasonable. Therapy is largely about how people relate, what goes unsaid, how responsibility is taken or avoided, and how conflict is handled — all of which are also what makes a staff team work or fail.

What it borrows badly is the assumption that the problem is always in the room.

What team work of this kind involves

Typical content: surfacing what is not being said, examining how the team handles disagreement, clarifying roles and expectations, and looking at the difference between the team’s account of itself and how it actually behaves. Facilitators sometimes use creative or experiential methods — visualisation, drawing, movement, structured exercises — on the reasoning that a group will show in activity what it will not say in a discussion.

Personal development training and workshops

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A large, informal sector sits between education and therapy: short courses and workshops on confidence, assertiveness, communication and listening, stress management, self-care, relationship awareness, body awareness, creativity and career skills. They run in adult education, in colleges, in charities, in government departments and in private organisations.

Much of the material is drawn from psychotherapy. Assertiveness training took its models from behavioural therapy and from transactional analysis; awareness exercises come largely from gestalt; stress management borrows from CBT and, more recently, from mindfulness.

Group work and facilitation

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Group therapy is not individual therapy done more cheaply with an audience. It works on a different mechanism: the group itself is the instrument, and what happens between members is the material.

Group analysis

The main British tradition is group analysis, originated by S. H. Foulkes in the 1940s and formalised when he and colleagues founded the Institute of Group Analysis in 1971. It combines psychoanalytic thinking with an account of social and interpersonal functioning: the individual is understood as formed within a network of relationships, not as a self-contained unit that occasionally bumps into others.