WORK IN PROGRESS

On directing Leicester – group relations and leadership in the real world.

Tim Dartington

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Introduction – thinking about conferences

Very little has been published explicitly from the perspective and experience of the director of group relations conferences, and specifically of the Leicester Conference. The two texts usually cited are 1. the comprehensive account given by Rice in Learning for Leadership. and 2. the review accounts by Eric Miller. More recently Mannie Sher has given a helpfully subjective account of his first experience of directing the Leicester Conference. In the UK Gordon Lawrence and David Armstrong have written influentially about the concepts that animate these conferences, but, I think, they have not written from the perspective of one managing these systems but as the philosopher consultant, one aspiring to enlightenment.

And yet this is a special position from which to think about what it means to manage an enterprise. Ken Eisold has commented to me the fact that directing conferences provides training in leadership. This has been true for me too. But I want to emphasise here that the role involves management as well as leadership.

The conference is intended to provide clarity about how authority is being understood by staff and participants. At the same time some of the processes, eg, of the role of sponsoring organisations, the appointment/authorisation of the director and other staff, may seem opaque and give plenty of opportunity for fantasy. How does the model of authority - which I see as essentially authority derived from task - stand up in a risk averse culture of audit and multiple accountability?

The sponsoring institution appoints the director, carries the financial costs and builds a reserve for further work; it carries legal responsibility; it is responsible for marketing, and pre-conference administration.

My experience of managing a conference is of working to achieve a good-enough containing system, within which it is possible to work. This includes writing a brochure that is not so much a marketing tool as an operating plan for the enterprise; making a lot of decisions about the physical environment; recruiting a staff group, allocating roles and responsibilities and monitoring performance; chairing a collective management; convening a directorate to look after the administrative details and to have an overview of the performance of the staff group; making space for 360 degree appraisals, though we call that looking at our own process; and so on. In relation to the conference members I am both the director as well as work with colleagues as a consultant.

I do not think that in essence this list is very different from what managers do anywhere, that I consult to. I want to compare my experience of taking authority in the group relations context with authority as I see exercised by managers in my consultancy in different sectors. Of course there are some very important differences as well. I am not oppressed by external expectations of performance – targets in the public sector, share value in the private sector. We see how public sector managers are expected to deliver according to political and economic targets. This is undermining of a previous culture of ‘servant leadership’, as demonstrated in educational and religious contexts. Hirschhorn’s endorsement of vulnerability as an attribute of leadership is indicative of continuing formulations of benign authority from the human relations theorists (going back to McGregor et al). The literature on narcissistic leadership also describes accurately enough some of the current realities of management, as ‘fat cat’ executives demand a high price for their vulnerability. The group relations director is not motivated by financial rewards. This is in this sense a strangely pure world were achievement is assessed against task.

Nevertheless I propose that the group relations design and structure acts very well as a template, on which participants and staff project their own understanding of how organisation really works.

I am aware that there are many aspects of the Leicester Conference as I experienced it as a staff member and then Director from 1991 to 2001 that I don’t know about, though I was there, or don’t want to know about, or sort of know but don’t know how to talk about.

Also I don’t know what was the learning of the members of the conferences where I was a staff member, even associate director or director. At the pearly gates of the Audit Commission, I would not know what to say to get in the heaven of approval.

In part this is inevitable: in part it is deliberate. Responsibility for learning is with the member and we do not have to know what she or he has learned. I sometimes wonder how much a senior manager needs to know in detail about what goes on in the organisation. I have heard that successful entrepreneurs do not have always have a good attention to detail.

There are ways of finding out more of what goes on. I have received some – not many – accounts of a conference, written by a member. I am impressed and influenced by the work done to integrate group relations learning within the rigours of academic teaching and learning. Necessarily this has released a consumer voice, as students are asked to record their experience of a group relations module within their academic contract of learning and accreditation. I realised that getting someone to write about their experience might not be persecutory but liberating. This was my hope also, in writing this paper.

Directing a conference

Directing a conference of this kind is itself exhilarating. I took up the role with considerable curiosity about what I would do.

A group relations director has concerns to do with stewardship – radical or cosmetic changes to the design of a conference - will a membership be recruited and will they all turn up on the day? – also a certain relief when all the staff convene for the pre-conference meeting. The staff group is brought together by invitation of the director, and this is a creative act, balancing sentience and diversity in assembling a group that is individually and collectively competent in the work. It depends on an effective network, so that individuals who do not necessarily know each other come together to work in what is rightly described as a temporary organisation.

During the conference there is then a collective management, which has the potential in the extreme to sack the director. Staff and the membership explore authority in a myriad of role relationships. The director takes a specific role in ensuring that the boundary conditions for learning are being maintained, and is supported in this by a directorate, with the associate director and administrator. The roles of director and associate director demonstrate a commitment to pairing as an attribute of creative leadership.

After a conference reputations are furthered or not by word of mouth and anecdotal evidence – like the reputations of all leaders?

The language of group relations

There is one sense in which group relations may be thought of as occupying a world of its own. For example, some people encountering this work for the first time observe that it has a language of its own. Perhaps this is so: if, so, is it a living language? Words develop both a precise and an unexamined meaning through usage; task, boundary, relatedness, ……

For example, in group relations we make a distinction between organisation and institution. Wesley Carr explicates this distinction as follows: ‘There is on the one hand the institution, which is ultimately a complicated set of unconscious constructs in the mind. And on the other there is the organisation, that aspect of the institution that invites conscious reflection and handling.’

The events that make up a conference are well set in time: small study groups, the large group, the intergroup event …. A central event in the planned crescendo of a conference is the Institutional Event. I envisage the Institutional Event of a conference evolving into a Networking event – it already has many of the characteristics of such an event, with the staff as management contracting with project groups of members – out-sourcing in effect - to carry out aspects of the learning on behalf of the institution as a whole. I see the large group as, from an OPUS perspective, a societal event and I see small study groups as local communities. Such a formulation brings some formal attention to the political that is sometimes complained of as absent or underplayed in this work.

There are opportunities to think further about the processing and application of learning that would continue to break down the importance of the inclusive boundary of what we have thought of as the conference institution, as a reflection of the fragmented world of work, where institutions provide core support to what has increasingly become the outsourced delivery of products and services. But wait a minute. If I want to change the names and play about with the language, am I really making a difference or serving my narcissistic insistence on innovation? In group relation we are always playing with the words. Of course I recognise and respect that the changes of language result from conceptual turmoil and a desire for clarity and distinctiveness, but the result, I suggests, includes its own process of obfuscation.

Innovation and tradition

I have a question in allowing these thoughts to surface. My experience is of group relations in the Tavistock Leicester tradition in the UK and Ireland, in particular from 1991 to 2001. This was a decade of transition, of transformation – these days what decade is not? I like the insight from OPUS events that we are experiencing transience – not transition or transformation from what has been to what is coming next but existing among subtle alternatives of which we are profoundly unaware. The Leicester Conference in particular is sometimes seen as traditional and those working in other countries and contexts and those working in the Harold Bridger tradition may then lay claim to an innovative creative stance against that (dead/deadening) tradition. I would not presume to include group relations work in other societies in my analysis, but I want to think further about innovation and tradition and see if we can find a model of integration rather than splitting and mutual denigration.

What is the nature of tradition? It was a shock to me when a conference member quoted back to me from the brochure: ‘Leicester Conferences have remained unchanged.’ Did we really say that? And yet conferences brochures (including that for 2004) are uncompromising in the statement: In three fundamental ways the ‘Leicester Conferences’ have remained unchanged: the focus is on the relatedness of individual to group and organisation; the method relies basically on learning through experience in the ‘here and now’; and the stance is educational.’

So now we have to think about tradition and innovation. And the all-important concept of containment, which we take from Bion’s understanding of the importance of the capacity of the mother for reverie in responding to an infant’s projections of dread and hate.

The tradition has been carried forward conceptually but not I think in a continuing revision of the socio-political content of the work. I may be unfair in this but let me blunder on in search of a further truth. I have noted and been momentarily surprised at times by the seeming exclusivity of what may be described as a Bion/Tavistock tradition in this work.

What are we to make of the centrality of Bion to this project? There is no question about his significance, both for his own thinking, but also from the thinking that his thinking has encouraged. There is an anecdote that Bion himself was disorientated by the rigidity of the time boundary in the one experience he himself had as a staff member of a group relations conference, when the rest of the staff group left a plenary meeting as he was speaking: that is a powerful antidote to the dangers of received thinking. I despair though at the thought that in our current practice we are religiously still expressing what we thinking is an appropriate way of working based on myth on myth of how a remarkable individual worked with groups in the 1950s and then had the effrontery to write about this work in a humorous and insightful way, so insightful that it became authoritative.

But there are questions as always of what then gets excluded. The heady impact of Bion’s thinking has been such that there has been lesser impact of other thinkers. This is one of the complaints against the perceived hegemony of the Tavistock model. Creative thinking within the work has engaged with this: as an example, I think of Barry Palmer and Susan Long’s interest in the application of Lacanian concepts.

Another characteristic of conferences is that what is thought to be generic and therefore gets taken for granted is often personal and idiosyncratic. As director I was challenged vigorously for an innovation I had introduced in the institutional event, except that it was not an innovation at all - it was just that it was not the way another director had done it in another conference in another country in another year. We are all influenced by our own first or second small study group taker. What we think is tradition is often what we encountered in our first experience, through a process of cerebral attachment, and not tablets of stone after all.

So it is important to emphasise that the useful innovation in conferences is not in the design but in the learning that takes place. And that learning belongs primarily with the members, not the management of the conference. (And that, if this were really to be the case, members would be more satisfied with their role and not need to aspire to staff roles.)

The robustness of the model

What evidence do I have for the general application of the group relations template?

Increasingly there is a challenge that this is founded in a Judeo-Christian western European view of the world, there to be rejected by those who do not identify with the oppressor in the family, the community, the nation, the global socio-economy. Gouranga Chattopadhyay has written about directing a conference in India where the same dynamic was apparent, but played out there between a supposed Brahmin ascendency (to use an Irish expression) and a membership of untouchables. We may want to respond with an interpretation, but should also listen to the complaint.

I think that a sense of history is important here. The origins of group relations came from the creative energy for war and post-war work by exceptional psychologists and psychiatrists and others, for whom there was a common passion about understanding and influencing the dynamics of organisational life, where they had observed and experienced totalitarian processes leading to fascism and nazism, and they wanted to provide the boundary conditions that this would not happen again.

We have been living with a creeping totalitarianism in contemporary society and work organisation. (Lawrence) This has been recorded to some extent by the Opus work on the relationship of the individual to society. This brings me to question: is this group relations work subversive of the status quo or a refuge from it? The subversive/refugee dynamic is I think crucial for thinking about the way we are working. Gordon Lawrence was addressing the tension in his exploration of the salvation/revelation dynamic.

The group relations model includes some distinctly unfashionable characteristics, if we look more widely at work organisations. In particular there is an emphasis on task and boundary that may seem quaint to those engaged with the fluidity of modern organisational contexts. You could say that it follows a modernist tradition of Klein and Bion in a post-modern world of emergent meaning. (Gertler and Izod) My experience of the conference is that it is stressful, brutal at times, an opportunity for staff and members to work with what is psychotic in ourselves and our working relations that borders on madness, and also that it is a refuge, an asylum on the old fashioned sense, a place where it is possible to play, to recover lost insights from the politics of childhood, and so to think in a world where – specifically at work – it is not always possible to think.

My first proposition. In organisational life we are seeing a dynamic of interaction between the farmer or settler and the nomadic hunter-gatherer. Those who are made redundant in their settled existence take up an identity as hunter-gatherers with more or less success. My suggestion is that group relations work appeals to those that are wanting to work with the creative tension between their settler and hunter-gatherer identities.

Let me explore the difference between these identities. (It is explored in a very interesting way by Hugh Brody in his book, The Other Side of Eden.) From an anthropological perspective, farmers have an attachment to land, to property, to status and succession. This is our Judeo-Christian heritage, spelled out in the stories of Genesis. Paradoxically, it is the farmer identity that leads both to possession as an objective in itself, and confrontation, and so moving on and exile. But at the same time there is another model of relatedness altogether, where the hunter gatherer does not understand the concept of exile in the same way – every place is home, not constrained by a local boundary but free to move within a much wider community.

I can think of a number of contexts, from a consultancy perspective, where, instead of consulting to an organisation, I have been working more with the interaction of an institution and a network – for example, following re-organisations in the NHS, employees are transferred or seconded from one organisation to another, but continuity of the service is provided by their belonging to professional networks working within the wider NHS institution. There is a similar dynamic in any industry, where the emphasis is on project management and short-term contracts. I think this kind of interaction is worked out in the conference, in particular in the Institutional Event between the ‘management group’ and the networking organisation of conference members.

I remember at Leicester, when I was director, a member challenging my authority in a plenary meeting. In effect he was saying, I was not like his manager. He made this observation as a complaint, I think – part of the continuing questioning about the relevance of group relations to the real world. But for me there was a dilemma. Was this a criticism or a something positive to work with?

It is true, I think, that the interaction of the institution and the network requires more than management attributes of command and control, and draws on competencies associated with consultancy. When I worked as a manager in the 1980s I was held in some suspicion by some colleagues as being really a consultant under the skin. From my group relations background, I believed for myself that what they thought were my consultant attributes were actually highly relevant to my management role. And

I suggest that, consciously or unconsciously, this is implicit in a lot of group relations driven consultancy to managers. I don’t mean this concretely. But there is a suspicion in my mind that we are implicitly saying, if only you could think more like us, you would be better managers. We have to be wary, because this must surely be a flawed logic. If it were so, there would be more managers coming to conferences.

The group relations constituency.

There are some dynamics of conferences that need explaining. Why do conferences recruit not quite enough, just enough, or a small waiting list. e.g. how do we recruit just enough to stay much as we are? Why is there a remarkable consistency about the group relations constituency?

Proposition Two: on the organization and its environment. I think that group relations, like any industry, has created its own constituency. And that this is defensive of the work and also defeatist of the work.

I value work that disputes my hypothesis. – the work of Gordon Lawrence and colleagues with unemployed people on Canada, the OPUS project with unemployed people in north east England, the work of colleagues in Ireland, in eastern Europe. I am aware and often state in defence of this work that it thrives in conflict striven societies, northern Ireland, Israel, India, South Africa. Work that touches the raw nerve of primitive emotion in relation to mature behaviours has been to do with German-Israeli conferences of psychoanalysts.

But I am still not content. I think we have created an outer boundary, not one that we consciously wanted, but all the less permeable for that, which scuppers our enterprise – or, alternatively, makes it safe enough for us to work. If there is not traffic across that outer boundary, we are working ultimately within a closed belief system.

Certainly there is an addictive element to the experience: this puzzles and concerns me. Like any business, group relations survives through the generation of repeat business. But group relations is not like any business. So why do people keep coming back to conferences, as if the benefit is to be got not from the temporary organisation but the continuing tradition?

Proposition Three: on leadership and succession. There is a wish both for immortality in the leader, to ensure that there will always be a future, and also, as certain as night follows day, the wish to kill off what would otherwise become immortal.

I think of the curious interest that members of the Leicester Conference had whether they were attending Eric Miller's last conference, an interest that continued over at least ten annual conferences ...

In the two years following what turned out in fact to be Miller's last conference, a cohort of members returned first as B members and then on the Training Group. They demonstrated a desired continuity of experience that belied the temporary nature of the conference institution. I was Director of that Training Group and would be the Conference Director the following year. I remember a Training Group member telling me that he would be the next Director. The unconscious purpose of this informal cohort was evident at this point, to take over the succession of this work and ensure their own immortality. Their energy for it was soon to be exhausted though. One thought to apply for the then vacant post of Director of Group Relations Programme at the Tavistock Institute but withdrew, and as far as I am aware, other members of the cohort have largely disappeared from active roles in this work.

This is an example, where interpretation based on one conference on its own is insufficient. I will return to the question, how temporary is a temporary organisation? because this is relevant I think to current assumptions about project management. The question has to be revisited, just as members revisit the conference - why do they come back? I suspect that members aspire to staff roles, not only from ambition, but because this legitimises their recidivist tendencies - its the only way that they can keep coming back to learn.

Those who may think themselves comfortable with the nomadic identity, having appreciated and benefited from membership of conferences, alongside successful ploys to ensure a relative autonomy on their work lives, e.g. a consultant identity inside or out of organisations they are familiar with, nevertheless burrow back into the breast by seeking membership of the Training Group of the Leicester Conference.

I want to think what this tells us about the current realities of work, as we experience for ourselves the shift from a 'job for life' to a series of short-term commitments to a series of project contracts, which may be more or less continuous or discontinuous in their meaning for what we still like to think of as a career. The apparent discontinuities and make-overs of identity may disguise an underlying continuity of cultural meaning. (This is why organisational changes have less impact than you might thinking on, say, NHS workers who have been doing the same job, more or less, while working for this or that Trust, and then another, which merges with a third ….) Our short-term commitments take place within the context of a wider and long-serving commitment, which is value-based and consistent. There is an outer boundary, beyond that of the temporary organisation, and this outer boundary acts like a horizon, so that we can’t see beyond it.

A temporary organisation or an institution-in-the-making

What if the real world is too scared to engage with what we are thinking about in group relations conferences? There is some evidence that this is our underlying assumption. We tolerate the occasional psychotic outburst, usually from someone professionally qualified in madness. We include increasingly specific warnings in the brochure to discourage those who are already finding their world dangerously stressful. We encounter a conference culture, where a certain professional perspective derived from psychology and psycho-analysis is often assumed, is thought desirable, and is used to exclude those without these assumed qualifications for understanding.

Above all, the conference is described as a temporary organisation. And so it is. We put huge emphasis on the importance of boundaries of task, time and territory. And when things go wrong in conferences, we look for and analyse the failures of staff and members to manage these boundaries. But this is not the whole truth. There is a continuity from one conference to another, as we have seen, which serves to make a wider boundary, as I have suggested, within which the conference can have its brief life in relative calm from the turbulence of the wider society.

The temporary institution that is a conference is so embedded in its own history, including travellers tales brought by staff members and participants, that it offers a richness of interpretation well in excess, I suggest, of our capacity to realise all the insights that might be available. It is also contributing to a much wider institution-in-the-making, of which each conference is itself only a partial expression.

Proposition Four. A temporary organisation or project, as we understand it- for example, a group relations conference - is located also within a wider eco-psychological system that as we understand from chaos theory, is both predictable and unpredictable in its development. This is the wider institution in the making, which provides the conditions for a temporary organisation to flourish in its time and place.

So the temporary organisation that is a conference may represent the dying of the light or be the precursor of storms ahead.

The Leicester brochure now advertises the dates of conferences five years ahead. The erosion of the unique boundary of the conference, for example through the introduction of a B membership and training group, continues in other ways. I know participants may think that an object of such importance to them must continue forever, but we are in danger perhaps of confirming their certainties, when no such certainty can exist. Each conference may be different but it has to work according to the powerful dynamics of
what has become, in commercial terms, an industry.

Conference management – what lessons does it have for other contexts?

There are two aspects of conference management that I would like to consider again. The first is that it is a collective management. The second is that in a practical sense conferences are generally speaking well managed, with resources in place when they are needed.

At times I have thought that the ideal of collective management has become eroded, as the complexity of the conferences has required us also to explore the dynamics of a bureaucracy. The importance of the administrator has been more evident to staff than to the membership. I understand that it has been said of the Leicester Conference that the staff group does not address its own dynamics. This is manifestly untrue. Perhaps not enough: I could think about that, without getting defensive. Certainly there is no small study group for the staff (taking a staff role is not a way of having a continuing membership role) and, from the perspective of conference director, I would argue that, with an attention to task, our dynamics are important only to the extent that they inform our work with the membership. But, from my experience of robust debate in the staff meetings as well as informal discussion (much like members), the charge itself I refute.

The conference management is probably seen -by most members at one time or another - as distant, self-serving and arbitrary in its actions. So what is different from other experiences of contemporary management? Some of those experiences are desperate, for example in descriptions of the social destruction of meaning and annihilating stories of downsizing, which have been compared even to the holocaust. (Howard F. Stein. Nothing Personal, Just Business, a guided journey into organisational darkness.)

Some of these perceptions in conferences derive no doubt justifiably from tendencies among staff groups to do these things. They also come powerfully from the fundamental distinctions that exist in the conferences, between the membership and the staff group. This difference feels like something has happened in fantasy equivalent to the Fall and the expulsion from Eden.

Occasionally at an opening plenary, when the staff chairs are arranged facing the chairs for the membership, a member will 'innocently' sit in one of those chairs. 'When Adam delved and Eve span, Where was then the Gentleman?' But innocence cannot really be recovered in this way, and we know that we live in a world where there are always managers and managed, leaders and followers, sometimes willingly so, sometimes under duress, rulers and subjects, dictators and the disappeared, gods and men.

The group relations concept of management emphasises management of the task, not of the person. It is in this sense that it is well managed, with attention to boundaries of time and territory and management of self in role. In the world of work generally, the management of the person (in or out of role) is more evident. Appraisals, disciplinary procedures, policies covering absenteeism and sickness, increments, bonuses, promotion, redundancy, all ensure that the subordinate is practically as well as psychologically in a position of dependency in relation to the manager and more generally to the organisational system.

The practical dependency justifies the psychological dependency, the ambivalent need both to belong and to separate, which is the stuff of psycho-analysis and in particular Kleinian theories of projective identification. In the conferences those practical sanctions are stripped away and the psychological dependency is the more painfully exposed as a result.

The emergent organisation involves the coming together in a number of confrontations of the mutual projections of staff and members in determining what is then to be seen and understood. This happens with great rapidity and intensity - it’s like rushing through the whole of evolution in order to arrive at the present, or like that indecipherable screen-full of data whenever we re-boot our computer. The evolutionary process includes the discovery of trade as a means of managing group relations (Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue), and I find it relevant that a successful innovation (not at Leicester) has been the market place event, devised by William Halton.

Conferences use the language of task but not so much of objective. The reason for doing things is discussed more in the interpretation - as if the only reasons that really matter are the irrational - the working through of unconscious motivations to survive by the selective use of sense data to cope with guilt and fear.

In the 1960s and 70s conferences experienced confrontations that had echoes of student and inner city unrest. The confrontations now will also reflect the socio-political arrangements or conventions of our time, which may be seen as post-dependency in structure and fragmented and individualistic in expression. (OPUS)

The competition, the ambition, the hate and the envy that is integral to a conference is real enough and also reflective of what happens in human systems of different kinds. A difference from most work organisations is that the sanctions on failed behaviour are primarily sentient – perhaps to be excluded from the intimacy of those you (used to) admire and respect. We may observe another difference between the institution and the network. Schisms may be creative, and those that fall out are free to set up rival institutions. The alternative institution provides a haven against the hated other. However, the network , being inclusive and potentially boundaryless within a much widerr institution-in-the-making, offers at least partial freedom from the negative aspects of otherness. At the same time as there is a need for the settled existence of organisations with some stability and promise of continuity, there is the alternative freedom of the networking nomad, able to work across the boundaries with different organisations, even those at war with each other.

Conclusion – the meaning of organisation

What then are conferences FOR? To study group behaviour. But what for? The marketing answers are available (see brochure). But then you might as well ask, what is any organisation FOR? In every case there is an answer: it is to turn an idea into a reality. The idea may be individually focussed and owned or shared collectively.
It is said by some participants at conferences that they ‘just don’t get it.' This assumes nevertheless that there is an it to get. The it, the idea, involves a shift in understanding of the I in relation to the Other. Without giving up the concept of self, the boundary of the self as still permeable enough to include a groupishness or group identity, so that there is a heightened experiential awareness that our actions are both our own and not our own. From this understanding grows the awareness that we may call system psychodynamic thinking in the ways that we take up our roles in different contexts.

I suspect that the Leicester conference has some of the characteristics of spiritual exercises, providing a space for imagining, though some would argue in contrast that a spiritual element is in fact weak or lacking. We may think at the same time of the spiritual impoverishment of work organisations. Some present managers, working sixteen hours a day in a desperate scramble to stay ahead of the game, may remember as children going on the annual works outing , when the company gave whole families a day out - and wonder if their own children have any sense of their work identity except as an absence. (For this observation, I am grateful to student discussion on the Tavistock Clinic course on consulting to organisations.) The intensity of the experience has been sufficient to give group relations also some of the characteristics of a movement, including a heightened capacity for schism, with claim and counter-claim of betrayal, heresy and corruption, in processes of quasi apostolic succession. As I have said, it is also a significant player in a global business.

So we may think of the relevance of conferences to organisational life as being of two kinds - ways that conferences are like other organisations - and then again, ways that they are not like, but offer the real possibility of something different. The protagonists in the processes that make them like are the same as those that make them different: they are to some extent the staff but to a great extent the membership who chose to engage with the work of a group relations conference and so engage also in the wider institution-in-the-making. It is the conference membership that will determine the relevance of a conference to their worlds outside. Those of us who work in this way have be wary that the membership of a conference are not buying into our dreams but are turning their own ideas into reality.

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