A note on confidentiality: in the organisational material that follows, identifying details, including sector, geography and role titles, have been changed or made composite to protect anonymity. The methodological observations are drawn directly from practice. The industry this organisation belongs to places a high value on empirical rigour and scientific evidence. The specifics of what happened inside the workshop itself are not described, as doing so would compromise the confidentiality of those who participated.
Following on from my last essay on the quality of leadership that makes sustained developmental work possible, what follows moves from the sponsoring leader to the work itself: how I actually made sense of what was happening on this assignment, how that diagnosis shaped my design, and where I chose to look.
As a developmental practitioner with a post-modern lens, my view of any system is always situated and partial. I am always working with the unique pressures of a particular team at a particular moment in time. This provides a constant reminder that while development work can feel all-consuming and incredibly important to me, it is fundamentally in the service of their actual business strategy and direction. This sits alongside broader epistemological questions as a practitioner coming to know an organisation - how do I come to know it, and what do I do with what I think I know?
Team Diagnosis
The initial brief with this organisation was broad and vague, as it often is. What emerged through my stakeholder interviews with all members of the leadership team was complex and layered.
At the organizational level, the core mission was rarely mentioned as an active driver of daily decisions. Strategy was largely held and driven by a single leader at the center. Surprisingly, there was no mention of how AI would impact the business, even though their industry would be heavily impacted by it.
At the team level, role and accountability boundaries that were unclear, the team flat on paper but hierarchical in practice, a tendency to locate authority outside the self and passing references to an upcoming leadership succession. An unnamed anxiety appeared as a “wait and watch” attitude in several team members, as visible frustration in others and in a constant deference to the leader of the team. The problems of the team were easily articulated, while the authority to act on them appeared to be surrendered to the leader, who was increasingly positioned as the person who could solve everything.
I was acutely aware of bringing my interpretivist stance in design through delivery to an organisation whose core was empirical and a team that placed a high value on scientific evidence.
These interviews gave me much data in both the said and the unsaid. My questions were broad and generic as I was curious about how individual team members framed this leadership team in their minds. I held my initial hypotheses as tentative as my own theoretical lenses shape what I notice. My personal discipline is to hold what I heard rather than adopt it, as a practitioner who becomes emotionally invested in their own diagnosis will hold on too tightly, and the group will feel it and close down (Schein, 1999).
Re-Contracting: What Can Be Known, What Can Be Held
Contracting, beyond agenda and outcomes, in such an engagement is on-going and happens after every stage, especially when sensitive material regarding the team is involved.
I entered a second contracting conversation with the leader of this team, sharing an initial report on key themes from the stakeholder interviews. Apart from getting his reactions and perspectives, I wanted to agree upon the scope: surfacing the difficult topics, the interpersonal tensions, the question of succession and the lack of external focus.
In addition to agreeing on practical matters, I have come to see contracting as also epistemological and establishing roles - I do not have the full context of the organisation, what decisions have already been made and what political or relational realities are in play. Much of this is simply not visible from stakeholder interviews alone. The team leader was the only one who could tell me if what looked like a critical group dynamic to me might be already getting addressed, unknown to the team until after the workshop. A pattern I observe may be real and yet not my role or time to surface.
One of the goals we agreed upon was to build psychological safety and trust, to get the team talking to each other without an over-reliance on him. I also asked him to consider taking a back seat during the workshop, not speaking first, giving the time and space for the group’s own authority to emerge and be seen. This is the nuance of being situated only partially in a system, as an external practitioner.
Holding the Position: BART
One framework I carried through this assignment was BART: Boundaries, Authority, Role and Task, from the group relations tradition (Miller, 1993), a tradition that has shaped my practice in particular ways, explored more fully in a previous essay.
Boundaries set the container for what belonged to this intervention and what did not as much as the boundaries of my role. Task gave me a compass to help this team see how it functioned as a collective and to focus my facilitation on creating the conditions for honest dialogue about what was getting in the way of their future. I had to decide in real time which emotionally charged issue was worth pursuing, in service of the task. I bring Authority and Role into focus here as it is where the most delicate work of this assignment sat.
Authority
For this team, Authority was a central question. One pattern running through the diagnostic conversations was of authority consistently located outside the self: in the leader at the centre, in seniority, tenure, and the type of research that was privileged over others. Through a Bionian lens, this could be understood as consistent with a dependency basic assumption: an unconscious expectation that direction and sustenance will come from above rather than being generated from within (Bion, 1961). I held this as a hypothesis, not as a diagnosis of the group.
I also saw clearly the leader’s own challenges: the gap between the person and what the role and this team required of him, his own discomfort with what he considered asserting his authority in role.
In the room, I noticed how authority played out in who spoke when, waiting for the leader to speak, waiting or withholding their individual position and de-authorising themselves completely when someone more senior or “valid” offered a different view. I did not name “dependency” as a pattern but it informed my facilitation to make aspects of the pattern visible. I addressed the team as a whole, and they recognised their own patterns, making connections to the discussions in their leadership team meetings. This opened a conversation about how they took up their own authority or relinquished it, and enabled valuable feedback to each other, including to the leader, on how he enabled their authority or diluted it.
For myself, Authority was a reminder that seeing something does not mean I have the authority to act on it. Years of learning from practice had taught me not to get attached to everything I see, as it is only useful if there is a place for it to land in the system. This is especially important to respect the sensitive material that I have been entrusted with, as a practitioner, and to not over-step a line where the system feels overly criticised and shuts down to learning.
This frame also helped me think about how I took up my own authority in the room: when I was more visible and when I metaphorically disappeared, when my intervention would enable the group and when it might simply make me the next authority figure to whom they deferred.
Role
Role asked me to distinguish between myself as a person and the role I occupied on this assignment. This team attributed a neutrality or insight to me as the external practitioner. Obholzer and Roberts (1994) describe how consultants can be recruited into roles the system needs filled but cannot fill from within, often unconsciously and in ways that relieve the system of having to do its own work. Inner questions of my role, how I took up my authority in a way that my interventions would return authority to the group rather than inadvertently take more of it away.
The most significant moments came from what the design made possible: people naming how they had been hurt, amends being made, a quality of connection that translated directly into how this team could think together afterwards. Armstrong (2005) calls this the organisation in the mind: the practitioner’s internal representation of the organisation, shaped by their experience within it. What I had come to know through every conversation and every moment in the room was part of what I worked with. Independence does not mean objectivity. In being seen by someone who did not carry its existing history, this team began to see itself differently, and that shift in seeing was the point.
In Closing
What stays with me, across assignments like this one, is how much of what shapes a team’s functioning is unconscious and gets acted out in the interpersonal tensions that rarely get examined. The work in teams is, fundamentally, a work of making the interior life of a group available to itself. On this assignment, working at that level was inseparable from the institution’s capacity to think and act together afterwards.
And yet, as a practitioner, I discovered most about the team during the workshop, in experiencing them as a collective. That may be one of the deeper disciplines of this work: learning to live with partial knowledge without becoming passive, to act without pretending to certainty, to use theory without allowing it to become the explanation, and to hold one’s own authority without taking it away from the client. And most importantly, to cultivate a quality of attention to pick up the data in room.
Praxis, for me, is the living dialogue between what experience teaches and what it unsettles - a way of knowing I have written about more fully here. When I work with intact leadership teams, what I am asked to do is design and hold a process that enables the group to find, and own, its own authority and from that ground, to return to more constructive ways of working together. In being asked, my inquiry continues.
© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com
References
Armstrong, D. (2005). Organisation in the mind: Psychoanalysis, group relations and organisational consultancy. Karnac.
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Tavistock Publications.
Miller, E. (1993). From dependency to autonomy: Studies in organization and change. Free Association Books.
Obholzer, A. and Roberts, V. Z. (Eds.) (1994). The unconscious at work: Individual and organizational stress in the human services. Routledge.
Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (Eds.) (2001). Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. Sage.
Schein, E. H. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. Addison-Wesley.
Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.