Reflections on my PhD journey, NIODA Graduation 2019

As well as exploring face-to-face and online ways of working, I wanted my thesis to integrate cognitive and intuitive ways of knowing. To this end, I developed an art-based systems psychodynamic method.

Reflections on my PhD journey

For my PhD, I chose to investigate a team where members are distributed across locations, and communication is a blend of online and face-to-face. I was curious to learn how this type of arrangement might affect the experience of work. Primary research questions included:

• How does the use of digital technology shape the nature of work and vice versa?
• What are the impact of place and place-based cultural norms and practices?
• How is meaning made in digitally-mediated communication and knowledge sharing systems?
• How does a system psychodynamic approach help us to understand contemporary organisational life?

My thesis is based on a case study with a partially distributed team of therapists working with children in an Australian child protection system. I found that the dispersal of the team, use of technology, and the structural separation of decision-making and service delivery limited their
capacity to work together as a team. My thesis can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/1959.9/567485

I would like to share some other things I learnt through the process: managing oneself in role, containment, and coming to know.

Managing oneself in role

From the start, there was a desire by research participants for me to be part of the team, rather than in my role as a researcher. This set up a conflict for me, because I had to be ‘in enough’ to understand something of their experience, yet maintain my role so I could think about what might be happening. And, even though I was cognitively alert to the dynamics, unconsciously, I became one of the team. This experience raised questions such as:

• What does it mean to be part of this team?
• How ‘in’ do you need to be?
• How is difference worked with?

This led to a working hypothesis about the experience of being part of this team and, when offered to the team, provided an opportunity to explore boundary relations. The experience highlighted, for me, the importance of managing oneself in role which, in turn, requires containment.

Containment

I cannot stress enough the importance of finding and creating structures to contain the experience of undertaking a PhD, using a systems psychodynamic approach.

As well as practical things such as participant information statements and consent forms, and institutional processes such as gaining ethics approval, meeting with supervisors and research progress panels, I also had:

• A research reflection group with whom I shared the ups and downs of my experience, and who offered new vantage points from which to view the research.
• Peers and colleagues who were available to think with me
• Weekly psychoanalytically-informed supervision
• A physical place to which I could anchor myself as I grappled to make sense of the data
• My family who supported me with cups of tea and hot dinners, and heard me say too many times, ‘I can’t, I have to work on my PhD’

Coming to know

These supports provided containment which enabled me to stay with the research. As well as exploring face-to-face and online ways of working, I wanted my thesis to integrate cognitive and intuitive ways of knowing. To this end, I developed an art-based systems psychodynamic method to explore my countertransference experience, something which was in me but of the research system.

When I was seduced by the internet to endlessly follow links to other research, or go down rabbit holes, getting further from the original focus of my thesis, it was the art-based method which helped to bring me back. It enabled me to get in touch with the experience, to transform it from some formless feeling inside me into an object that could exist outside me, and be thought about.

Dancing on the edge of knowing and not-knowing, the art-based method created a third to triangulate the data and theory, and provided depth to the exploration of underlying dynamics in the research system.

Having finished my PhD, I am drawn to further research about the artist-as-researcher, and how creative processes, together with systems psychodynamics, can be used to more deeply ‘come to know’ the experience of contemporary organisational life.

Dr Nuala Dent
Research lead & Academic staff member, NIODA

3 December 2019

Reflections on my PhD journey

ps Are you a leader or manager and would like to learn more about psychodynamic methods? Have a look at the NIODA Master of Leadership and Management (Organisation Dynamics) course.

Trust at work

Contemporary workplaces tend to be flatter, more collaborative and more distributed and, as such, require leaders and managers to develop trusting relationships with staff and stakeholders. But how do we define trust? This article draws upon different models of trust at work, to develop an understanding of trust from a systems psychodynamics perspective.

How do we define trust?

Schein (2009), in his analysis of the social and psychological dynamics of helping relationships, proposes that people develop trust by helping each other, in turn increasing organisational effectiveness. Ancona and Bresnan (2007), drawing on years of research that examined teams across many industries, suggest the best way for a team to develop trust is to work together on a shared task. This is supported by research from Plotnick et al. (2009) who identified three dimensions of trust; personal, process and expertise, where personal trust is linked to experiential knowing and process trust relies on presentational knowing.

What does it mean to know?

To further investigate what it means to trust requires an exploration into ways of knowing. Heron and Reason (2007) advise that presentational knowing is underpinned by experiential knowing which, in turn, is the platform for all other forms of knowing. Rajagopalan and Midgely (2015), in their research on extending ways of knowing, develop this further and claim that formal and reflective thinking are inadequate on their own. They developed a four-part framework that describes ways of knowing, adding practical knowing to the three forms of knowing identified by Heron and Reason. The framework, comprising experiential, presentational, propositional and practical ways of knowing, is summarised below. 

Based on the work of Rajagopalan and Midgely (2015), I argue that experiential knowing is the basis for all forms of trust. As such, it can be explored through object relations theory (Klein, 1985) to understand relations between self and other. Further, in systems psychodynamics, the additional attention to group processes, system structure, processes and boundaries, and contextual elements enables a systemic understanding of the conditions that lead to or inhibit trusting relations.

Experiential knowing and the development of trust

A thesis by Harding (2006) proposes that, from a systems psychodynamic perspective, mutual relations are reliant on ‘good enough’ management of projective processes, as a pre or synchronistic condition. In mutual recognition, each person has a need for recognition and has the capacity to recognise the other in return. ‘The subject declares “I am, I do” and then waits for the response, “You are, you have done” (Benjamin, 1988, p. 21). Mutual recognition involves simultaneous connection and separation, creating a tension between recognising the other and asserting the self. Inherent in intersubjectivity is a fundamental paradox. Benjamin (1990) expresses it in this way:

It is the now moment of ‘knowing and being known’ that brings coherence of wholeness to the system, increasing its capacity for complexity. Sander (2002) writes that the complementary structure of intersubjectivity and the subsequent move to mutual understanding results in power being dissolved rather than transferred back and forth in an endless cycle, and thus supports trust between self and others. This is in line with Sievers (2003), who writes that trust cannot be engineered, and instead, attention must be paid to the undercurrents of organisational life, such as uncertainty, hopelessness and despair.

Given that no two people ever see an event in the same way, Sievers argues that ‘the challenge is to learn new ways of creating trust between partners who do not necessarily share the same goals and values’ (p. 32). This is reliant on the creation of a reflective space (Krantz, 2013) to explore the group’s culture and unconscious dynamics, leading to mutual recognition and paving the way for trusting relations.

Systems psychodynamics provides a framework for understanding how trust is developed, however, the only way to ‘know’ the theory is to experience it. NIODA provides academic programs, workshops and group relations conferences which are designed to provide experiences which enable an exploration of the dynamics of trust.

Dr Nuala Dent
Academic Staff Member, NIODA

17 October 2019

Trust at work

ps Are you a leader or manager and would like to learn more about the dynamics of trust at work? Have a look at the NIODA Master of Leadership and Management (Organisation Dynamics) course.

References

Ancona D and Bresnan H. (2007) X-Teams: How to Build Team That Lead, Innovate and Succeed, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Benjamin J. (1988) The First Bond. The bonds of love: psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. New York: Pantheon Book, p 11-50.

Benjamin J. (1990) An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition. Psychoanalytic Psychology 7 (Supplement): 33-46.

Harding W. (2006) Intersubjectivity and Large Groups: A Systems Psychodynamic Perspective. Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship. Melbourne: Swinburne University of Technology.

Heron J and Reason P. (2007) Extending Epistemology within a Co-operative Inquiry. In: Reason P and Bradbury-Huang H (eds) The Sage Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and practice. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com: SAGE Publications.

Klein M. (1985) Our adult world and its roots in infancy. In: Colam AD and Geller MH (eds) Group Relations Reader 2. Washington DC: A. K. Rice Institute.

Krantz J. (2013) Work Culture analysis and reflective space. In: Long S (ed) Socioanalytic Methods: Discovering the Hidden in Organisations and Social Systems. London, UK: Karnac Books, 23-44.

Plotnick L, Hiltz SR and Ocker R. (2009) Trust in Partially Distributed Teams. 30th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). Phoenix, AZ.

Rajagopalan R and Midgely G. (2015) Knowing Differently in Systemic Intervention. Systems Research and Behavioural Science 32: 546-561.

Sander LW. (2002) Thinking Differently Principles of Process in Living Systems and the Specificity of Being Known. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 12: 11-42.

Schein E. (2009) Helping: How to Offer, Give and Receive Help, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Sievers B. (2003) Against All Reason: Trusting in Trust. Organisational & Social Dynamics 3: pp 19-39.