Seminar: The Transforming Experience Framework (TEF)

This seminar will introduce the Transforming Experience Framework (TEF) as a tool for working with individuals and groups in organisations. The TEF takes role, rather than the individual or the organisational chart, as its basic unit of analysis.

The TEF can be thought about as a scaffold that constructs, or a framework that maps experience across four interconnected domains with role being central.

• The first is the psychological, a person’s inner world.

• The second is the systemic, their participation in the organisation and its institutional life.

• The third is the contextual, the wider social, economic, political and global environment.

• The fourth is the experience of connectedness with Source: the deeply held values and sources of meaning that sit beneath, and within, the other three. In this sense, the spiritual is not an added layer. It is the ground on which the TEF is located.

Working with the TEF enables movement between these domains while paying attention to what emerges where they meet. The aim is to understand how a person finds, makes and takes up a role within its explicit and tacit constraints, so that they can act more authentically and effectively from within it.

At the heart of this enquiry into what is really going on lies a complexity that many people find difficult to sit with. The TEF offers a scaffold for holding that complexity while developing a mature critical praxis: thinking about thinking, enquiring about enquiry, reflexion on reflection.

Participants in this seminar will have the opportunity not only to learn about the TEF and its applications across a range of role contexts, but also to experience it directly. Participants will have the opportunity to work with a workplace dilemma and use the four domains to explore the two questions that underpin critical praxis.

The reflective question: What can I say?

The reflexive question: What … now … can I say?

Dr Cath Mckinney is a member of NIODA's Academic Board of Governance and is the Professional Supervision Program Director at the University of Divinity. She has extensive experience as a group relations consultant where she specialises in helping people to flourish as they take up their roles.

Cath graduated with her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Divinity (through Pilgrim Theological College) in 2020. Her thesis, entitled Leading Saturday Lives is centred around the experience of disappointment as central to an authentic understanding of a Christian theology – from Mary as bereaved mother to the presence of the absence of God in the disappointment of Holy Saturday. Her research was stirred by her work as a prison chaplain and as a minister in an inner-city community church for many years.

Cath specialises in teaching Professional Supervision, Practical Theology and Ministry Studies, Leadership and Group Relations.