January 1990: Chairman's Report

The response that we got to the July newsletter was very helpful to the Council, giving us back the feeling of being in communication with our members. It is very important that enough information passes amongst us, and it is important that the quality as well as the quantity is high enough. There have been a number of comments on the sheer amount of paper that is now circulating in the Conference. We have a serious and unsolvable problem as giving out enough information takes up a lot of paper. If we used less paper our discussions would take place half-blind. The ideas as well as the proposals from the various sub-committees that we have created to do the essential work must be circulated so their work is not duplicated. On the other hand, too much paper can cause fatigue and lead to a reliance on the authors rather than plough through yet another wad of reports. This is the danger of handing over too much power to whoever is on the committee and supposedly looking after your interests.

In the days of the Rugby Psychotherapy Conference I was in touch with everything that was going on, and was a participant in all the discussions. Since our inaugural meeting one year ago that has not been possible as our structure is now developing and more people are involved in the day to day work. For instance, the actual negotiations about the application to form a new section were conducted by the relevant subcommittee, who reported back to Council from time to time. The result is a recommendation from Council that we create a new section at our AGM.

This healthy development is essential if we are to grasp our opportunities and get away from relying on any single person. It is important for us to move towards being able to rely on a group that is large enough to keep pushing the work of Conference forward. The difficulty that we inevitably run into is that we come up against the problems of our structure. Whatever structures we evolve as we go along, we will never find any perfe