Working with New Designs: Group Relations Conferences—Danish Design III1

In this paper the learning concept of group relations conferences are discussed. The authors have worked with group relations conferences (GRC) in different contexts for many years—mainly as a part of educational programmes for managers and consultants (OPU at IGA Copenhagen, MPO at Roskilde University, and NAPSO2). Seen from the horizon of their experience some of the basic concepts in the theories about GRC need clarifying, revision, and development. The GRC is a part of the learning from experience movement and as a consequence it stresses the underlying basis: learning is personal so everyone decides for themselves what makes sense and what does not. This principle sometimes work as a defence against a closer examination of the two questions: does GRCs provide relevant experiences to learn from, and what is it you learn or can expect to learn at a GRC. While two earlier papers (Beck & Visholm, 2014a,b) discussed respectively the authority relations in GRCs and the concepts of learning from experiences in the GRCs, this third and last paper describes some of the designs the authors and their colleagues have created within the overall GRC-concept. In these designs the authors have tried to deal with some of those problems mentioned in the previous papers.