It is with pleasure and anticipation that we bring Group Relations India’s GRC 2026 brochure to you. Titled ‘Unpacking hierarchy and privilege: leadership that supports purpose and potential of systems’, it comes at a time of pervasive global conflict – where it seems even more critical to interrogate what leadership towards purpose and potential means, and how ideas about hierarchy and privilege, often held unconciously, shape how leadership is exercised.
Hierarchies and privilege shape our everyday life — our neighbourhoods, our societies, our politics and our sense of self. They are often the elephant in the room, resulting in the activation of deep anxieties, sense of threat, and reactive habitual responses. This makes it difficult to begin conversations and explorations about these issues, let alone unpack them, in order to shift from our hardened stances.
Designed as a temporary institution, away from the routine and distractions of everyday life, a Group Relations Conference (GRC) offers a fresh space to see familiar patterns with new eyes. This GRC offers the theme unpacking hierarchy and privilege as an invitation to explore how these intertwined dynamics influence the roles we take up in the different systems that we are part of, the choices we make, the stances we assume, and the leadership we exercise. Alongside, this conference is also an opportunity to see how individual and group identities are created, and how they influence collective behaviour, particularly in unconscious ways. The possibilities these explorations and insights offer, are of moving towards more humane and compassionate families, communities, organisations, and societies.
Our conferences have a very diverse set of participants representing a range of roles, contexts, lived realities, and identities, which furthers the possibility of nuanced and unexpected insights for all. Note that we use the word conference in the sense of to ‘confer’– to bring together – in observation, reflection and exploring of the ‘here and now ‘experience in the GRC. Learning in a GRC is neither standardized, nor a guaranteed set of outcomes. If learning from direct experience and a methodology of learning based on one’s own authority is appealing to you, then this ‘conference’ is likely to be of immense value to you. Along with the Associate Director Ganesh Anantharaman and colleagues on the staff, I look forward to hearing from you and welcoming you to this Group Relations Conference 2026.
Rosemary Viswanath, Conference Director.
For further discussions to assist your decision about participating in the conference, we would be happy to speak to you. Kindly WhatsApp or text Rosemary (+91 98454 03773) or Ganesh (+91 98864 06806) to schedule a conversation. Or email us at grc@grouprelationsindia.org
