Jones's seminar - as part of the ongoing Systems Engagements series at Linköping Univerity - on facilitating co-creation in context introduced a set of principles for convening participatory processes - selection, recruiting, facilitation, modification - drawn from systemic design practice and informed by Warfield's (1994) work on managing complexity through structured dialogue. The principles are sensible and well-grounded. What they do not address, and what the systemic design literature more broadly tends not to address, is what happens beneath the conscious surface of a co-creation workshop: the unconscious dynamics that shape who speaks and who does not, what can be thought and what cannot, whether the group engages with its task or defends against it.
Bion's (1961) theory of group dynamics, developed through his work at the Tavistock and the foundation of the group relations tradition, offers a way of thinking about this layer. Every group, Bion argued, operates simultaneously in two modes: the work group mentality, which is engaged with reality and oriented towards achieving the primary task; and the basic assumption mentality, which is oriented towards managing collective anxiety through unconscious means. As Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 19) summarise, "Bion claimed that in basic assumption mentality, the group's behaviour is directed at attempting to meet the unconscious needs of its members by reducing anxiety and internal conflicts". Both mentalities are always co-present; the question is which predominates at any given moment, and what triggers the shift from one to the other.
The three basic assumptions in the workshop
Bion identified three basic assumption patterns, each of which is immediately recognisable to anyone who has facilitated participatory design processes.
In basic assumption dependency (baD), the group behaves as though its purpose is to be sustained by an omnipotent leader. As Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 19) describe it, "the leader is expected to look after, protect and sustain the members of the group, to make them feel good and not to face them with the demands of the task". In a co-creation workshop, dependency manifests as the room looking expectantly at the facilitator for answers, participants deferring to the most senior person present, or the group waiting passively for the "expert" to tell them what the system needs. The facilitator who accepts this role - who provides the answers, who fills the silences, who rescues the group from its uncertainty - is colluding with the basic assumption rather than working with it.
In basic assumption fight-flight (baF), the group acts as though survival depends on either attacking an enemy or fleeing from danger. In workshop settings, fight manifests as argument, blame, territorial boundary-drawing ("that's not our department's responsibility"), or the scapegoating of whoever raises uncomfortable truths. Flight manifests as distraction, topic-switching, excessive abstraction, or the retreat into safe procedural detail that avoids the substantive question.
In basic assumption pairing (baP), the group invests its hope in a future product - an unborn messiah, in Bion's language - and is thereby released from the anxiety of the present task. In co-creation workshops, or in organisations at large, pairing manifests as the collective fantasy that the next technology platform, the next reorganisation, the next round of user research will solve everything, without the group having to do the difficult work now. The hope is sustained precisely by remaining unrealised; if the paired future were actually to arrive, the group would need a new one.
Armstrong (2005) emphasises that these mentalities are "co-dependent, each operating as a silent, unconscious complement to the other". A workshop does not simply "be" in one basic assumption; it oscillates, and the oscillation itself is diagnostic. A group that begins in dependency, shifts to fight-flight when the facilitator refuses the omnipotent role, and then settles into pairing ("we should commission a pilot project") has moved through a recognisable sequence that tells the facilitator something about the group's relationship to its task and to the anxiety that task evokes.
What Warfield's structured dialogue cannot structure
Warfield's (1994) contribution to systemic design - the Domain of Science Model, Interactive Management, and the emphasis on the efficacy of language in collective inquiry - represents an attempt to structure the conscious dimensions of co-creation rigorously. His methods provide clear procedures for defining problems, generating options, and structuring relationships between ideas. Jones's adoption of these methods in his systemic design practice is intended to manage the cognitive complexity of multi-stakeholder engagement.
The psychodynamic addition is not that structured methods are wrong but that they address one dimension of what is happening in the room. Structure addresses the work-group dimension - it provides a task, a procedure, a sequence of activities that orient the group towards its stated purpose. But structure does not, on its own, address the basic assumption dimension. Indeed, structure can become a defence against basic assumption dynamics rather than a means of working with them: the rigidly structured workshop that never allows silence, that fills every moment with activity, that moves participants briskly from exercise to exercise, may be defending against the anxiety that would surface if the group were allowed to sit with its own uncertainty.
The Tavistock group relations tradition, by contrast, deliberately creates conditions in which basic assumption dynamics can be observed and thought about. The conference design includes unstructured time, interpretive interventions by staff, and the explicit expectation that participants will find the experience uncomfortable. The discomfort is not a failure of design; it is the material. As I discussed in the post on simulations as transitional objects, the group relations conference functions as a containing environment - a potential space in which the unconscious life of the group can become available for examination.
This does not mean that co-creation workshops should be run as group relations conferences. It means that the design of a co-creation process needs to attend to both dimensions: the conscious structure (Warfield, Jones) and the unconscious dynamics (Bion). A facilitator who understands basic assumption theory can read the room differently: the silence is not emptiness but dependency; the argument is not failure but fight-flight; the enthusiasm for the pilot project is not commitment but pairing. Each response becomes data about the group's relationship to its task, rather than a problem to be solved through better facilitation technique.
The anti-group in co-creation
Nitsun's (1996, 2014) concept of the anti-group extends Bion's framework by naming a set of forces that group-analytic theory had, in his view, insufficiently acknowledged. The anti-group refers to the destructive, hostile, and fragmenting forces within any group - forces that threaten the group's cohesion and its capacity to fulfil its creative potential. In its manifest form, as Nitsun (2014, p. 5) describes, "the anti-group takes the form of challenges to the group, expressing doubt about the integrity and purpose of the group, including behavioural expressions of dissatisfaction, such as late-coming, irregular attendance and drop-outs".
Anyone who has facilitated co-creation processes will recognise these dynamics: the participant who arrives late and leaves early; the senior stakeholder who sends a deputy; the team that agrees enthusiastically in the workshop and then does nothing; the person who derails every discussion with procedural objections; the quiet sabotage of outcomes that were supposedly agreed. These are not personality defects or failures of engagement. They are anti-group phenomena - expressions of the group's ambivalence about its own task.
Nitsun (1996, p. 7) is careful to note that "the anti-group is not conceived as a monolithic force that inevitably destroys the group". On the contrary, the anti-group has a crucial role in the creative transformation of the group: "the anti-group has a crucial place in the creative transformation of the group" (Nitsun, 1996, p. 11). The destructive forces, when they can be contained and worked with rather than suppressed or ignored, provide the tension that drives genuine engagement. A co-creation workshop with no anti-group dynamics is not a successful workshop; it is a compliant one, in which the participants have collectively agreed not to challenge anything that matters.
The design implication is that anti-group phenomena should be expected and attended to, not treated as failures of process design. The question is not how to prevent sabotage, withdrawal, and cynicism, but how to create containing conditions - as I argued in the orientation post - under which these forces can be expressed and worked with. A workshop that suppresses the anti-group produces false consensus; a workshop that is overwhelmed by the anti-group produces nothing at all. The facilitator's task, as Bion's framework suggests, is to hold the tension between the work group and the basic assumption group, between the creative potential and the destructive forces, without collapsing into either.
The facilitator's countertransference
There is a further dimension that the systemic design literature does not address: what the facilitator feels during the workshop, and what those feelings tell them about the group.
In the group relations tradition, the staff member's countertransference - the feelings, fantasies, and somatic responses evoked in them by the group - is primary data about the group's unconscious life. The facilitator who finds themselves feeling omnipotent and indispensable is receiving a communication about the group's dependency. The facilitator who finds themselves feeling attacked and embattled is receiving a communication about fight-flight. The facilitator who finds themselves feeling hopeful and excited about a particular idea is receiving a communication about pairing. In each case, as Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 8) argue, the practitioner's task is to use their own feelings as "indicators of having become not only in but part of the client system".
This connects to the argument I made in the post on the body as container: the facilitator's body is not a neutral instrument of process management. It is a container for the group's projections, and what it contains is diagnostic information. The facilitator who ignores their countertransference - who treats their feelings as personal noise rather than systemic data - is discarding the most sensitive instrument available for understanding what the group is actually doing, as opposed to what it appears to be doing.
The question for co-creation
Jones's systemic design principles - and Warfield's structured methods - address the architecture of conscious participation. They answer the question: how do we structure a process so that diverse stakeholders can contribute their knowledge to a shared inquiry? This is a real and important question, and the methods work for what they are designed to do.
The question they do not answer is: what is happening in the group that the structure cannot reach? What anxieties are being managed, what projections are being enacted, what basic assumptions are operating beneath the surface of the structured dialogue? And what conditions would be needed - what containing structures, what facilitative stance, what tolerance for discomfort - for the group to do its real work, rather than the defensive simulation of work that so many co-creation processes produce?
In Beyond Technomagic I argued that workshops can produce the appearance of consensus without producing the conditions for change. In Owning the Problem Space I argued that design threatens because it demands engagement with what is not known. The group relations tradition, read alongside the co-creation literature, suggests that the gap between appearance and reality in participatory processes is not necessarily a design failure but may reflect psychodynamic processes that better methods alone cannot resolve - and that the task is not to close the gap through better methods, but to create the conditions under which the gap itself becomes thinkable.
References
Armstrong, D. (2005). Organisation in the Mind. London: Tavistock Clinic Series.
Bion, W.R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock.
Jones, P. (2018). Contexts of Co-creation: Designing with System Stakeholders. In P. Jones & K. Kijima (Eds.), Systemic Design: Theory, Methods, and Practice. Tokyo: Springer.
Lawlor, D. & Sher, M. (2021). An Introduction to Systems Psychodynamics. London: Routledge.
Nitsun, M. (1996). The Anti-Group: Destructive Forces in the Group and their Creative Potential. London: Routledge.
Nitsun, M. (2014). Beyond the Anti-Group: Survival and Transformation. London: Routledge.
Warfield, J.N. (1994). Science of Generic Design: Managing Complexity Through Systems Design. Ames, IA: Iowa State Press.