...huh. I guess I know of one particular variety, and that variety is very self-contained and circling-adjacent (I almost could have called it “Narrative Circling”, if that didn’t seem like such a contradiction-in-terms). But from the wiki article, T-Group appears to refer to a more nebulous and broad category of things, some of which seem not nearly so self-contained.
The thing I had run into functioned basically as described here (scroll down for the written description). This read to me as clearly cicling-adjacent, and I didn’t think all that hard about where it had come from.
The wikipedia description struck me as surprisingly uninformative about the details of the practice itself. But from poking around a bit on the internet just now… I get the impression that T-Group can refer to something similar to what I described, but can also be used to refer to something close to an experimental leadership/decision-making structure that uses the “T-Group” as part of their intragroup conflict-resolution method?
I knew that the variety I had run into was a bit homebrew, and probably had aspects of circling bred into it. I don’t think I appreciated just how different it could be from other people’s usage of/context for the term. That said, I do see some signs of shared lineage.
The techniques feel related, and the facilitating ethos of awareness, learning, honesty, and goallessness feels similar. But the variety I ran into felt more tightly-defined and compartmentalized, and I was mostly doing it with strangers.
I admit that with a high bar of trust and decently committed participants, I could actually see it working well as a social-information-gathering method? But the idea of being dragged into doing it with coworkers, or of treating it like a primary conflict-resolution technique, seems quite troubling to me.
...huh. I guess I know of one particular variety, and that variety is very self-contained and circling-adjacent (I almost could have called it “Narrative Circling”, if that didn’t seem like such a contradiction-in-terms). But from the wiki article, T-Group appears to refer to a more nebulous and broad category of things, some of which seem not nearly so self-contained.
The thing I had run into functioned basically as described here (scroll down for the written description). This read to me as clearly cicling-adjacent, and I didn’t think all that hard about where it had come from.
The wikipedia description struck me as surprisingly uninformative about the details of the practice itself. But from poking around a bit on the internet just now… I get the impression that T-Group can refer to something similar to what I described, but can also be used to refer to something close to an experimental leadership/decision-making structure that uses the “T-Group” as part of their intragroup conflict-resolution method?
I knew that the variety I had run into was a bit homebrew, and probably had aspects of circling bred into it. I don’t think I appreciated just how different it could be from other people’s usage of/context for the term. That said, I do see some signs of shared lineage.
The techniques feel related, and the facilitating ethos of awareness, learning, honesty, and goallessness feels similar. But the variety I ran into felt more tightly-defined and compartmentalized, and I was mostly doing it with strangers.
I admit that with a high bar of trust and decently committed participants, I could actually see it working well as a social-information-gathering method? But the idea of being dragged into doing it with coworkers, or of treating it like a primary conflict-resolution technique, seems quite troubling to me.