The Subconscious of Groups

Team performance rarely tracks with individual talent - Bernhard Kerres has found no correlation between how capable a team's members are and how well the group works. Drawing on psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, he argues every group has a hidden subconscious life that quietly drives, and derails, its conscious work. First published in Coach Magazine Global, Issue 7, 2024.

Published 2024-06-01 by Bernhard Kerres

I love working with groups and teams. Accompanying a leadership team through its development fascinates me, and facilitating those workshops puts me, in the best sense, on edge. What draws me in is the dynamic between a set of very capable, very respectable individuals. Because here is the strange part: so far I have found no correlation between the members' capabilities and expertise and how well the group actually functions.

I have read plenty on teamwork. My favorite remains Jon Katzenbach's Wisdom of Teams, and his argument that the ability to learn from each other is what separates a high-performance team from the rest. But something was still missing. Then I came across the work of Wilfred Bion (1897-1979), a British psychoanalyst who studied groups closely. Most of the literature takes the individual's view of collaboration. Bion argued that a group has a conscious and a subconscious life of its own.

The group beneath the group

Bion described two entities present at the same time. The Work Group is the conscious part: defined by purpose, goals, and task. It is what we observe first. Beneath it runs an unconscious level he called the Basic Assumption Group. Neither the members nor the group as a whole are aware of it, yet it drives how they work together. People behave as if the assumptions they hold about the group were simply true.

This is why teams derail. A group works through its agenda and then, somehow, comes off the rails, and cannot find the source. Usually the blame lands on poor discipline or one difficult individual. More often, it is the Basic Assumption Group quietly torpedoing the Work Group.

Why a team cannot see this alone

Bion went further and identified three basic assumptions that groups fall into. Each one shapes what kind of leader the group unconsciously demands, and how easily it can be led astray. Recognizing which one is operating changes everything about how you work with the team.

But a group cannot do this diagnosis by itself. Neither individuals nor teams see their own blind spots. What looks like a perfectly rational argument in the room often comes straight from the subconscious need to protect the group at all costs. It takes an experienced coach to guide a team into that territory, and to keep the focus on the subconscious level where the real dynamics live.

The full article sets out Bion's three basic assumptions, dependency, fight-flight, and pairing, and gives three concrete methods a coach can use to bring a group's subconscious to the surface, from pausing a live meeting to running a multi-round leadership simulation.