The detailed sessions below follow the same movement as the programme arc: from frame and lived experience, through organisational realities and sensemaking, into role work, integration and return to practice.
Frame
Friday · 14:30–15:30
Professor Mark Stein — Opening Frame and Discussion
Between Collapse and Certainty: Doubt, Conviction and the Capacity to Lead, Consult and Coach
In this keynote, Mark Stein explores the difficult balance between doubt and conviction in the work of leaders, coaches and consultants.
At times, those in helping or authority roles may find themselves carrying the despair, anger or helplessness of the people they are trying to support. Clients, employees or citizens may make them feel deskilled, unauthorised, or no longer up to the task. In such moments, doubt is not merely cognitive; it becomes a lived emotional experience that can undermine the capacity to think and act. Resilience, grounded in experience, training and reflective practice, becomes essential in sustaining the conviction needed to remain engaged with the work.
Yet conviction carries its own risks. Leaders, consultants and coaches may become too attached to their own competence, ideas or interventions. When conviction becomes excessive, it can close down curiosity, block learning, and defend against reality.
Drawing on psychoanalysis and systems psychodynamics, Mark will examine how doubt can become paralysing, how conviction can become defensive, and how curiosity and resilience can help sustain judgment, authority and responsible action in turbulent organisational life.
Lived Experience
Friday · 16:00–17:30
Professor Anand Narasimhan — AI in the Decision Field
Group-in-Self, Doubt and Conviction
Participants work collectively on an organisational dilemma. The primary task is clearly stated with full awareness that we are here to observe the group’s own process.
The accomplishment of the task is of course important, and yet equally important is the reflection on how we go about accomplishing the primary task as a collective.
This session gives participants a first lived experience of the conference theme. It explores how the group organises itself around anxiety, authority, responsibility, doubt, and conviction.
Focus questions:
What heightens a collective’s anxiety?
Who carries doubt?
Who carries conviction?
Who within the group and outside is an oracle, a threat, saviour, rival, or scapegoat?
How is responsibility and accountability for collective task shared, avoided, undermined or displaced?
Social Dreaming Matrix
Saturday and Sunday · 07:00–07:45
Social Dreaming Matrix
The Social Dreaming Matrix offers a space for dreams, images, associations, and emotional residues from the conference system to become available for shared reflection. It is not a clinical interpretation of individual dreams, but a way of listening to the unconscious life of the group and the wider field.
Across Saturday and Sunday mornings, Nicola Wreford Howard and András Gelei will hold this space so that participants can notice what may be emerging beneath the surface of the formal programme: anxieties, hopes, disturbances, repetitions, images of authority, and collective preoccupations.
The matrix connects directly to the ERM theme because doubt and conviction are not only held cognitively. They also appear in images, dreams, moods, projections, and the affective life of the temporary conference system.
What is the conference system dreaming?
What images or associations reveal something about authority, anxiety, task, doubt or conviction?
How does the unconscious life of the group help us think about organisational turbulence?
Organisational Reality I — AI, Thinking, Judgment and Authority
Saturday · 09:00–10:15
Professor Wodzisław Duch — AI, Thinking and the End of the Human Monopoly on Thought
Professor Duch is not only an internationally recognised authority in artificial intelligence. He brings a deeper provocation about thinking itself.
His session asks what happens when AI challenges assumptions about cognition, language, consciousness, authority, and truth-testing.
The systems-psychodynamic relevance is that AI can become an oracle object: something onto which people project certainty, intelligence, threat, salvation, or control.
What do we believe too quickly?
What do we dismiss too defensively?
How does language create false certainty?
What happens when thinking is no longer assumed to be exclusively human?
Saturday · 10:45–12:00
Professor Naomi Haefner — AI, Innovation and Organisational Decision-Making
Professor Haefner brings AI into the organisational field: innovation, organisational design, leadership decision-making, and the changing nature of work.
Her session explores how organisations take up AI not only as a technology, but as a force that reshapes authority, judgment, design, capability, and strategic choice.
The systems-psychodynamic relevance is that AI may disturb existing patterns of leadership, expertise, dependency, control, and responsibility.
How are organisations reconfigured when AI enters the work of thinking and deciding?
What new forms of dependency or authority does AI create?
How do leaders make responsible decisions when the system is changing faster than it can fully understand?
Saturday · 12:00–12:30
Plenary Reflection
What do this morning’s contributions help us understand about doubt and conviction?
Organisational Reality II — Parallel Reflection Sessions
Participants work with what has been stirred through concrete organisational, institutional, consulting, leadership, governance, and AI-related realities.
Each session has two parts: Part 1 — Entry into the Reality, a case, frame, question, or experiential task that grounds participants in a specific reality; and Part 2 — Reflection and Meaning-Making, in which participants explore what the material evokes about doubt, conviction, authority, anxiety, role, responsibility, and task.
The shared task is to explore how systems-psychodynamic thinking illuminates what happens when certainty is unavailable.
Parallel Session 1
Professor Susan Long & Victor Svensson — My Relationship with AI
This experiential session uses socioanalytic drawing to explore participants’ conscious and unconscious relationships with AI.
Through image, association, and reflection, Susan and Victor invite participants to examine how AI is imagined, feared, idealised, resisted, or used.
The session explores what AI evokes about authority, dependency, creativity, control, and the changing boundaries between human and machine thinking.
This session belongs in the parallel reflections because it gives participants space to work with their own lived relationship to AI, rather than adding another expert input.
Parallel Session 2
Erik van de Loo — Between Doubt and Conviction: Working with Very Large Systems and Organizations
This session explores consulting to very large organisations, where scale, hierarchy, power, and institutional dynamics shape what can be seen, spoken, silenced, or acted upon.
Erik brings the lens of consulting to reflect on how doubt and conviction are held, worked with, and sometimes defended against in complex organisational systems.
The systems-psychodynamic question is how consultants remain useful without becoming captured by the organisation’s need for reassurance, simplification, silence, or premature certainty.
Parallel Session 3
Simon Western — Entangled Futures — Leadership Between Doubt and Conviction
Moving beyond traditional command-and-control models, this session explores how unconscious dynamics, systemic interdependence, power relations, and ecological thinking shape organisational life in an age of uncertainty.
Drawing on Simon Western’s book Entanglements, Simon invites participants to look awry at disruption, desire, care, uncertainty, and the fragile conditions through which leadership becomes possible.
The session asks how leaders and consultants can act with conviction without foreclosing doubt, complexity, or ethical awareness.
Parallel Session 4
Larry Hirschhorn — What Is Going on Here?
Consulting Between Doubt and Next Steps
This session explores the dynamics of consulting when organisations, executives, boards, or teams are under pressure and the situation is not yet clear.
Drawing on his long experience in organisational psychodynamics and consulting practice, Larry invites participants to reflect on how consultants work with uncertainty, authority, anxiety, and decision-making.
The session stays close to two practical questions: What is going on here?What is our next step?
Parallel Session 5
Dr Nadine R. Tchelebi — Creating Followership Between Doubt and Conviction
The session draws on the conviction of a convent community to explore how leaders navigate group dynamics when existential doubt is continuously lived with, and how their decisions are in turn shaped by the conviction of the group they are leading.
Nadine will use this context to examine how these insights may speak to leadership, consulting, and coaching in turbulent organisational life.
Parallel Session 6
Professor Anand Narasimhan — Governance in the Zone Between Doubt and Conviction
This session explores governance as the work of making responsible decisions when doubt reigns and conviction tempts.
Drawing on his experience with senior leaders, boards, and institutional systems, Anand invites participants to reflect on how the anxieties that are endemic to the act of governance, the unconscious roles that are motivated as a result, and how governing bodies shape the movement from doubt toward conviction.
The systems-psychodynamic question is how governance can support thinking, a sense of fiduciary responsibility and accountability within the institutions we govern, rather than becoming a defence against anxiety, conflict, doubt, and conviction.
Sensemaking
Friday · 17:30–18:15
Plenary Reflection — Day I
The first plenary reflection connects the lived group experience to the conference theme and begins to gather what has appeared in the temporary conference system.
What appeared in the group as doubt and conviction were negotiated?
How did authority, anxiety and responsibility move through the field?
Saturday · 15:30–16:00
Large Plenary Across Sessions — Sensemaking Across the Whole Field
The large plenary is essential because the parallel sessions will generate different experiences, anxieties, insights, and questions. Its purpose is to gather the whole field.
What appeared across the sessions?
Where did doubt become paralysing?
Where did conviction become defensive?
What happened to authority, responsibility, and task?
What did the different realities reveal about organisational life in turbulence?
Role Work
Sunday · 09:00–10:15
Reflecting on Key Learnings from the ERM
Participants will have opportunity to reflect on their experiences and learning in small groups.
Participants will be led by reflective questions such as:
What are my takeaways from this conference?
Which ideas and experiences stand out to me?
Which ideas do I want to continue exploring? Which ideas remain unclear?
Which ideas and experiences felt jarring and uncomfortable, and why?
Integration
Sunday · 10:45–12:00
Applying Key Learnings to Own Practice
Participants reflect on how they might want to apply their learning to their own practice.
Participants will be led by reflective questions such as:
What are some next steps I want to take based on my learning from this conference?
How might the themes and ideas we explored at this conference influence the way I work and take on my role?
How might they influence the way I work with clients?
What ideas and themes can I safely set aside as not relevant to the work I do now and in the future?
Facilitators: Amelia La Spada, Voytek Chelkowski, Larry Hirschhorn, Susan Long, András Gelei and Nadine Tchelebi.
Closing Plenary — Return to Practice
Sunday · 12:00–12:45
Closing Plenary — What Are We Taking Back?
The closing plenary gathers the whole conference experience.
It asks what participants are taking back into their organisations, roles, practices, and ISPSO.
This is not another integration panel. It is the final collective closure of the temporary conference system.
The focus is on what has been learned, what remains unresolved, and how participants may carry a more thoughtful relationship to doubt and conviction back into their work.
People
Organisers, Contributors and Facilitators
Opening Keynote
Professor Mark Stein
Mark Stein opens the ERM from a systems-psychodynamic perspective, framing doubt, conviction and the capacity to lead, consult and coach.
Leadership and Governance
Anand Narasimhan
Anand Narasimhan is the Shell Professor of Leadership and Governance at IMD Lausanne, working with top teams, boards and organisational transformation.
AI, Mind and Consciousness
Professor Wodzisław Duch
Professor Wodzisław Duch is an internationally recognised authority in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, neuroinformatics and philosophy of mind, and Professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
AI and Innovation
Professor Naomi Haefner
Professor Naomi Haefner is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation at IMD Lausanne, researching how AI reshapes strategy, organisational design and decision-making.
Socioanalytic Drawing / Adviser
Professor Susan Long
Professor Susan Long is an academic, author, researcher, organisational consultant and coach, a past president and distinguished member of ISPSO, and co-lead of the PhD programme at NIODA.
Socioanalytic Drawing
Victor Svensson
Victor Svensson is founder of Hybrid Experience and contributes to the socioanalytic drawing session exploring participants’ conscious and unconscious relationships with AI.
Very Large Organisations
Erik van de Loo
Erik van de Loo is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst and Affiliate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD.
Leadership and Entanglement
Dr Simon Western
Dr Simon Western is Founder and CEO of the Eco-Leadership Institute, and a leading academic, coach, author and leadership practitioner.
Consulting / Programme Interlocutor
Larry Hirschhorn
Larry Hirschhorn is a founding member of CFAR and ISPSO, known for practical organisational psychodynamic consulting.
Role Consultation / Organising Committee
Amelia La Spada
Amelia La Spada is Managing Director of antepodes.org and a behavioural coach working with executives, groups, teams and organisations.
Dr Nadine R. Tchelebi is an organisational consultant, mediator and founder of Change:Mediated, specialising in conflict management, leadership and team development.
Social Dreaming Matrix
Social Dreaming Matrix
The Social Dreaming Matrix offers a space for dreams, images, associations, and emotional residues from the conference system to become available for shared reflection. It is not a clinical interpretation of individual dreams, but a way of listening to the unconscious life of the group and the wider field.
Across Saturday and Sunday mornings, Nicola Wreford Howard and András Gelei will hold this space so that participants can notice what may be emerging beneath the surface of the formal programme: anxieties, hopes, disturbances, repetitions, images of authority, and collective preoccupations.
The matrix connects directly to the ERM theme because doubt and conviction are not only held cognitively. They also appear in images, dreams, moods, projections, and the affective life of the temporary conference system.