Commentary on ‘Group Analytic Methods Beyond the Clinical Setting—Working with Researcher–Managers’ by Christopher Mowles, Group Analysis June 2017

I welcome the opportunity to comment on this article and wish to share both my admiration and a degree of unease. My comments derive mainly from my long experience of working in the British National Health Service (NHS) and consulting to the NHS and other organizations. The generalized title of this article, Group Analytic Methods beyond the Clinical Setting (Mowles, 2017), belies its importance as a description of what is almost certainly the only university-based doctoral course in the UK based on group analytic principles as applied to working / managing in organizations: the Doctor of Management (DMan). The sub-title, ‘working with researcher– managers’ is more specific and gets closer to the nub of the article and the core aim of the course, as I see it: to provide an academic framework within which organizational managers coming from a wide range of business and other environments are enabled to engage in an ongoing group-analytically informed reflective process concerning their methods of engagement in the working environment. The importance of the article is threefold:–