Navigating Difficult Conversations and Defences - A systemic approach

Navigating Difficult Conversations and Defences is a practical and insightful workshop for leaders who want to handle challenging situations with more confidence, clarity, and impact. Using a systemic and psychologically informed approach, we explore why tough conversations trigger defensiveness—and what you can do to keep dialogue open and constructive. You’ll learn simple, effective strategies for saying hard things in a way people can hear, staying grounded under pressure, and understanding the wider dynamics shaping how your message lands. Expect a warm, reflective space with real-world tools you can take straight back into your team or service.

Aims

• To strengthen leaders’ ability to communicate difficult messages in ways that can be heard, understood, and acted on across the system.
• To deepen understanding of how roles, dynamics, and organisational anxieties shape communication and defensiveness.
• To develop reflective, mentalizing approaches that support clarity, compassion, and constructive authority when conversations become challenging.

Objectives

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Recognise how system pressures, roles, and unconscious dynamics influence how difficult messages are received.
• Understand the key elements of a mentalizing stance and how it supports clearer, less defensive communication.
• Use practical techniques for preparing, framing, and delivering challenging conversations in complex systems.
• Identify unhelpful patterns (avoidance, escalation, splitting, over-functioning, shutting down) and work with them more skilfully.
• Hold both their own psychological state and the wider system in mind in order to stay steady, connected, and effective during difficult exchanges.
• Make small, meaningful adjustments to their leadership practice that enhance trust, transparency, and system-wide learning.

Who this course is for

• Boards of Directors and Executive Teams
• Senior Leaders and decision makers responsible for organisational culture
• Non-Executive Directors and governance leads
• Service leads and managers

Anyone wishing to bring about change and influence systems

MORE ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

Leadership today takes place in conditions of uncertainty, complexity and emotional pressure. The Tavistock Consulting Leadership and Management Workshops are a series of one day workshops that help leaders, managers and consultants think more deeply about the human side of organisational life.

Facilitated by organisational consultants from Tavistock Consulting, aspecialist organisational development and change consultancy, the workshops blend key concepts from the Tavistock body of research and theory with experiential learning and reflective dialogue.

You will come away with new insights and practical tools to help you notice and respond to unconscious processes, group dynamics and organisational anxieties, and use these to shape how you take up your leadership role. A CPD certificate will be provided to evidence attendance.

ABOUT TAVISTOCK CONSULTING

Tavistock Consulting’s expertise lies in being able to work with the full complexity of organisational life. This means we recognise and engage with both the practical realities and issues our clients face as well as the unacknowledged aspects that lie below the surface; the assumptions, dynamics and emotions that often present an unanswered challenge to creating real and sustainable change. We work to this model, which we call a systems psychodynamic approach.