Karpmans Drama Triangle And Irving Janis Groupthink Theory

For my collaborative project, my group created a show made up of a variety of different pieces all centred on themes of equality, identity and social acceptance. Having been previously limited to what was deemed acceptable within our disciplines we opted to attempt to break this mould and just freely create different dance, acting and singing performances that we were passionate about, without reading to deeply into the meaning. However the process was not without it challenges many of which arose between group members because of our shared discipline with one another. Within this report I will be interrogating whether shared interests create conflicts and how they are resolved in relation to my own collaborative experiences; analysing them through the use of various theories including Transactional Analysis (Berne, 2018), Karpmans Drama Triangle(Graham, 2018)and Irving Janis’ groupthink theory (Janis, 1991).

At first glance this made the process seem much simpler because we all wanted our final product to be within the area of musical theatre, but we found that once we started to try and create material we moved through many different ideas of what our final product would be, with the whole group never fully committing to one idea. We shifted constantly between discussions about what style our piece was, what it meant and how we would achieve it, which perhaps has to happen to some extent when forming as a group but looking back in fact we didn’t have a fully set product until a week before the