Consultancy
Organisational consulting from the Tavistock Institute, the home of systems psychodynamics, founded in 1947.
For your complex organisational challenges and changes.
We explore how people behave, make decisions and lead under pressure. Together we translate what we discover into action.
Challenges our clients bring
“Our restructure created more problems than it solved.”
“This culture needs to change — but nobody knows how to shift it.”
“Our leadership team (or our Board) agrees in the room and fragments outside it.”
“Previous change efforts stalled, then made things worse.”
Explore our methods
Our consultants draw on a distinctive set of methods developed and refined at the Tavistock Institute, sequenced and applied in response to your specific organisational questions.
Diagnostic inquiry
Through structured interviews, ethnographic observation, document analysis, and focus groups, we build a picture of what is actually happening — another layer of understanding, often distinctly different to what the organisation believes about itself. We will be looking for what is latent as much as what is visible.
Systems psychodynamics
We attend to the anxiety moving through a system, the unspoken rules about authority and power, the history that shapes what can and cannot be said. This is the analytical lens through which we make sense of what we observe.
Why do capable organisations repeatedly undermine their own goals?
Why do experienced leadership teams sometimes lose the capacity to think clearly under pressure?
Role and authority consultation
What are the expectations placed on the people in this system? What authority are they carrying and what gets in the way of using it? What does the system need from them that they may not yet be providing? Particularly valuable for leaders navigating significant change or transition.
Experiential learning
Simulations, intergroup events and structured group processes make the dynamics of the organisation visible and workable in real time, as they occur. Participants do not learn about group dynamics; they encounter them directly and develop the capacity to work with what they find.
Action learning
We work alongside your team as co-investigators, not distant observers. Action learning at TIHR is a blend of inquiry and intervention, grounded in organisational learning and practical application. Through iterative cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting, we surface and address the hidden dynamics that often hinder change: the unspoken tensions, defensive routines and anxieties about uncertainty.
We explore the relationship between the individual, the group, and the wider organisational system. Combining systems thinking with depth psychology, we’ve supported change in mining industries, the EU’s clothing sector, health leadership teams and global IT companies. Our teams understand the unconscious processes influencing behaviour and decision-making and build your capacity to think clearly under pressure and create lasting transformation.
What is Action Research?
Menzies, I. E. P. (1960). A Case-Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence against Anxiety
Arts and organisations
Creativity at our heart: the arts give expression to difficult emotions, uncertainty, power and the unspoken dynamics that shape organisations and systems.
Part of TIHR’s transdisciplinary character and its long engagement with the arts as a way of knowing organisations from the inside.
Our arts practices offer ways of knowing that support complex change processes and deepen understanding.
We work with performance, visual and literature expression to help us with difficult emotions, uncertainty, power and the unspoken dynamics that shape organisations and systems.
Much of our work deals with ambiguity and relational complexity.
Arts practices offer ways of knowing that support complex change processes and deepen understanding.
We work with performance, visual and literature expression to help us with difficult emotions, uncertainty, power and the unspoken dynamics that shape organisations and systems.
Much of our work deals with ambiguity and relational complexity. Traditional research and consultancy methods often struggle to engage with these dimensions.
Artistic practice makes the systems we work in real: it situates us and helps to contain tensions safely. In times when virtual interactions and digital technologies are becoming more pervasive than ever, sensory practices are vital and to our work in improving the quality of work life.
Bringing artists into dialogue with social scientists, practitioners, and organisations, the work has generated a community of artists-in-organisations and acts as an expansive container for a wide range of arts and creativity practices and programmes.
Social dreaming
Through the sharing and association of dreams in a matrix setting, material that lies below the level of conscious organisational life becomes available for thinking and sense-making.
Social dreaming is a practice in which a group of people come together to share their dreams within a group setting. The idea is that dreams are not only personal. They also carry traces of the social world we live in: our anxieties, our cultural preoccupations, the things that go unspoken in organisational and public life.
A social dreaming session is called a "matrix" rather than a group. Participants share dreams and make free associations, noticing patterns and connections across the material. The matrix is designed to avoid the dynamics familiar in therapy or group relations work, and instead to create a container in which dreams can speak to dreams.
The focus is the dream, not the dreamer, and on what emerges when dreams are placed alongside one another.
The practice was developed by Gordon Lawrence and his colleagues at the Tavistock Institute and partner organisations in the 1980s. What draws people to it is the way it gives access to a different kind of knowledge: the things we sense but cannot yet articulate, the undercurrents that shape how we think, feel and act together.
Application
Social dreaming can be used in all sorts of settings: organisational development, group relations, education, action research and social enquiry, wherever there is value in surfacing what is usually unattended, and in making the unconscious dimensions of collective life available for reflection and new thinking.
Developmental evaluation
We evaluate in real-time as interventions unfold, because complex initiatives don't wait for neat endpoints to adapt and learn. We facilitate learning and reflection to support adaptive decision-making through iterative inquiry. Rigorous evidence-gathering takes place, enabling innovations to evolve intelligently as contexts shift and insights surface.
The evaluation is part of the innovation process, not a judgement delivered afterwards. Our developmental evaluation with international social change organisations facilitated learning spaces as each adapted wellbeing interventions to their unique cultural contexts.
Socio-Technical Systems
Socio-technical systems (STS) are work systems — like supermarket self-checkouts, hospital wards, and sales organisations — in which the social and technical elements must be jointly designed and optimised if the system is to perform well.
The principle originates in the Institute's 1950s coalfields research, where Eric Trist and colleagues demonstrated that new technologies fail when they fracture the social structures that make work meaningful. Subsequent studies across Vauxhall Motors, Courtaulds and the process industries extended this into high-automation environments.
The founding principle — that neither subsystem can be improved at the expense of the other — remains the working grammar of socio-technical practice today.
Recent scholarship has extended this into balanced optimisation, which treats demands from the wider ecosystem as equally pressing; and adaptive autonomy, recognising that in human-AI systems, autonomy is not fixed but distributed and renegotiated as tasks and contexts shift.
We bring an STS lens wherever new tools, agents or platforms are reshaping how people work. We are developing a multi-level STS evaluation framework for complex human-AI systems to promote effective labour market policy in Europe. We are also pioneering experiential and arts-based approaches to STS learning, including participatory performances such as Faust Shop and Memory Machine.
Lawlor, D., Sher, M. with C. Child (2023), ‘Socio-ecological: Working with Large Complex Collaborative Partnerships (Whole Systems)’, Systems Psychodynamics: Innovative Approaches to Change, Whole Systems and Complexity , D. Lawlor, M. Sher, New York, London.
Trist, E.L. and Bamforth, K.W. (1951). Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal-getting. Human Relations, 4(1), pp.3–38.
Emery, F.E., Marek, J., Miller, E.J. and Murray, H. (1960). Analysis of automation: a preliminary statement. Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
Designing effective labour market policy in Europe
Creative Digital Futures Lab
Engage with us
Organisations willing to engage deeply with our teams are better placed to lead with clarity, adapt with confidence and build cultures where people can genuinely thrive. That is what Tavistock consultancy is for.
As we work with the under-the-surface tensions that emerge when people, structures, strategy and practices collide in unexpected ways, we will pull you out of what might feel like a swamp or a fire, with empathy and humility.
Our goal
Our goal is to strengthen your organisation’s capacity to think clearly under pressure and for that capacity to persist long after we have gone.
Our core team
The Institute’s consultancy team brings together social scientists, consultant/researchers, artists, psychologists and anthropologists.
