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
We often find 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
Making sense of organisational dilemmas and challenges
We use this analytical lens to make sense of organisational and leadership dilemmas and challenges. We might be asked to discover why capable organisations repeatedly undermine their own goals, for example, or why experienced leadership teams sometimes lose the capacity to think clearly under pressure.
By attending to the anxiety moving through a system, the unspoken rules about authority and power, and the history that shapes what can and cannot be said, we are able to uncover the answers to questions like this and help shape repairs, sustain leadership and co-create ways forward.
Role and authority consultation
Experiential learning
Action learning
Action learning for our clients
Action learning sets can run as a stand-alone intervention or as part of a wider programme of consultancy, leadership development or evaluation, and are designed around your organisation's purpose, membership and circumstances from the outset.
Action learning sets are particularly valuable when:
- senior teams keep becoming caught in the same conflicts
- technically accomplished managers are struggling with the human demands of leadership
- a merger or restructure has left groups working as rivals
- authority and accountability have become unclear
- staff are leading change under real uncertainty
- collaboration across professional or organisational boundaries is difficult
- you want learning to continue after a piece of consultancy has ended.
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
The arts have been part of the Tavistock Institute's transdisciplinary character for decades — a way of knowing organisations from the inside rather than observing them from outside, and one that supports complex change as well as deepening understanding of it.
Artistic practice makes the system we are working in real. It situates people inside it rather than in front of it. As more of working life moves onto screens, that grounding in the senses matters more rather than less, and it is central to what we mean by the quality of working life.
Social Dreaming
Developmental evaluation
Developmental evaluation is part of the innovation process, not a judgement delivered afterwards.
We have conducted developmental evaluations with international social change organisations, the EU clothing industry and with children's service organisations, amongst many others.
Socio-Technical Systems
Innovations in Socio-Technical Systems theory
Recent scholarship has extended socio-technical systems theory, developing an approach called balanced optimisation, which treats demands from the wider ecosystem as equally pressing. Another recent development is called adaptive autonomy, recognising that in human-AI systems, autonomy is not fixed but distributed and renegotiated as tasks and contexts shift.
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.
