Looking ahead to our 80th anniversary

This year’s Annual General Meeting of the Tavistock Institute, on 16 July 2026, ended with this talk by Lucian Hudson, Chair of the Council of Trustees. Lucian sets out his thoughts on how we might approach our 80th anniversary next year, exploring our tradition and the way ahead for the Tavistock Institute.

Anniversaries are an opportunity to mark a significant milestone, to look back and to look ahead, yet be present in the here-and-now. The Tavistock Institute, in marking its 80th, will be no exception. A swift Google search on the significance of the figure 80 suggests both the infinite and the limitless, a culmination of life experience, spiritual power, and strategic balance. All heady stuff, but how might apply to us?

We have a remarkable history, and a bright future, if we can survive and thrive in tough market conditions; and a much prized reputation for insight, impact and influence — often not that visible. We stay vital and current — because of the work we do and continue to do, and do exceptionally well. We have developed and sustained a distinctive tradition shaped by successive generations of thinkers and practitioners. We will give some thought this coming year to all those whose work have inspired us: pre- and post- the creation of this Institute, past and present practitioners and influencers. 

It has been a management trend in my 44 year professional career to accentuate strategy at the expense of history. We need a good understanding of both — as history is lived, and relived, whether we like it or not. I for many years believed and hoped that our progress was linear. It might still be, in some areas such as medicine, science and technology. But in others it is non-existent, or slow, patchy, dynamic, reversable. What progress there is cyclical, and depends on each generation using its power and influence ethically and effectively to shape the world. I feel sometimes it is a game of snakes and ladders — symbolism for psychoanalysts and theologians to feast on!

Ours is a living and evolving tradition, what has become known as the Tavistock approach, practiced by Tavistockians.

The run-up to a special anniversary gives us an opportunity to reflect on who we are, what we’re becoming and what purpose we serve, particularly in these challenging, troubled and uncertain times.

I draw on two dreams that two of our number have had of late. Each of us not knowing that the other was having this dream until we shared it with the other. Each dream was about a suitcase — specifically opening a suitcase.

Maybe there was a lingering memory of a book published over the past year Sitting on a Suitcase, which we launched here. I’d highly recommend if you haven’t already read it. 

Mannie Sher dreamt of a suitcase that he needed to pack. He was in a hurry. He was travelling and the suitcase was overflowing with items and the suitcase needed to be packed. 

I had a dream where I was carrying an empty suitcase, a dark brown empty suitcase, which I was, oddly enough, quite attached to, and I was walking home. The suitcase was similar to the one Paddington Bear carried with him when he first arrived in London. I dreamt of a road of my childhood. I was walking home when the next moment I was mugged at gunpoint and instructed to hand over the suitcase. I produced a wad of money — I am rich in my dreams! — and said, look, take my money, but please leave me with my suitcase. And so the money was taken, my suitcase was returned, and I opened it and it was empty. I felt surprisingly relieved. 

What could this tell us about the Tavistock tradition?

In Mannie’s example, it is not so much a single item that we produce, or certainly not a single solution. It’s our capability of picking out or drawing out something that’s relevant in context for our client that could, in our work with them, make a difference. It is the fact that we have a range of methods, tools and techniques which contribute to what broadly we would call the Tavistock approach.

 My empty suitcase speaks to a tradition where we acknowledge ‘just not knowing’, yet living with that and working with not knowing. We contend with and embrace that not knowing. The uncertain. What we might also call the liminal.

The Tavistock Institute is one of those rare organisations that straddles opposites, contradictions, conundrums, tensions. Let me list some examples of binaries we typically straddle: objective, and subjective/inter subjective; ethical and effective leadership; local and global: parts of systems and whole systems; individual and social selves; conscious, unconscious; known, unknown. A scanning of social media commentary these days shows a predominant preference for choosing one side and not the other, or equivocating. I suggest we can do better than that.

On that last point, about the known and unknown, as a former journalist and a lifelong student, now also teaching, I have long pursued and valued knowledge: knowledge for its own sake and knowledge applied. However, our tradition also points to other dimensions. A play on the word knowledge, no ledge.

So we step into the unknown and do so maybe apprehensively, maybe confidently, but that’s the space in which we operate, where we work hard to shed the pretence or aspiration of knowing. 

We bring together at least two traditions, one that’s data rich, not just visible, conscious, but invisible and unconscious, but still data, and having no data to work on, and yet still having to act.

The poet John Keats described this as negative capability. This very insight, Wilfred Bion developed and formed part of his thinking.  It presents us with a way in which we can approach issues, social, technical, biological, political, personal, interpersonal, intrapersonal.

Keats asked what quality went to form a ‘man of achievement’, shall we say person of achievement, especially in literature, and which Keats believed Shakespeare possessed so enormously. Keats said ‘negative capability’, that is, when a person is capable of being with uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.

One strand in our tradition is the interplay of dependence, interdependence and independence, a growing awareness of our role and place in the world and in relation to one another. Typically, in my experience of our development programmes, one feels one has to lose oneself to find oneself — an experience that is unsettling, disorienting but also eye-opening, and often rejuvenating. Whatever we lose when loosening the grip that lifelong assumptions and biases have on us, we gain or regain a sense of agency, a sense of freedom. This is the special gift that being in the Tavistock force field brings us.

Søren Kierkegaard once said, ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’.

If we focus on anything at all in our work, it is, of course, learning from experience, which I think on balance means that we’re probably less doctrinaire, less prescriptive, less overtly promoting an idea or set of ideas, stepping back from one-size-fits-all, stepping back from off-the-shelf solutions, stepping back. As the French would say, ‘reculer pour mieux avancer’.

Credit here to Steve Hearsum in his latest book, about there being no silver bullets, no magic bullets.

In marking 80 years we can pay sufficient attention to the tradition and influences that preceded it. The Tavistock tradition does not abandon earlier formulations in psychoanalysis and social sciences, but enlarges them.

What we see is an evolution, and an evolution in which the individual is understood not only in relation to internal psychic life, but also within families, groups, organisations, institutions and the wider social system.

To that the Tavistock tradition or approach has added further dimensions, including large group processes, authority, power, culture, and more recently, complexity.

As discussed with Mannie Sher, the challenge here is not to choose between these models, but to hold them together simultaneously, each illuminating a different aspect of human experience.

As we move toward our anniversary, I would like to challenge ourselves to take up more of a role in addressing more directly the way society is changing, to act not just to contain but to act as catalysts or enable others to do so. I have for long been inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, especially her emphasis on freedom as a real world activity, rather than a solitary, internal state of mind, and Viktor Frank. Arendt and Frankl confronted human cruelty, its causes and consequences, and turned despair into hope through an appreciation of freedom.

For Arendt, true freedom is made actual by acting in concert with others, and is not just about the removal of constraints, but the active participation in the governance of one’s community. 

Stephen Covey brought out this insight from Frankl: ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’ 

Being free to think, to think creatively and critically, has never been more important or at greater risk. The relentless commentary on social media and media that amplifies anxiety, ambivalence and anger, reduces the time and space in which we can think and reflect, and produces a rush to judgment, opinion and knee-jerk reaction. This is corrosive to our democracy and ultimately our civilisation.

We Tavistockians, quietly or loudly, need to call out this dynamic and as we do in our work with people and organisations, exercise that discernment that distinguishes between fact, interpretation, opinion, theory and hypothesis. Our work is scientific. We work to a framework. We follow certain steps. In working with us, an individual or organisation does not just buy into a possibly desired outcome, but accepts a way of working through an issue. 

It seems at times that the modern world often conflates instinctive reaction to a problem with a drive for instant explanations and solutions. We judge people before hearing all the evidence, we don’t question very deeply our assumptions, we seek to impose a view or our will before understanding and appreciating different and wider perspectives. We want our public leaders to deliver soundbites and photo opportunities. Media, social media and political discourse exacerbate that shortcircuiting of our thinking. In so doing, we lose the capacity to think for ourselves and think matters through. We also short-circuit our emotional response, what it is to feel.

Our approach is to counteract the tendency of our times, which is a rush to judgment, a rush from emotion to opinion to decision, to pause and discern exactly what’s happening, to try to make sense of a situation or a pressing matter without feeling obliged to take a premature or untimely decision. Instead to think through decisions and their consequences. We as Tavistockians occupy a space here that is desperately missing in a lot of public life.

We are not dealing with a new phenomenon, but one amplified by the speed and spread of available information. If we don’t rise to the challenge of rapid and exponential growth in AI, we won’t make the most of our agency as a human species. 

But there are other trends we are in danger of ignoring in many of our liberal capitalist or mixed economy democracies: growing and deepening inequality, and our own consumerist tendencies in wanting rapid rather than deferred satisfaction. We need to be more attentive to the distinction between demand and desire. The new conventional wisdom I discern: the more demands can be met, the more we can fulfil or extinguish desire. But it is a fool’s errand.

As we wrestle with the challenge of climate change, perhaps when we fear our mortality as a human race, we go into overdrive. Past thinkers warned us of some of the risks.

Freud remarked in The Future of an Illusion: ‘The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.’

C.S. Lewis anticipated the modern obsession with ‘being nice’ would destroy the soul. 

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis argued that when a society stops believing in objective virtue, it doesn’t become tolerant: it becomes manipulatable. He called the result ‘men without chests.’

‘People with appetites and intellects, but no courage, no honour, no trained moral instincts. They can calculate everything and defend nothing.’

We can show that Freud perspicacity and CS Lewis courage as we approach our 80th. 

As I weave in the example of our suitcase dreams, Mannie’s and mine, we entertain the thought that dreams may be speaking to us and to each other across different minds and contexts. Social dreaming is just one of many valuable contributions that the Tavistock tradition brings. It continues to bring us fresh insights and continues to sustain our curiosity. A question for all of us: what are we dreaming, what might we dream in the run-up to our anniversary?

A few words about curiosity: I think that of all the different elements that characterise our approach, this is possibly most important and understated. A sustained curiosity — giving matters both a wide and narrow attention — ensures that our contribution remains original, fresh and distinctive.

David Lawlor and Mannie Sher in their trilogy on Systems Psychodynamics have done much to elevate and enhance our standing among our peers and wider circle of influence. Manfred Kets de Vries describes their work as ‘a testimony to the continued intellectual contribution of the Tavistock Institute in their efforts to improve human relations in organisations.’

Multi-disciplinary and multi-theoretical in nature, the systems psychodynamics paradigm — by placing an equal emphasis on both terms — develops from the understanding that no single theory or approach explains the complexity of organisation systems.

As we operate as consultants and coaches to groups and organisations, we introduce that combination of closeness and distance, that questioning. But if you’re a leader, as Eliat Aram and I are, and served leaders, directly, at the highest level, we can enable leaders to fill a gap, lack or vacuum in how organisations are led and run. We can explore a vacuum in leadership where we acknowledge that it’s not leaders alone who can make the difference. They carry the anxieties, hopes and fears of an organisation, but becoming anxious themselves, they risk over-relying on structures, strategies, plans and objectives that give the semblance of control. Far more challenging, yet more fertile and fruitful, is understanding the system and systems of which they are part, and appreciating in context leadership, followership and self-supporting systems, and the roles — formal and informal — that we take up.

We have no option, I believe, but to be in the business of enabling people and organisations to identify not only what doesn’t work, but what might work. And if it is to work, how that might be best achieved. This speaks to the different strands of our work, research, consultancy and professional development, each in its own right and in combination.

As Antonio Sama said to me in the past week, ‘Once a Tavistockian, always a Tavistockian’. It seems we belong to a family we find difficult to leave. We find a home away from home, whether it be Tabernacle Street, Gee Street or now Featherstone Street:  a welcoming space for explorers, travellers, strangers, refugees and orphans. In spirit and at heart, mind and body, this is who we are.

Thank you.

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We will be planning celebrations for our 80th anniversary in the coming months and you can keep up with news on those plans and our current work by subscribing to our newsletter.