Three recent presentations reflect TIHR’s continuing learning around design and culture change.
The European Parliament Risk Management Unit recently contracted for a workshop in organizational design, encompassing both design and culture aspects, drawing on the Tavistock Institute’s traditions in design and culture change. Organizational consultancy may be contracted with either organizational design or organizational culture change as the main focus; often organizational design assignments encounter the need for organizational culture change while client systems involved in culture change assignments begin to identify design changes they need or want to address more directly. A recent paper delivered to the ISPSO Symposium by TIHR’s Principal Researcher / Consultant Fiddy Abraham, can be found here addressing this.
Organizational consultancy at TIHR continues to work across these different organizational approaches, drawing on the Institute’s leadership in developing participative design theory and practice – best known through classic socio-technical (STS) design and methodology (Trist, Miller, Rice, Emery, Hickling, Friend) – and culture change through addressing systems psychodynamics (Jacques, Menzies) and increasingly influenced by contemporary theorists such as Habermas, Foucault and Stacey.
The recently established European Organizational Design Forum is providing opportunities to engage with other practitioners (which you can read about in ‘Is It Just Me? Exploring Dilemmas and Choices in Organizational Design’. Jean Neumann and Frances Abraham will continue this dialogue in the EODF stream at the second meeting of the European Organizational Development Network in May 2014, which is building an essential platform for practitioners across a broad spectrum of approaches. Their presentation to ODN continues the organizational design theme and will be posted after the ODN Europe Annual Conference 7th-8th May 2014.
Update: the presentation to ODN in May 2014 can be found here.
For further information please contact Fiddy Abraham.
