Our approach to organisational consultancy

Working with our organisational consultancy

Tavistock Institute consultants will help you and your team to work with visible and beneath-the-surface difficulties and challenges that might affect your organisation’s performance, growth or change and the patterns of behaviour, authority and feeling that shape whether a system works or fails. 

Our response to your challenges will be grounded in decades of field experience across the public, private and third sectors, in the UK and internationally.

Our consultants draw on a repertoire of approaches, combined and sequenced in response to what the work itself demands. We do not arrive with a fixed methodology. We arrive with a set of disciplines that we bring to bear as the situation unfolds.

Explore our methods

Describing the challenge

Organisations come to us at moments of genuine difficulty. Sometimes the difficulty is visible: a restructure that created more problems than it solved, a culture everyone knows needs to change but nobody knows how to shift, a leadership team that agrees in the room and fragments outside it.

Sometimes it is hard to name the presenting problem: inexplicably lagging performance data, a persistent unease, a sense that something important is being avoided.

Beneath policies, procedures and formal hierarchies lie anxieties, defences, loyalties and conflicts that strongly influence behaviour, decision-making and the performance of teams, departments and whole organisations. 

Every organisation carries its own unspoken rules about authority and power, its own history of what is said and what is unsayable. The stories people tell about who they are and what is permitted are often more powerful than rational plans.

This is our territory.

Remaining present in uncertainty

The capacity to remain present in uncertainty rather than react defensively to it is at the heart of our work. We call this negative capability, drawing on the poet John Keats.

We pay close attention to what is being avoided, to the way anxiety moves through a system and shapes behaviour without anyone quite realising it. For us, resistance and dysfunction are not obstacles but meaningful signals. They often express institutional history, or identity under pressure. That is where our diagnostic work begins. 

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 to build that capacity to persist long after we have gone. 

As our CEO Eliat Aram puts it, this work requires the courage to run towards difficult conversations rather than away from them. That combination of intellectual rigour and genuine courage is what makes it possible.