Remembering Merrelyn Emery

We are saddened at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations to learn of Merrelyn Emery’s death.

Her work made an important and enduring contribution to our understanding of organisations as open systems: not isolated entities but living parts of a wider social and environmental field. Her thinking illuminates the essential relationship between an organisation’s internal life and the environment upon which it depends.

Merrelyn Emery wrote: ‘An ecosystem in social science is a community of systems, usually organisations and individuals, who occupy a particular section of the extended social environment, a task environment.’

She argued that the first task of such a community is to work towards adaptation to its ecological niche, so that both the community and its environment can function productively. This requires not only an adaptive relationship with the external task environment, but also adaptive relationships among the members of the community itself.

This insight remains especially relevant today. Organisations cannot flourish by attending only to their own boundaries, interests or anxieties; they must recognise their interdependence with other organisations, individuals and the wider environment.

That way of seeing came with a set of methods by which people can redesign their own work. The Search Conference began with Eric Trist and Fred Emery at Barford in 1959. It was Merrelyn who rebuilt it over five decades on explicit theoretical foundations, tested it in hundreds of settings and carried it far beyond Australia. A Search Conference brings a community together to read its own environment and plan for it, with no expert in the room to do the reading on its behalf. 

With Fred she then developed the Participative Design Workshop, which turns the same principle inward, onto the workplace itself. The first method works on the world an organisation must adapt to. The second asks whether the organisation is built to adapt at all.

Every organisation holds some spare capacity. It can hold it in people: many hands, each trained for one narrow task, with a supervisor to join them up. Or it can hold it in skills: a group whose members can each do several jobs, coordinating their own work and answerable together for the result. She argued that this was never a technical question but a choice about democracy, and she was not afraid to challenge anyone who treated it as anything less. She challenged consultants and researchers who preferred designer-led intervention, in which the expert diagnoses and the workforce receives the design. She challenged managers who wanted the language of participation without giving up control. She held her ground for as long as the evidence held it for her.

That willingness to challenge extended to arguments the field had left behind. From her doctoral work in the 1970s to a paper published in 2025, she argued that screens alter how children perceive and learn. It was a lonely argument for most of those fifty years. It reads very differently now that legislation on social media for under-16s is under debate.

Her work and legacy belongs with that of Enid Mumford, Lisl Klein and Isabel Menzies Lyth. Each of them changed what the field understood, and their work is still in use. 

Merrelyn’s output was prodigious: by 2016 it already ran to ten authored or co-authored books, eight edited volumes, thirty-five book chapters, sixty journal articles and twenty-nine institutional research reports, several of them national studies – and she went on publishing for another decade. In ‘An Open Systems Science’ (2026), published open-access months before her death, she put the demand plainly: ‘We need a science that acknowledges reality as it is and employs practices that are congruent with, and flow from that reality.’

Merrelyn Emery leaves us a powerful intellectual and practical legacy: a way of seeing human systems as relational, evolving and ecologically embedded. Her ideas will continue to influence those of us seeking to understand how organisations can think, adapt and act responsibly within an increasingly complex world.

Photo credit: Simone Butterfield