Tavistock Institute consultants in action

The numbers don’t add up 

A global technology company was developing a revolutionary €200m product when engineers discovered that two essential components were misaligned — not for technical reasons, but because of hidden rivalry and unspoken conflict between two departmental heads. 

We brought the teams together, shifted the conversation to what had previously been unsayable, and explored the unquantifiable. The components were aligned, the teams were aligned, and the product got made.

Client: ASML, Europe

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Professional boundaries can be barriers to care

Two NHS engagements had echoes of similar underlying patterns.

In the first, operational leads from three organisations — a hospital, community therapies, and social care — were jointly responsible for a patient discharge pathway but functioning as separate systems. Relationships were tense, staff focused on their own patients. The standards of care were under pressure.

In the second, NHS Directors in a Trust in the Midlands, England, were navigating the daily complexity of their Directorate — absorbing intense pressure, managing multiple group dynamics, and trying to lead clearly through what often felt like an inescapable tangle of politics and unspoken conflict.

In both cases we created structured space for people to experience the system at work in the room — to see directly how their individual actions affected each other, and to develop the relational capacity the work demanded. 

In the integrated care engagement, relationships became stronger and more honest and participants were more able to engage constructively across organisational boundaries. 

In the Midlands engagement, Directors told us the programme made them look at their Directorate with fresh eyes and gave them an awareness of how intense emotions shape what unfolds — uncomfortable, they said, but in a necessary way. The effects were team building and healing.

Clients: NHS Trusts, England

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Building leadership inside a complex system 

Hertfordshire Adult Care Services wanted their people to work with greater autonomy, navigate complexity with confidence, and hold their own with the NHS. 

Over six years we worked with more than 500 participants across every level of the service — senior leaders, frontline practitioners, administrators and commissioners — in three interlocking programmes. We trained fifteen internal facilitators from within the organisation to run future cohorts themselves. 

The work is still running. The capacity to sustain it now lives inside Hertfordshire.

Client: Hertfordshire County Council, England

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Deep change

A garden, exhibition and educational space in London exploring food, ecology, creativity and climate resilience came to TIHR at a moment of significant transition. Its founder had attended the Leicester Conference — an experience that prompted a fundamental reappraisal of their own role and the organisation’s direction.

The work began with rhythm and task, using seasonal cycles as an entry point into how the team understood itself. It moved into intergroup work on relationships between different parts of the organisation, individual role analysis, and social dreaming. At the heart of it was a question that only honest inquiry could answer: how do you lead an organisation through transformation when you are also the one being transformed?

Client: NGO managing a garden, exhibition and educational space, London, England