Arts practices offer additional ways of knowing that support working with complex change processes, and deepen understanding.
The arts in the numerous forms we work with them (performance, visual and literature) help in bringing expression to difficult emotions, uncertainty, power and the unspoken dynamics that shape organisations and systems.
A different kind of access
Much of our work deals with ambiguity and relational complexity. Traditional research and consultancy methods often struggle to engage with these dimensions.
Artistic practice offers a different kind of access— often sensory and embodied, it invites reflection, imagination, and emotional resonance, offering alternative insights into work and organisational systems and space for new possibilities.
More fundamentally, artistic practice makes the systems we work in real. It situates us and helps to contain tensions safely. In times when virtual interactions and digital technologies are becoming more pervasive than ever, sensory practices are vital and to our work in improving the quality of work life.
Connecting art and social science
Our arts and creative practices are curated and directed by artist-in-residence Juliet Scott.
The work includes residencies, curated exhibitions, and collaborative inquiry.
Bringing artists into dialogue with social scientists, practitioners, and organisations, the work has generated a community of artists-in-organisations and acts as an expansive container for a wide range of arts and creativity practices and programmes.
Artistic Affluence and Social Dreaming : This exhibition with Korean artist Bongsu Park, Juliet Scott and DCP Alumnus Marie Beauchamp critically explored the generative and performative nature of dreaming. The show connected artistic responses with the theory and practice of Social Dreaming. It was a radical exercise in sharing, associating to and working with dreams.
Sentient Excavations: This show explored artistic responses to the archive. It was a collaboration with Simone Kennedy, curated by Maria Markiewicz.
Deepening Creative Practice with organisations
This inventive and exhilarating professional development programme is open for applications, with Juliet Scott, Annja Neumann and a community of artists and creative practitioners.
DCP combines artistic methods with Tavistock’s traditions of systems thinking, group dynamics, and psychodynamic insight.
Three cohorts of Deepening Creative Practice participants have worked together with Tavistock faculty and artists to co-create public exhibits exploring organisational and social challenges of our time through artistic and other creative practices.
In 2021 OPEN: a radically unpolished magazine that captured the intersection between different kinds of knowledges – including organisation development, deep listening, bodywork and attunement – and paid attention to the scripts, both acknowledged and accidental – which inform our everyday practice.
2022 Womanifesto: an immersive performance full of tension, potential disintegration and creativity. Hybridity and identity featured, amidst some expression of the dynamics and process of co-creation.
2024 Kurat: a film written and realised by the cohort that stumbled around the slippery pivot between death and new life, exploring the comical and surreal aspects of being in a group.
creative / artistic / social / scientific
We use creative methods in applied research and community-based projects.
PARCS Grows Everybody Installation at Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth
PARCS Grows Everybody: An intergenerational oral history and storytelling project with a Portsmouth-based rape crisis service.
Creative Digital Futures Lab: This innovation space explores how we relate to technology through artistic inquiry, including mixed reality performance engaging with AI governance (including ethics), AI integration into organisations, Human-AI partnerships, digital futures, and organisational aesthetics in public and participatory ways.
Living exhibitions: Evolving installations in our office space that reflect ongoing inquiry and dialogue.
Archive and performance
Our archive is not just a repository—it’s a living document . We use it to inspire new work and connect past and present through performance, movement, and embodied inquiry.
Image Credit: Heni Hale
Still from Assembly – video artwork – featuring dance artists Ben Ash and Marina Collard and papers from Automation project 1959-61.
Re-Imagining Human Relations in Our Time (2017): A festival marking our 70th anniversary, where archival material was brought to life through dance, dramatic readings, and participatory performance.
The Liver in Bed Two: a participatory performance staged by E15 Acting School at Wellcome Collection which brought to life seminal work by Isabel Menzies Lyth about how she discovered ‘social defences’ in students training to be nurses in hospitals in the 1950s.
Faust Shop: Discover your artificial double, mixed-reality performance exploring the Faustian pacts we make with digital technology. BGSU Visit, July 2025.
Encountering our archive materials through artistic practice-as-research: Performance-researcher Heni Hale is leading a practice-based research programme that investigates how movement, sensory attention, and embodied experience can be used to engage with the Tavistock Institute’s archive. With Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research and the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.
Partnerships
These are fertile edgelands to the Institute’s work where new knowledge and new practices are emerging with artists, arts organisations and collectives.
Bowling Green State University: an annual fixture and highlight where graduating Organisational Development and Change doctoral students visit the Institute for a programme which centres the arts.
The Mother: Australian artist Simone Kennedy’s psychoanalytically informed work around the mother;
Equitable evaluation: explorations in sensory approaches to equitable evaluation with Rebecca Swift and artists at Entelechy Arts;
Innovation and evolution: Social Dreaming with Bongsu Park and Marie Beauchamp and Transformation Bodies with the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University.
Journal: The Organizational Aesthetics Journal aims to provide a place and space to publish where aesthetics concerns are central and upend the dominance of dominant and instrumental modalities.
This partnership emerged out of the Art of Management and Organisation Biennial Conference where Juliet Scott and Antonio Sama have convened streams.
Creative practice is a way of being in the world
Creative practice helps us:
- Work with complexity without rushing to simplify.
- Surface emotional and relational dynamics that shape systems.
- Create spaces where people can reflect, imagine, and act differently.
It also challenges us. It asks us to slow down, to stay with discomfort, and to be open to not knowing. In that sense, it’s not just a method—it’s a way of being in the world.
In a world that often values speed, certainty, and control, the arts offer something different: space to reflect, to feel, and to imagine. Our arts and creativity work helps people and organisations stay with the questions that matter—and find new ways forward.
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