The arts and creativity are encoded into the DNA of the Tavistock Institute, helping us find ways to explore complexity, support change, and deepen understanding. Integral to much of our applied research and consulting, artistic practice and creativity help to surface what is often hard to name: emotion, uncertainty, power and the unspoken dynamics that shape organisations and systems. 

Ambiguity and complexity

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—it invites reflection, imagination, and emotional resonance. It helps people see their work and their systems , and opens up 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 can increase productivity and the quality of work life. 

Curating the arts and creativity across our work 

Tavistock Institute arts and creative practices are curated and directed by artist-in-residence Juliet Scott. Activities include residencies, 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. 

About artist-in-residence Juliet Scott

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Artistic Affluence and Social Dreaming : This exhibition with Korean artist Bongsu Park 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 a radical exercise in sharing, associating to and working with dreams. 

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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 is a professional development programme, with Juliet Scott, Annja Neumann and a community  of artists and creative practitioners. On the programme, we combine artistic methods with Tavistock’s traditions of systems thinking, group dynamics, and psychodynamic insight. 

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Over three cohorts so far, participants have worked together with Tavistock faculty and artists to co-create a public exhibit exploring organisational and social challenges of our time through artistic and other creative practices. 

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.

3. Creative Artistic Social Science in Action Projects and Labs 

We use creative methods in applied research and community-based projects. 

Examples: 

• PARCS Grows Everybody: An intergenerational oral history and storytelling project with a Portsmouth-based rape crisis service. 

• Creative Digital Futures Lab: A space to explore how we relate to technology through artistic inquiry, including mixed reality performance engaging with AI governance (including ethics), AI intergration 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. 

4. Archive and Performance-Based Projects 

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. 

Examples: 

• 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.

• Exploration of embodied methods of inquiry in relation to the Institute’s archive: 
  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. Conducted in partnership with Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research and supported by the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, this work explores how archival materials can be activated through choreographic thinking and somatic practices.

5. Growing partnerships with artists, arts organsiations and collectives. 

These are fertile edgelands to the Institute’s work where news knowledges and practices are emerging such Australian artist Simone Kennedy’s psychoanalytically informed work around the mother; explorations in sensory approaches to equitalbe evaluation with Rebecca Swift and artists at Entelechy Arts; innovations and evolutions to Social Dreaming with Bongsu Park and Marie Beauchamp and Transformation Bodies with the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University and many more. 

6. The Organizational Aesthetics Journal  and the Art of Management and Organisation Biennial Conference 

More recently the Institute has taken on the Organizational Aesthetics Journal whose aim is to provide a place and space to publish where aesthetics concerns are central and aim to upend the dominance of dominant and instrumental modalities. This partnership emerged out the Art of Management and Organisation Biennial Conference where Juliet Scott and Antonio Sama have convened streams. 

What We’re Learning 

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. 

Why It Matters 

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.