Upcoming dates for:
Discovery session for Deepening Creative Practice
Re-designed for 2025, in a world that has become pervasively uncertain, this programme brings the arts to the fore. We invite practitioners to experiment with their personal authority and growth as leaders, change and transformation agents, activists and artists.
The programme is designed with innovative artistic and critical-creative methods alongside the experiential and applied social science approaches developed by the Tavistock Institute.
We will also consider concepts and approaches including socio-technical systems; role, power and authority; unconscious processes and social dreaming; foresight and scenario building.
Format
The fully in-person programme is designed to be accessible and agile and to mirror complex organisational spaces.
There are three seasons followed by an exhibiting season. Participants can choose to attend one, two or all of the seasons as well as a final and fourth exhibition season.
We are setting dates in consultation with interested participants and will publish them at the end of January 2025.
Fees
The programme will cost £4800 for all three seasons and the exhibiting season, or £1800 per season. Seasons may be mixed and matched.
Deepening Creative Practice
Three field-based seasons;
Four self-directed days in our London studio space
and with our archive at the Wellcome Library;
One final co-created exhibiting season.
Attend one, two or all of the seasons.
Who is it for?
The programme is for those working with change and transformation who want a space to engage in serious and radical experimentation to develop their own practice. Each iteration will generate a peer group of creative leaders and practitioners, situated in and influencing a powerful ecosystem of organisations.
Certification
Participants who successfully complete all of the three seasons as well as the exhibition season within three years will receive a Certificate of Achievement for artistic action research and organisational change. The programme will be certified by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
DCP has made me delve into my own creative practice and discover new facets of it; it made me consciously engage with the roles I take within a group and organisation; it made me struggle and it made me take risks.
Marie Beauchamps, writer and poet, The Netherlands
What might it look like?
We will be considering our leadership and organisational identities alongside activist, artistic and organisational practices.
Experiments will be underpinned by the latest case studies of the Tavistock Institute and informed by faculty members’ practice as research. Example explorations may include: still life as organisational phenomenon, psychophysical and use of self, human-centred AI through mixed-reality theatre and dance.
Themes
Each seasonal theme will have core Faculty members collaborating with commissioned artists operating across disciplines, which will include dance, visual arts, AI-driven technologies and digital media, archival practice and performance.
Themes will work at the intersection of seasonal, time-based qualities and artistic form and focus which illuminate different ‘ways of being’ within our organisational contexts.
The following are example themes for 2025:
Spring, bubbling up, burgeoning, awakening: sculpting, drawing and design-thinking to lead into the exploration of objects, artefacts and the material culture of organisations.
Summer, growth, flowering, fecundity and power: theatre, role, performance and agency to illuminate different understandings of socio-technical systems including AI.
Autumn, liminality, composting: scores and choreography, improvisation, and movement in space to harvest and collect thoughts and expressions as we move between worlds.
Winter, hibernation, transformation: archival exploration to bridge past and future, working with paradox, experimental design, memory and foresight.
The Journey
The vision for Deepening Creative Practice has always been to situate it as a dynamic container for the wider socially oriented arts practices at the Institute. We try to resist the pull to linearity of learning programmes where certain inputs are expected to lead to certain outputs. We tend to approach our own learning as causal when we know this is far from the reality of organisational life.
Rather than outcomes, we might suggest delving into the richness and complexity of all that organisational life offers — some of which will be challenging.
DCP has given me new perspectives, thoughts, inspirations. Not only for my artistic interests but also a fresh perspective for my professional work.
Emin Birsel, European Director, Pladis Global
Instead of prescribing what you will get out of the programme, we invite you to imagine what could possibly emerge from each of the seasons, within their societal, global and organisational context.
You will be the architect of your learning, and we will challenge you in finding a mind of your own in this regard.
The invitation
Deepening Creative Practice participants will be invited to:
- Challenge oneself and each other to find alternative perspectives and try out new approaches;
- Free oneself from feeling or being stuck and from identities that may no longer be of service;
- Experiment with an aesthetic sensibility to design and change in organisations;
- Explore new modes of expression for the difficult and sometimes intractable problems that relate to organisations and wider society;
- Make space for thinking differently, breaking moulded habits and petrified behaviours;
- Participate in explicit and sensitive crafting of a suitable container for the work to unfold into.
What might emerge?
An increase in your ability to address complex organisational and societal issues inventively, ethically and imaginatively;
A new repertoire and language of creative leadership. This might involve curating/caring; archiving; choreographing; conserving; exhibiting; presencing; embodying your role(s) with intention.
A new relationship with the performative and theatrical side of yourselves to enable you to share your practice in the public domain.
Why engage with us at the Tavistock Institute and why now?
The Tavistock Institute has worked in a trans-disciplinary way since its inception. As experts in working with the unknown, we are precisely the right people to lead this unique programme and support you in your deep exploration.
For over 75 years, we have blended cutting-edge research with practical applications to help individuals and organisations navigate complexity, change, and human dynamics. We consider the whole system, applying social science methods to address research questions that are urgent and demand attention.
The Tavistock Institute has pioneered internationally recognised creative, psychoanalytic and systems approaches to respond to organisational and societal challenges.
Come and play (seriously) with us, and equip yourself for the unfolding and unpredictable challenges of the immediate future.
Since doing DCP I stepped back into my role as a Head of Community Service in the NHS with a commitment to embrace the DCP awakened version of myself and apply my learning. Over the past year the most significant work that has impacted on my teams and the delivery of services has involved collage and textiles, music, dance and movement, singing, spoken and written word — at the core of all of these activities has been the shared connection of breathing exercises — ‘we breath the same air’ .
It feels as if this ‘stripped back connection of humans’ has unleashed something very powerful in a mechanized system....
Bernadette Kennedy, artist and creative facilitator and former NHS Clinician
Next Steps
We welcome expressions of interest.
Dates to be confirmed at end of January 2025 after consultation with interested participants.
Please contact us if you have questions or would like to speak to one of the programme faculty: email Hafija Bibi at h.bibi@tavinstitute.org
We welcome conversations and your ideas, thoughts and dreams about the programme. Discounts and bursaries are available.
Venue
Programme Director
Programme faculty
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Get in touch
If you have any questions and/or would like a conversation with one of the directors about this programme, please fill in the form below and Meg Davies will get back to you.
Upcoming dates for:
Discovery session for Deepening Creative Practice
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