Please note we are not taking applications for this programme currently. Please contact Meg Davies, Professional Development Manager, if you would like to find out more. 

Are you looking for advanced help with your complex consultative projects? Are you interested in working with experienced practitioners to share your understanding of what is happening between you and your client and identify key learnings for current and future interventions?

Organisational Consultancy: Working with Dynamics presents a group opportunity with experienced organisational development and change consultants to develop advanced skills in the application of Tavistock Institute systems psychodynamics approaches to their consultancy practice.

This learning programme is deeply embedded in the Institute’s professional activities. It is informed by the skills, knowledge and experience of our staff, partners and associates who together have worked in professional development & consultancy/research & evaluation over the past 75+ years.

The value of taking Organisational Consultancy: Working with Dynamics

The objective of the reflective seminars is to deepen your skills as a systems psychodynamics organisational development and change consultant.  Our approach is to provide opportunities for deep and holistic learning that focuses on principles, links and meaning, and tolerance of uncertainty. Together with the participants as active explorers, the programme will provide opportunities to:

• discuss actual consultation dilemmas faced by you as an organisational development and change consultant
• examine the roles you are unwittingly ‘invited into’ by the system and how task-orientated or anti-task they might be
• problem-solve, plan and collaborate on consultation issues and dilemmas
• bring aspects of your consultative practice that you are curious about and want new ideas around how to work on them
• achieve the capacity and ability to work with dynamic process issues at micro, mesa and macro level contexts within systems
• work with an empowering group of advanced practitioners to share and learn from our collective understandings of what happens between consultant and client system
• identify key learnings for future interventions
• develop the capacity for reflection 
• understand the emotional experience of task-related work so that these can be better understood and mastered
• examine how individuals and teams debate, communicate and behave, sometimes unconsciously, within the organisation in ways that help or hinder the work of the organisation

Who is this for?

You may be working in a training and development context in which you provide both formal and informal consultation. You may work in human resources from which you provide change and catalytic process to systems, or you may be self-employed as an organisational and development consultant, coach or mentor.

Applicants will already be familiar with and experienced in working with systems psychodynamics approaches in organisational development and change consultancy. Applicants will be graduates of the following Tavistock Institutes formal training programmes or the equivalent level programme of another similar institution:

• Organisational Consultancy: Working with Dynamics (OCWD)
• Deepening Learning Group or Training Group in a Leicester conference
• Practitioner Certificate in Consulting & Change
• Certificate in Dynamics @ Board Level
• Certificate in Coaching for Leadership
• Supervision for Coaching & Consultancy
• Advanced Organisational Consultancy (AOC)

By virtue of your previous attendance at one or more Tavistock Institute certificated programmes and/or the Leicester conference advanced group, you are likely to have a strong background in systems psychodynamics approaches in the practice of organisational development and change. 

This programme has up to 10 places.

Programme directors

Design how we will work

The series comprises 6 Modules. Module 1 will be one and half days. Modules 25 will be one day. Module 6 will be one and half days. The seminars are offered in hybrid form, with participants able to attend both in-person at our London Office and online (via zoom). 

The first module will comprise introductions, expectations, and examination of the learning needs of the participants, practice-based small group sessions and opportunities for sharing and discussing consultancy dilemmas.

Learning methods in the modules will include:

• Practice: The presentation of your consultancy practice in small groups to deepen your learning and the application of advanced systems psychodynamics theory and practice.
• Experiential events such as small study groups, inter-group events, social dreaming matrices, sensing walks and regular reviews of each event in the seminars as the programme progresses.
• Theories: Discussion on your understanding and the application of systems psychodynamics theories and approaches you have learned in your previous Tavistock programmes to your consultancy work, such as: open systems, socio-technical systems design, socio-ecological, socio-psychological; large and small group dynamics and general application of psychoanalytic theory to individuals, groups, organisations and environments; the relevance of group relations theory to your consultancy design
• Consultancy Design: An exploration of your consultancy designs and interventions
• Group Membership: The empowering experience of group membership for receiving in-depth constructive feedback from supportive colleagues on your taking of a role and your practice as a consultant.
• Writing: Discussions on writing proposals, interim Working Notes and final reports and writing for publication on organisational consultancy

Building on the Tavistock tradition of self-regulation and semi-autonomous work groups, the seminars, through reflective practice, will facilitate participants involvement in both the presentation and assessment of the material.  In order to facilitate the deepening of consultancy skills, the programme will build a challenging and supportive culture. The cohort will be encouraged to reflect on its learning and thereby develop its work.

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Venue

Modules will take place at the Institute offices in London. Situated between Farringdon, Barbican and Old Street, we moved into our office at Gee Street in mid-2021. Our office is a bright and flexible space, with a state-of-the-art video conference system set up to accommodate both in-person and online learning, and in hybrid. We have a fully stocked kitchen, board room, consulting rooms and studio space for larger groups and movement. For those joining online, we use Zoom. 

Certificate

A Tavistock Institute Certificate of Attendance can be provided for CPD purposes.

During the programme and afterwards

Basecamp is our virtual hub where each programme cohort has their own private space for nurturing deeper connections between seminars. Basecamp also hosts the Tavistock Community, a place for alumni to connect with others, continue their learning, exchange ideas, to develop practice, expand learning and carry on or begin working together, all underpinned by Tavistock methodologies.

Participants in the series of seminars in organisational consultancy in any given year will be able to retain an on-going membership of the reflective seminars in subsequent years, if they wish.    Those wishing to retain on-going membership will be eligible for a 30% discount.

Next steps

To join this programme please complete the online application form and pay the deposit. All applicants will be interviewed by one of the programme directors by telephone or video prior to joining. The purpose of this conversation is for them to hear more about you; for you to hear more about the programme, and together to decide whether this is the right programme for you at this time.

If you have any questions and/or would like a conversation about the programme with one of the directors, please contact Meg Davies, Professional Development Manager at: m.davies@tavinstitute.org