Juliet Scott’s Keynote in Finland

“We dealt with the archive not as a technical cataloguing exercise but as part of a wider and regulatory ecosystem, breathing new life into an organisation’s system.”

On Wednesday 13 November 2019, Juliet Scott, Principle Consultant and Artist in Residence, gave a keynote speech at the Minimalist Organizational Design (MODe) research seminar Who’s Afraid of Hierarchy? at Aalto University, Helsinki. The MODe project focuses on self-management and the kind of organisational models that make employees’ self-management possible.

Juliet’s paper, which is now available to read (a link to download is below), draws on the historical evidence of the Tavistock Institute’s Archive to illuminate questions of self-management and minimalism in organising.

Accompanied by a visual presentation of fragments and snippets from the archive, Juliet explores their ability to tell a powerful story about the social dynamics of self-organising groups. She postulates that through the archive, one can witness a transitional journey of what it is like to work with organisations in their changing context over time and, consequently, observe how the understanding of them has simultaneously changed and remained constant.

For Juliet, working so closely with the Tavistock Institute’s archive has generated a profound and deeper awareness of the Institute’s culture and its “aesthetic patterns” of symbolic practices. The archive, therefore, is not merely material rooted in its historical setting, but an unfolding organisational and social process.

You can download the PDF of Juliet’s talk here and discover more about the Tavistock Institute archive project.