This Food for Thought Lunchtime talk was a hybrid event taking place at the Tavistock Institute, and online via Zoom.

Over the last few decades, there has been an increased focus on how organisations can ‘improve’ creativity and innovation. This was particularly prevalent during the Covid19 pandemic as organisations had to be more and more creative in order to survive. However, there is often a limited exploration of the inter and intra-psychic factors that enable creativity to happen and the focus tends to be more on what happens once the creative thought has emerged.

During this lunchtime talk, Stephanie will share the findings of her doctoral research that focused on the development of individual creativity and its relevance to organisations and will invite participants to join in a playful space to consider their relationship with their own creativity, how this has developed and changed over time and how both individuals and organisations can create a space for creativity to happen.

Stephanie Davies is an executive coach and organisational development and design consultant, who has experience of working across multiple sectors – from small, charitable organisations working with children and young people who have experienced trauma, to tech start-ups, and global manufacturing and insurance companies. She has been a Group Relations Conference staff member, taught on degree and postgraduate programmes at The University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University and The University of the West of England, and has published work focusing on the practical application of psychoanalytic observations in work with children and young people.

Stephanie is passionate about helping organisations to better align to their purpose and has created a data-informed model for organisations that triangulates business performance, observational and people analytics to do so. Stephanie is particularly interested in the ways in which creativity develops for individuals, and how organisations can better enable creativity and innovation to happen. This was the focus of her doctoral research at The Tavistock and Portman and is now a core part of her consultancy approach.

Fun Fact: Stephanie has a love of all things Harry Potter and Lego based, especially Harry Potter Lego, and will use any excuse to shoe-horn both/either into my working day.