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Our History

6 Decades of The Tavistock Institute


The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was formally founded as a registered charity in September 1947. In our early work we brought together staff from different disciplines to find ways to apply psychoanalytic and open systems concepts to group and organisational life.

Pioneering approaches

Action research became a key element in the way we work with industry and business. Through these collaborations our team developed new participative approaches to organisation change and development. These include:

  • socio-technical systems design to help clients grapple with the emerging changes in the organisation’s context, encompassing job-, work- and organisation design for joint optimisation of both technical and psycho-social resources. This was initially developed through collaboration in English coalmines (Trist & Bamforth, 1951) and Indian textile mills (Rice & Miller, 1953)
  • culture change and organisation development, originally developed in heavy industry (Jacques on Glacier Metal Company) but with broad applications
  • organisational responses to environmental turbulence (Emery & Trist, 1963)
  • understanding of how unconscious processes work in organisational life, enacted, for example, through social defences against anxiety (Jacques, Menzies Lyth, 1970), and education in how to work with these processes through group relations events (Rice) with global spin-offs
  • diffusion of participative design and organisational culture into industrial democracy (Heller) and Quality of Working Life movements
  • community setting applications of participative design through search conferences (Emery)
  • using operations research to developing strategic choice for networks of groups and organisations (Friend, 1987)
  • evaluation and applied research studies of learning through programmatic change and innovation (Stern)
  • organisation and interorganisation design consultancy to change and innovation, for example, supply chain management in the construction industry (Holti, 1997)
  • Consultancy education in organisational theory, consultancy competence and systems psychodynamics (Neumann, 1997)

Most of the earlier references here can be found in the three volumes of the Tavistock anthologies, The Social Engagement of Social Science edited by Trist & Murray, at http://moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/archives.html