Principal Researcher / Consultant

Fiddy Abraham BA, MA

My work at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) helps individuals, groups, organisations and groups of organisations improve their understanding and skills for developing structures and cultures which support well-being and performance.

My work focuses mainly on three areas:

• consultancy to address difficult issues within and across organizations and teach them to use these as a source of strength;
• support to service delivery, especially within social care and to marginalized groups, working with service users, staff, management and policy actors;
• collaboration with public, voluntary and community and private sector clients in organization and interorganisational design.

I work out of a broad range of social science approaches, using discourse analysis, conversational enquiry and narratives. This builds on my original discipline of political science and traditional TIHR approaches such as socio-technical systems thinking and the psychodynamics of systems. Depending on your needs, I use a variety of methods to support collaboration internally and externally.

I focus on the needs of clients in consultancy and evaluation assignments, as a consultant to organizations for over thirty years and a founder member of the TIHR evaluation unit in the 1990s. I joined the Institute in 1976 and deliver assignments in consultancy, action research and formative evaluation, having begun with an action research programme in a merchant fleet, supporting the development of communities on board ships and the re-organisation of back-office functions. As a specialist in designing and delivering educational events, I regularly draw on this expertise to teach to Masters level in organization related courses, as well as for the TIHR own programmes.

Current and recent assignments include supporting:

• Collaboration and partnership between local statutory and voluntary partners
• Public sector organizations in crisis, for example facing significant job losses and incremental closure
• An international voluntary sector federation developing organizational norms and procedures for its members
• Developing ethical decision making within a European organization