Deepening consulting practice at the Tavistock Institute.
The ‘P’ in P3C stands for Practitioner and we encourage those interested in joining the programme to see their participation as a unique opportunity to develop and deepen their own consultancy practice. In this series of short articles leading up to the 2018 cohort, programme faculty are sharing their personal take on this mysterious word practice, what it means to them in the context of their own work with organisations and their different offers to the P3C programme.
Coming to work at the Tavistock Institute was a serendipitous encounter for me, my background was in the visual arts and through attending a Group Relations conference in 2009 I began to make connections between my art and the multi-disciplinary social science of the Tavistock Institute. I was encouraged by colleagues to explore this relationship and my subsequent enquiry has been a rich and diverse one leading to my very current preoccupation as Director of the Institute’s 70th anniversary Festival in October.
Important to me in my development as an arts based Organisational Development consultant was that while there are some very useful tools that we use in our practice, I was never handed a standardised toolkit. The Tavistock toolkit a was an artful one and came through learning about myself in relation to a group or organisation; addressing questions of my own and others’ authority and power: encountering new ways of looking at an organisation: taking risks; experimenting with what I had to offer and how I offered it. This is what I would call practice, the continual learning through doing from which patterns form even an emerging landscape.
In this way I was able to begin to craft my own consultancy practice and see my work with the Tavistock Institute’s archive as much more than a project but as a deep and meaningful programme of work. The process to make the archive available had the potential to support a process of change at the Institute itself so that all of us practitioners could move to standing on the shoulders of giants instead of being overshadowed by them. My practice had taken me to the point where I have taken on the complex dynamics continually present in working with history, responded in creative and imaginative ways resulting in a piece of work that even included my artist-in-residency on the archive.
The creative thread now runs throughout the P3C programme and we are continually working on new connections and synergies to further enrich the role of the creative arts in consultancy practice.
This programme has now become a market-leader for consultants wishing to deepen their understanding of consultancy practice, using Tavistock methodologies. If you wish to fundamentally develop your competence and experience AND meet people who can become part of your own supportive peer community, join us on P3C.
Juliet Scott, TIHR Principal Consultant/70th Festival Director/Business Development Manager.