Juliet Scott

My work at The Tavistock Institute involves cross-disciplinary working between the visual arts and social science.

As the Director of our newest area of practice, Art and Organisation, my work at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) means moving amongst the visual, performing, embodying arts and social science; an inter-disciplinary role that involves working (psycho)dynamically from within to outside the organisation to open up spaces for conversations of arts and culture at work. As part of that, I am pleased to be launching and co-leading with Heather Stradling the new programme Deepening Creative Practice, which transcends boundaries of art and science and weaves them together in search of new ways of interacting and intervening in and with organisations.

In my consulting practice, I offer arts-based organisational and professional development interventions exploring the role of the artist as a societal change agent. I work with concepts and methodologies from the arts, researching around questions of design, aesthetics, new objects and the meaning of space and place.

As Business Curator, I am responsible for the new work generation activities at the TIHR, influence and shape the institute’s strategy and oversee and contribute to the development of innovative research, evaluation and organisational development projects, in which we apply methods and approaches that promote new knowledge and learning for those with whom we work and for the benefit of society.

I was the director of the Institute’s 70th-anniversary festival in 2017: ‘Reimagining Human Relations in our Time’. A four-day festival that boldly experimented with integrating the arts and social science through performance, poetry readings, exhibition and film-making workshops.

My background is in organisational change and development as well as the visual arts where the focus of my practice is Still Life: the representation of groups of objects in different forms, scales, relationships, states of recognition and predominance. My studio is at Bainbridge Printmaking in Elephant and Castle, London.

Recent professional development and consultancy projects include:

• A cultural diagnostic for Devon and Cornwall and Dorset police forces
• Design and delivery of leadership development programmes and community building for multiple organisations including Kings College, London; the Cabinet Office; The Solstrand leadership programme, Norway; NHS Wales; The Metanoia Institute, Finland; Walworth Garden Farm and the Roma Support Group, in London.
• Content development using video animation and consultancy support on the EU funded Improving School Governance Using an Action Learning Approach (IGUANA).
• Leading on creative storytelling about TIHR projects e.g. Emergent – using an animation showing the findings of an EU study on the use of social media in emergencies.
• ‘Data Overload and Even Blacker Boxes’, a workshop for practitioners relating images and data to contemporary organizations, initially offered to colleagues at Tavistock Consulting at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust.
• Designscapes – providing an organisational and capacity building perspective as part of the Institute’s evaluation role in a Horizon2020 project supporting Design Enabled Innovation in the urban environment.
• Public Engagement and Dissemination
• Opening the TIHR Archive; an ongoing programme in partnership with the Wellcome Library and Canterbury Christ Church Business School, curating a socio-cultural and historical record of the Tavistock Institute’s contribution to social change that includes innovative public engagement work such as the ‘out loud’ project blog; social dreaming matrices and reenactments of the archive material.
• Art at Work in the Evolution of Trans-disciplinary practice in the Tavistock Tradition: an experiential learning professional development workshop at the 79th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
• The Liver in Bed Two – commissioning of a performance at Wellcome Collection by East 15 Acting that looked at TIHR’s contribution to health systems in the NHS’s 70th anniversary year.
• Opening the Tavistock Institute’s Archives: Dialogue between Past and Present. A symposium exploring customisation and innovation of contemporary organisational practice at the TIHR at the 78th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management 2018 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
• Director of Reimagining Human Relations in our Time. A four-day, multi-venue multi-event festival celebrating 70 years of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations its past, present and future work. Including a symposium, participatory performances animating the TIHR archive and various workshops.
• Curating four series of Social Dreaming Matrices at Wellcome Collection.
• Light of My Life a study of group processes and dynamics as experienced through a group relations conference in Israel published in the journal of the Israeli Association of the Study of Group and Organisational Process (OFEK) (January 2010) and the OPUS (Organisation Promoting Understanding of Society) Journal, Spring 2011.
• Curating TIHR Food for Thought Lunchtime talk series – now in its tenth year, this has brought together a global audience that collectivize around the Institute’s work.