Most leadership teams stall for reasons that are invisible to the people inside them. The Tavistock Institute has been mapping these reasons for more than seventy years. The teams that learn to see themselves through this lens stop relitigating the same problems.

The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was founded in London in 1947. Over the seven decades since, it has produced the most rigorous body of work in existence on how groups behave when given a task and the authority to complete it. Its core insight, distilled, is uncomfortable for senior leaders.

A group is not a collection of individuals. It is a system. And the system itself has behaviours that the individuals inside it cannot see, because they are part of what is producing the behaviour.

What this means for an executive team

Most senior leaders, when they describe a problem with their leadership team, name individuals. "The COO is too defensive." "The CFO is not strategic enough." "The CEO doesn't make space for the rest of us."

These descriptions are usually accurate at the individual level. They are also incomplete. The COO is defensive in this team in ways the same person was not defensive on previous teams. The CFO is not strategic in this team in ways the same person was strategic before. The CEO holds tightly in this team in ways that were not necessary in earlier roles.

The system is producing the behaviour as much as the person is. Take the same individuals, put them in a different group, and the patterns shift.

This is not a softening of accountability. It is a more precise version of it. The work to change a stalled leadership team has to address both the individual behaviours and the system that is reinforcing them.

The four group-level patterns we see most often

Group relations work names many group-level dynamics. Four show up consistently in senior teams running Saudi enterprises.

1. The dependency pattern

The team has organised itself around the assumption that the CEO will provide the answer. Senior leaders who are perfectly capable of independent thought, on this team, defer reflexively. Decisions cannot land without the CEO's explicit blessing, which exhausts the CEO and infantilises the rest of the room.

The CEO often sees this and complains about it. They rarely see that they are participating in the pattern by accepting the role of provider. The pattern is mutual.

2. The fight-flight pattern

The team has organised itself around an external enemy or an internal scapegoat. Energy in the room is high, but it is energy directed against something rather than energy directed toward the actual work. Every meeting has a villain. The team performs unity by aligning against whoever is in the seat that day. Real work moves slowly because it is not where the attention is.

This pattern is particularly common in transformation contexts, where the team has, often unconsciously, decided that the previous leadership, the regulator, the parent company, or "the legacy culture" is the obstacle. As long as they remain the obstacle, the team does not have to confront its own internal patterns.

3. The pairing pattern

The team has organised itself around the hope of a future solution that has not yet arrived. The new strategy. The next CFO. The transformation programme. The market shift. As long as the team is waiting for the future to solve the problem, it does not have to do the harder work of changing how it operates today.

Senior leaders are particularly susceptible to this. Every senior team has access to enough optionality that the next move can always be invoked as the answer. The current move rarely is.

4. The valency pattern

Each member of a team has, in Tavistock language, a "valency" for certain group-level roles. Some leaders have a valency for taking the burden. Others for representing dissent. Others for holding optimism. Others for naming what is uncomfortable. The team unconsciously recruits members into these roles regardless of what they were hired to do.

The Chief Compliance Officer becomes the team conscience whether or not that is their function. The most junior member becomes the truth-teller because no one with seniority can afford to. The CFO becomes the brake, the COO becomes the engine, regardless of whether the company actually needs them in those positions.

Once these valencies are visible, the team can choose. Until they are visible, the team is just operating on them.

Why this matters specifically for senior Saudi teams

Three observations from running Tavistock-informed team coaching across the Kingdom.

Hierarchy concentrates the dependency pattern. Saudi executive teams often default into dependency around the CEO more readily than peer teams in flatter cultures. The pattern is not unbreakable, but it has more gravitational pull and the work to interrupt it has to be more deliberate.

Family-influenced teams have an additional layer. In family businesses, the group system includes family roles alongside the operational ones. The CEO who is also the eldest son holds a different role inside the team than a non-family CEO would. Mapping the family system alongside the operational system is part of the work.

Vision 2030 transformations create heavy pairing patterns. Many Saudi senior teams are in semi-permanent waiting for the transformation to mature, the regulator to clarify, or the next strategic phase to begin. Pairing patterns flourish here. Naming them productively is one of the highest-leverage moves a coach can make in this context.

What this looks like in practice

Inside team coaching engagements at SEC, this body of work shows up in three concrete ways.

The coach observes the team in real meetings, looking for system-level patterns rather than individual behaviours.

The coach names the patterns back to the team in plain language, with examples from the meeting that just happened, so the team learns to see itself as a system.

The coach helps the team build agreements that interrupt the patterns. Not "be less reactive," which targets individuals. But "we will not allow a decision to be deferred to the CEO unless we have explicitly named that we are doing so," which targets the system.

These agreements feel mechanical. They are. The system that produced the patterns will pull the team back toward them constantly. The discipline is in the cadence, not the inspiration.

The bottom line

Senior teams that keep relitigating the same problems are not failing because the people on them are not capable. They are failing because they have not yet learned to see themselves as a system. Once they do, problems that have been recurring for two years often resolve in a quarter.

The Tavistock body of work is rigorous, well-documented, and unusually well-suited to the senior team context. Saudi enterprises have started to engage with it more seriously over the past five years. The leaders who get there first will have a genuine advantage.

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FAQ

What is the Tavistock Institute? The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, founded in London in 1947, is a research body that has produced the foundational work on group dynamics, organisational behaviour, and systems-informed leadership development. Its methods are widely used in senior team coaching globally.

What is a Group Relations Conference? The Group Relations Conference is an immersive learning experience pioneered by the Tavistock tradition that allows senior leaders to study group-level dynamics in real time, including the patterns that block their own teams from performing.

Is Tavistock-informed coaching available in Saudi Arabia? Yes. Abdulelah Alhadidi, Co-Founder of Saudi Executive Coaching, is a Tavistock Institute Group Relations alumnus and integrates this body of work into senior team coaching engagements across the Kingdom and the GCC.