Socio-technical systems design was the product of a group of social scientists who came together at the end of the second world war and formed the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. The Tavistock, or Tavi as it is colloquially known, was established in 1946 by this group, many of whom had collaborated in wartime projects and most of whom had been members of the Tavistock Clinic before the war. The Tavistock Clinic is a therapeutic establishment concerned with mental health and individual development and this was also the initial focus of the members of the Tavistock Institute, although they were applying their ideas to workers in industry.

Eric Trist, a founder member of the Institute, became aware of the influence of technology on people when he was working in the jute industry in Scotland in the late 1930's. He was a member of a small interdisciplinary team studying the unemployment that resulted from the jute industry being rationalized. He found that changes in technology were causing unemployment, deskilling and alienation: the technical and social systems were acting on each other in a negative way.

In 1949, the Tavistock Institute made its first major contribution to the theory of socio-technical design with a number of field projects in the British coal industry. These studies have now become classics and are widely taught in business schools throughout the world. The coal industry had recently changed its technology and mechanized its production system and the changes caused great stress among the workers. Morale was low and many miners suffered psychosomatic disorders. As the research progressed, the team recognised that the new technical systems had created and inferior and damaging form of social organisation. This let them to formulate one the the most important principles of socio-technical design:

If a technical system is created at the expense of a social system, the results obtained will be sub-optimal.

They decided that when work is being designed, the goal must always be the joint optimization of the social and technical systems.

This early research, together with many projects in Scandinavia and one in India, led to many of the work design principles which are proving useful and relevant today. By the sixties, the team had developed and published their ideas on:

• The concept of socio-technical systems
• Definition of organisations as open systems
• The principal of organisational choice - the need to optimise and bring together social and technical systems
• The importance of self-managing groups
• The problems of work alienation

As it developed, socio-technical design came to be associated with a clear ethical principle, which was to increase the ability of the individual to participate in decision taking and through this to exercise a degree of control over the immediate work environment. Managers were advised to tell work groups what to do but not how to do it. The latter would come from the knowledge, experience and skill of each work group. Ways of working might differ as each group decided on the approach that would enable it to produce an optimal high quality result.

This description of the history of socio-technical design is drawn from "Tools for change and progress" by Enid Mumford and Geert Jan Beekman. Further information about socio-technical design can be found in Enid Mumford's numerous publications.