Collective intelligence does not arise by itself when people of good will are brought together: it depends on the frame, the rules and the way the group is led. Drawing on Elinor Ostrom’s work on self-organisation, Marion Carrel’s work on participation, and my own workshop practice, I propose four principles: rules made by the group, craft-like facilitation, a common object to make, and a place prepared for the unexpected.
Rules made by the people they concern
The economist Elinor Ostrom spent decades studying communities that durably manage common resources, pastures, irrigation systems, fishing grounds (Governing the Commons, 1990). Against the fatalism of the “tragedy of the commons”, which predicts that every shared good ends up plundered, she established that self-organisation succeeds, and succeeds according to identifiable principles: clear boundaries, rules adjusted to local conditions, monitoring carried out by the members themselves, low-cost conflict-resolution mechanisms, and above all the participation of the people concerned in making and changing the rules. This last principle is the most directly transposable to collective settings: a group holds to the rules it has made, and endures the ones delivered to it ready-made. Even a one-day workshop can begin with the joint drafting of a few working rules, and this apparently wasted time changes the nature of everything that follows.
Craft-like facilitation
The sociologist Marion Carrel observed what becomes of the injunction to participate in working-class neighbourhoods (Faire participer les habitants ?, ENS Éditions, 2013). Her finding is that proclaimed participation often produces a façade of participation, in which residents validate decisions already taken, and that real participation requires precise conditions: time, third parties who facilitate, demanding methods. She speaks of a craft of participation, and the word seems right to me. Facilitating is not remaining neutral, for neutrality lets the ordinary asymmetries run their course, the ones that give the floor to the most educated, the most at ease, the meeting regulars. The craft consists in working on these asymmetries through the setting itself: small groups, speaking turns, going through writing or making rather than verbal jousting, attention to silences.
A common object to make
The heart of my method lies in a displacement: replacing the confrontation of opinions with the cooperation of gestures. When a group debates, each person defends a position and the asymmetries of language prevail. When a group makes something, an animated film, a map of the territory, a collective story, positions become contributions, and materiality equalises: in front of paper and scissors, no one is an expert. I described how this works in the workshops on the imaginary of disasters (Create your own film about imaginary disasters) and its effect on psychosocial skills in the article When thirty-five professionals discover their psychosocial skills through creative experience. The object made has one last virtue: it can be shown. The public presentation, screening, exhibition, publication online, turns the group’s speech into an act addressed to the territory, and this address is the properly political moment of the setting. The quality of listening that prevailed during the making can be read in the works produced, and the audience perceives it.
A place prepared for the unexpected
A setting designed to prepare for crises would be incoherent if it collapsed at the first disturbance. I proposed in the article Presence in the Unexpected the notion of grafting the unexpected: preparing the ground so that the accident, the absence, the breakdown can be welcomed as materials rather than endured as failures. Concretely, this calls for rules that are simple and few, so that they survive upheavals in the programme, redundant roles, so that one person’s departure blocks nothing, and margins of time, which are margins of freedom. The setting then teaches, through its very form, the relationship to uncertainty it seeks to pass on: participants experience a frame that holds through fluctuations, and this lived experience is worth all the speeches.
These principles fit on one page, and that is deliberate. I document them publicly so that anyone who leads groups, in the cultural, social, educational or care fields, can take them up, adapt them and pass them on in turn.
