Potential development space

The potential development space is a method of collective innovation based on intuitive encounters, without predefined objectives, where mutual trust allows the unexpected and renewal to emerge.

How to bring about the unexpected?

How do we develop new ideas, make room for innovation? How do we bring people together so that, in a free, surprising, and disruptive way, new paradigms of thought, action, ideas, or methods can emerge? This is essential for renewal, which is indispensable in all fields of activity.

We know that sometimes, no matter the work environment, we need to radically evolve certain aspects of our work, our proposals, our methods, or our subjects. These shifts allow us to pivot in the right direction, stay ahead of our time, and fully exercise our prerogatives. For example, if the goal is to build cultural proposals that serve citizens, contributing to the emergence of new and enriching futures.

The first step is to assess the possibility of our need for this type of approach. It’s particularly destabilizing and therefore requires great self-confidence, as well as a solid grounding in our social and symbolic roles. If we feel symbolically threatened or in competition with others, we’re more likely to reflexively secure our positions. And then, it becomes difficult to innovate—to think outside the box and enrich our living space with those externalities, those alterities we need to stay alive.

Being grounded to allow for destabilization

The starting point, for an individual or a group, is to ensure that in this potential development space, the participants do not feel threatened in their deep grounding. That is, they can imagine their own reality being completely transformed without fear. This requires bonds of trust between participants.

Why? Because if we want to welcome profound changes, the only stable element is precisely the bonds that will remain. A human bond, if deep, is malleable, adaptable. True grounding lies in connections, in people’s ability to feel and mutually express the depth of their relationships, even as circumstances change.

Once these prerequisites are established, here’s a proposal for creating a potential development space within a group—a space that can allow completely unexpected things to emerge. Dare to gather people, ideally a small group. Two people invite two others, one invites another, three invite one more. In my opinion, the group should not exceed six people; even that might already be too many. There are those who initiate the meeting, but there must be a mutual desire to come together. Intuition about the purpose of the meeting must be mutually encouraged, even if the exact reason is unclear. The key to potential is the mutual acceptance of the unknown.

We don’t really know why we’ve organized this one-hour meeting between four people. None of the four knows exactly why. And yet, we’ve set up this moment of encounter, sharing, gathering—call it what you will. We meet and don’t know where to begin. We accept not knowing, no longer knowing. We’re here, present with one another, for a limited time. Thus, this acknowledged unknown rests on mutually recognized intuitive value. This means there are likely things to share, even if we don’t know what they are yet and will discover them together. This intuitive moment, formalized in a social act—we’re meeting, we’ve set aside time to meet—whose usefulness no one knows, and we accept not knowing why or what purpose it will serve.

The extreme difficulty of the improbable

This is extremely difficult to implement, and that’s precisely why it creates potential development spaces. It’s so hard because our representations of the world and activities are largely productivist. We must produce something together—otherwise, why meet? Here, we accept that we have nothing to produce, that we know each other a little, a lot, or not at all, but we’ve sensed something and chosen to devote official time to these vague things. In the end, it’s very much like a meeting between friends or even a romantic encounter: we don’t know, but that’s not the point; we know we want to, perhaps, and we’ll let what emerges do so, let our steps guide us, choose to get lost in an unfamiliar city and maybe discover things that will enrich us forever—without knowing whether we’ll discover anything at all.

What unlocks potential in us is the absence of stakes tied to guaranteed gain. The gains we receive will come from unexpected places. That’s why this is a potential space. It’s where we welcome the unexpected—and by definition, the unexpected is unexpected. To welcome it, we need complete openness, because it will not come from where we expect. This requires floating attention, so precious in psychoanalysis, which lets the mind wander, meander, find its own paths. It’s so destabilizing yet so constructive, so essential.

In this acknowledged situation—always difficult, because there’s always something “better” to do, urgent priorities—we create a “bubble,” a space where what emerges will emerge, perhaps nothing. Or perhaps things we won’t even perceive in the moment, which will reveal themselves much later, without us knowing they were born there. Allowing ourselves this unknown detour is so hard to pinpoint yet so essential.

Daring and legitimizing

For this moment to truly open and deepen, for this time to unfold like a vast space, we must dare to be fully ourselves without fear. Being ourselves means daring to express, daring to reveal to others what lies within us, while listening to what lies within them. That is, not filling the void out of fear, not just showcasing ourselves to be recognized by others. Not seeking validation, yet still presenting ourselves, speaking to the other, because the other never fully knows us. What we’ll share is who we are, each in depth. It’s our being that will be shared in this moment, not our having (including intellectual having).

In this delicate, deeply invested sharing, it may seem extremely improbable and useless—but that’s precisely the point. It’s in our ability to take the improbable and the useless seriously, to give them space just as we do for useful things, that a potential development space can open—sometimes extremely vast—within a limited time we’ve sanctified together.

This is a rare practice, but one I believe we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives, if we’re honest. I’ve formalized it here as a method, to legitimize it and, perhaps, help open these indispensable potential development spaces more often. I invite you to legitimize them. They are profoundly important workspaces. I can attest, and I think each of us can recall exceptional, unexpectedly important moments that arose by chance in life—moments I encourage us to cultivate a little more, without over-systematizing them, lest they lose their exceptional nature.