Reception
An activity to explore welcoming and interaction: each person alternates between welcoming and being welcomed, experiences strong emotions, and discovers group dynamics. The goal: to create connections, establish a supportive framework, and reflect on each person’s role in interactions.
Method, with a group of 30 people
I designed and co-created this exercise to explore the theme of welcoming.
For example, with a group of 30 people, 10 chairs are arranged in a circle. The activity takes place in three rounds (each lasting 5 minutes):
- In the first round, 10 people sit on the chairs and are tasked with welcoming the other participants moving around the space.
- In the second round, 10 different people take their places on the chairs.
- In the third round, the final 10 participants sit down. This way, everyone experiences being both a welcomer and someone being welcomed.
This exercise is well-suited for addressing the theme of welcoming. However, I believe it can also be adapted to explore other topics, particularly interaction. There are twice as many people moving around as there are welcomers. As a result, some may end up welcoming groups, while others welcome individuals. Those moving around may sometimes feel welcomed but can also feel excluded if no one approaches them. Similarly, welcomers may occasionally find themselves alone, with no one coming to them.
Emotions and the Framework
This exercise evokes strong emotions in participants, both in their interactions and personal experiences, tied to the themes of interaction and individual roles. The instruction I gave was: “What does welcoming mean?” For the welcomer, it’s not about providing information but about showing interest in the person being welcomed, building a connection, asking questions, understanding their needs, and listening attentively. It is the responsibility of the seated person to create a supportive framework for the person they are welcoming.
This approach to building a framework is crucial in interactions, especially for someone in an organizational role, dealing with beneficiaries or partners. It involves establishing a framework that fosters connection, dialogue, co-creation, or service delivery.
The Theme of Interaction or Service
While this exercise was designed to explore welcoming, I believe it can also serve as a useful foundation for addressing other topics, particularly those related to interaction or the service one aims to provide. The emotions experienced during the exercise enrich subsequent reflections, as they are rooted in the participants’ personal experiences.
Additionally, during this exercise, some participants may face challenges, while others may succeed at certain moments. Observing how others act around you is also part of the process. This informal exchange is incredibly enriching, as it allows participants to learn from and discover each other’s approaches.
In the context of businesses, as well as in associative, social, artistic, cultural mediation, cultural action, initial or professional training, and social action settings, mobilizing the collective intelligence of participants is a very powerful lever. It enables mutual enrichment, improved relationships, stronger cohesion, the emergence of ideas, the invention of projects, greater engagement, and more.
Collective intelligence tools are also powerful democratic tools. They have been largely developed within the field of popular education, where the contribution of each individual is valued far more than in the national education system, which, in France, unfortunately often remains too traditional in its approaches.
I have frequently participated in collective intelligence workshops, and I have facilitated, applied, refined, adapted, and even invented a number of them. Here, you will find a collection of tools that I have personally used, which are integrated into the methods I propose, supported by real-life use cases. I believe these tools are highly worth sharing, as I have seen so many beneficial effects from them! I often find myself thinking, during collective moments such as conferences, for example: it’s a shame to limit ourselves to passive listening—all these minds gathered together could, if mobilized more effectively, produce something greater collectively.
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The Shared Secret
When the intimate becomes collective: a method of collective intelligence through whispering, listening and creation.
Creating a space where the intimacy of a whisper becomes a collective work. Engaging empathic listening, emotional regulation and creative (…) -
The Implementation of Methods
When Words Are No Longer Enough: Toward an Embodied Transformation of Professional Practices
Methods often fail because they remain discursive. Advocating for cooperation while dominating, speaking of ecology while imposing: the (…) -
Cooperative Narratives
Creating polyphonic narrative devices to transform academic knowledge into living and operative knowledge.
How can we overcome the limits of academic narrative to create truly shared knowledge? A concrete experience of collective writing devices that (…) -
For an ecology of dispensability
Rethinking authority and transmission.
Faced with the vertical management that dominates and alienates, another path exists: that of an authority that aims for its own dispensability, (…) -
The Group Flag
Between cohesion and freedom: the fertile paradox of shared culture.
How can a common symbol liberate singularities? I propose here a reflection on the paradoxical role of the “group flag” function as guarantor of (…) -
The State of Openness
For democratic and transformative facilitation.
How can we cultivate a welcoming posture that allows everyone to contribute fully? Openness is not a method but an inner state that transforms our (…) -
Formalizing the informal
Informality, essential to learning, resists structure while calling for it. How to tame it.
The absence of informal aspects in distance learning forces us to rethink its fundamental nature. This constraint becomes a laboratory for (…) -
Framework, purpose and transgression
So as not to get lost along the way.
When the framework of a project becomes inadequate, transgressing it often allows for better achievement of the objectives by prioritizing lived (…) -
Speech takes on PowerPoint
For more useful collective exchanges.
PowerPoint presentations hinder collective intelligence by rigidifying exchanges—this is well-known and documented—yet they remain almost (…) -
Collective surveying of texts
Enrich a text with the intelligence of other readers.
Collective text surveying is a method where a group divides a document into sections, with each subgroup working on one part before sharing their (…) -
Potential development space
Collective innovation method.
The potential development space is a method of collective innovation based on intuitive encounters, without predefined objectives, where mutual (…) -
Mapping the Collective Territory
Geographical Identification of Connections within a Group.
This activity allows visualizing connections and origins within a group by creating a human world map. By positioning themselves according to (…) -
Web platform for professional training
An astonishingly powerful device.
Following the democratization of remote work, it has been necessary to rethink approaches to professional training. This proven method offers a (…) -
Digital traces as a link
The power of digital to bring people together.
The immediate sharing of activity traces (recordings, photos, mind maps) via an accessible digital space strengthens the connection between (…) -
Listener contributions via digital tool
Unleash the power of the brains involved.
In a conference where one or more people address a large audience, it is common, after the presentation, to have a moment of discussion or Q&A (…) -
The sustainable links workshop
Create meaningful connections in collaborative workshops.
This “Workshop of Sustainable Connections” encourages the creation of lasting bonds between participants in collective events. Each person (…) -
Collaborative mind-mapping
An instituting, evolving form of writing.
Collaborative mind mapping is a visual and tree-like note-taking method, projected in real-time during meetings or training sessions. This (…) -
World Café
A tried-and-tested technique that’s always being reinvented.
The World Café is a collective intelligence technique that fosters the collaborative creation of ideas and concrete projects. Through successive (…) -
Thematic groups
Elaborate together.
This method is a simplified and faster variation of the World Café method, which I have successfully implemented and tested. The goal is for each (…) -
A web platform for collective intelligence
Support collective action with a specific digital tool.
Discovering the Power of a Web Platform Specifically Designed for Collective Intelligence Contribution, Through a Concrete Example. A Digital (…) -
Exchanges in pairs
To give everyone a voice.
A collective intelligence exercise that stimulates thinking and listening. Working in pairs, each participant builds his or her own argument on a (…) -
Book synthesis
Boosting professional training in collective intelligence.
How to use collective intelligence in professional training in a way that is not anecdotal but enriches the subject in depth? Bringing a moment of (…) -
The importance of expression
Identifying an essential path to emancipation.
Expression, often overlooked, is a key element for individual and collective emancipation. By providing a legitimate framework, appropriate tools, (…) -
Reception
Interaction practice exercise.
An activity to explore welcoming and interaction: each person alternates between welcoming and being welcomed, experiences strong emotions, and (…) -
Secret tips
In-depth mutual enrichment.
A powerful exercise to nurture creativity and collaboration: each participant presents a project or idea in 3 minutes, then receives intimate, (…) -
Collective bibliography
An encounter with oneself through books.
This activity is very useful at the beginning of meetings, gatherings, or workdays. The idea is to bring a number of books that address the topic (…) -
Sit Stand
Playfully identifying the links between participants.
Sit Stand, a playful and profound exercise to identify the concept of community. The “Sit Stand” exercise is often presented as an icebreaker, (…)
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The State of Openness For democratic and transformative facilitation.
How can we cultivate a welcoming posture that allows everyone to contribute fully? Openness is not a method but an inner state that transforms our (…) -
Not judging people’s digital practices Non-judgment and non-hierarchization as conditions for mediation.
Judgment damages the very connection that mediation seeks to build. It goes hand in hand with a more subtle hierarchization, which places the (…) -
Secret tips In-depth mutual enrichment.
A powerful exercise to nurture creativity and collaboration: each participant presents a project or idea in 3 minutes, then receives intimate, (…) -
Calligraphy #11 Calligraphy
Listen to the people around you and write down some of their words. -
Listening and silence Pedagogy
How to get listening and silence in a group? Surprisingly, by going through a work on oneself the results can be spectacular. Silence is a (…)
