Giving Ourselves Permission to Create

29 May 2026. Published by Benoît Labourdette.

12 min

Public consultation mechanisms have become widespread in public policy over the past fifteen years, almost always in the form of the questionnaire. Yet the questionnaire freezes the very way of thinking within which people are asked to respond, and it keeps them at a distance from one another. Drawing on my experience as a facilitator, I propose a different way of working, grounded in creativity, understood as the possibility given to a group to venture together into other representations of the world.

A real democratic advance

Since 2010, consultation has established itself as an almost universal requirement in French public policy. Climate plans, urban projects, cultural strategies, educational programmes, participatory budgets: almost everything now passes through some mechanism for consulting residents. Digital platforms have multiplied, Cap Collectif, Decidim, Make.org and many others, to make this consultation possible on a large scale, and consultation has become a profession, with its methods, its standards and its indicators.

I want to begin by saying what I find sound in this development. The very fact that residents are now asked for their views, that dedicated time is set aside, that contributions are documented and made public, is to my mind a democratic advance. Those who designed these mechanisms wanted to break with a top-down way of running public policy, and many of their methodological choices make sense. There is here a demand for listening that did not exist twenty years ago and that has, in part, taken hold. When residents number in the tens of thousands, these mechanisms make it possible to gather, rank and make public a large number of views, which is valuable and which few other methods can do.

The severing of the human bond in the questionnaire

It is by looking closely at how these mechanisms work that one sees their limit, and this limit is rarely stated by those who design them. The preferred form of consultation, in the cultural field as elsewhere, remains the questionnaire administered online. Yet a questionnaire is designed by people who never appear, and filled in by others who never meet them. Those who ask the questions do not meet those who answer them, and vice versa. Each remains shielded from the other by the mechanism.

At bottom, if we build a questionnaire rather than organise an encounter, it is partly because the encounter is frightening. The other, when present before me, can overwhelm me and carry me somewhere other than where I had planned to go. The questionnaire removes that risk. The person who designs it keeps control of the frame, and the person who answers does so in their own time, at a distance, without being able to affect anyone. The intention is often good, we want to give people a voice, but the chosen form organises a mutual distancing, and it is an imagined fear of the other that quietly works through most of our participatory mechanisms.

The questionnaire has a second property that follows from the first. Since no one can shift the frame, the frame freezes the way of thinking. A questionnaire carries within it a representation of the world, a way of dividing up the subjects, of asking the questions, of anticipating the answers, and this representation cannot evolve through contact with those who respond, because the form itself does not allow it. The person who answers must reason within a system of thought imposed upon them, one they have no means of transforming. Spaces for free responses are of course provided, but those responses never carry the same analytical weight as the formatted ones, precisely because they do not fit the grid. If we ask residents which additional cultural facilities they would like, we get requests for facilities; if we ask what they feel is missing from the current programme, we get suggestions about programming. What we never get is what they have not yet formulated for themselves, because the situation did not ask it of them and nothing in the mechanism could lead them to it.

Beneath this machinery lies a presupposition we rarely question, the assumption that people already possess the information, and that it would be enough to ask them for it for them to hand it over. The questionnaire treats the person as a reservoir of ready-made opinions, to be emptied. Yet a person asked about their relationship to culture does not, most often, have a view waiting fully formed within them; they have an experience, practices, ways of living, out of which a view can be built if they are given the means. To ask is not the same thing as to make that construction possible. It is this presupposition about the very nature of what we are gathering that deserves close examination.

Data does not exist before the inquiry that produces it

This presupposition I first met in experience, but it was a body of scholarly work that allowed me to name it. In 2011 a collective volume appeared, edited by Barbara Olszewska, Michel Barthélémy and Sandra Laugier, Les données de l’enquête (The Data of Inquiry), which raises a seemingly technical question with considerable consequences for anyone conducting inquiries: what is a piece of data in the social sciences, and where does it come from? We are accustomed to thinking of data as something that is out there, in the world, that it would suffice to collect. The authors show, on the contrary, drawing on the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey and the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, that a piece of data does not exist outside the inquiry that produces it. It is the method that detaches a fact from the whole it was part of and constitutes it as data, and a different framework of inquiry would have produced different data, and so a different image of the world. The presupposition of the questionnaire, that of information already there which it would suffice to pick, is exactly what this book undoes.

Dewey wrote as early as 1938, with regard to history, that everything depends on the principle that controls the selection of facts, a principle that decides what will be retained, what will be left out, and how the chosen facts will be arranged. Garfinkel extended this idea by proposing to treat social facts not as things but as accomplishments, that is, as realities that people elaborate together in the ordinary course of their lives, by making their actions mutually intelligible to one another. A piece of data is therefore always the result of a process of elaboration, whatever the data may be, and this changes everything for anyone conducting an inquiry. The way we inquire does not merely measure a world that would be there in advance, it decides in part what that world will give us to see.

The researchers behind this volume worked in an era without artificial intelligence, through slow and manual analysis of conversations, recordings and transcripts. They paid particular attention to the ordinary and the informal, to what they call, after Garfinkel, the “seen but unnoticed”, that familiar background of shared obviousness on which our practices rest without our paying it any attention. It is precisely in this informal realm that the most interesting data is lodged, the data that escapes every grid, because it has not yet been framed by a question. I too work on the informal, and for reasons that meet theirs: it is there that one has a chance of thinking outside the frame.

It is from this that I draw a practical consequence. Rather than fooling ourselves that we are gathering objective information, it is better to admit that we are gathering elaborations, and then to work in depth on the process of elaboration itself, since it is this process that determines what we will obtain. Instead of tending only to the gathering, we tend to the path by which a person builds what they have to say. And this path we do not have fully ready within ourselves: it must be made possible, supported, given the time and the form that allow someone to fashion a piece of data that resembles them, one that will be all the richer for having been genuinely elaborated by that person.

To change things is to change our representations

If we carry out inquiries, consultations and surveys, it is to make things move, to gain in relevance in the policies we pursue. And to make things move is to change our representations. To build together, to move forward together, is not to add up views already formed, it is to let ourselves be changed by the other’s vision, to accept enrichment by a way of seeing that was not ours and that makes us discover the world differently. It is this transformation of representations that makes it possible to live and to build differently.

We tend nonetheless, most often unconsciously, to shield ourselves from the other’s vision of the world. One sees this very clearly in assemblies. Gather people moved by the best of intentions, give them a common goal, and you will find that, with rare exceptions, they do not know how to work together. They stick up sticky notes, they do not know how to make room for the other, how to welcome a word that unsettles their own. There are of course people endowed with real relational skills, but at the scale of a group, what dominates is a kind of shared psychosocial incompetence. We organise ourselves poorly, as human beings, when we are together, even though everything we do, we do for humanity, for ourselves, and not for machines. This is where the stake lies, as close as possible to our difficulty in being together.

At the bottom of this difficulty lies the fear of being affected by the other, overwhelmed, changed by their presence. The questionnaire is a way of avoiding it, and that is also why it reassures, since the other stays in their place, in their own time, and can shift nothing within me. But the risk we avoid by avoiding the other is also a risk we fail to take with regard to ourselves, for to shield oneself from the other’s vision is to deprive oneself of what might have transformed us. The risk to the other and the risk to oneself hold together, and the questionnaire neutralises them on both sides at once.

Creativity, or venturing into other representations

I come now to what I call creativity, whose meaning I want to make precise. Creativity, as I understand it, is the capacity to venture into new systems of representation. It is not a gift reserved for artists, it is a disposition that can be opened in anyone, in any group, provided they are given permission for it. And it is, to my mind, the condition for anything new to emerge at all. As long as a group remains within its acquired representations, it can only recombine what it already knows; creativity is what allows it to step out of what it knows, to let itself be surprised, to arrive at things no one could have formulated in advance.

One sees the link with the work on the data of inquiry. If data depends on method, then a creative method, one that does not enclose the frame of thought but opens it, produces data of another nature, capable of shifting our representations. Creativity and the quality of an inquiry hold together in this way, a process that mobilises a group’s creativity being one that makes itself capable of producing results that change something, because it has accepted that its starting representations may move.

Artistic creation is one of the paths, a particularly powerful one, for opening this creativity, but it is only one of the paths. Having people draw, take a photograph, sing, are all ways of leading a group through the adventure of representation, and they are not the only ones. Creativity can just as well be mobilised in a discussion, in writing, in mapping, as long as the setting gives people permission to dare something they had not planned.

I hold to this distinction between creativity and creation, because it avoids a misunderstanding. Artistic creation is not indispensable; creativity is, and it is so even when no artwork is involved. Without the mobilisation of creativity, we discover nothing, for to discover is precisely to step out of one’s acquired representations. An approach that claims to gather data while mobilising none of this creativity gathers only what its frames already anticipated. This is why I place creativity, and not artistic creation alone, at the centre of this reflection: it is the condition of any elaboration that brings something new, and the process of elaboration the researchers of Les données de l’enquête describe can only be worked in depth on condition that creativity is allowed to operate.

Creative permission

What is central, to my mind, and what seems to me to name what is at play in these situations, is fear. In an assembly, what stops people from moving into creativity is not a lack of ability, it is fear of the judgement of others. To dare to take a photograph, to dare a drawing, to dare to sing a song, to dare to voice an idea that was not expected, is to expose oneself to what others think of us, and we dread that gaze.

This fear is not irrational, and I want to explain why it is normal, because understanding it is the condition for freeing ourselves from it. If we fear judgement, it is because we fear, more deeply, exclusion from the group, and we need the group in order to live. No one lives alone. We exist within a fabric of relations and interdependencies, what one might call a relational ecology: one person tills the soil and feeds us, we in turn make for them the tools that help them till it better, and step by step it is from this interdependence that each of us draws our subsistence. To be cast out of the group long meant being unable to live, and something of that memory continues to work within us. The fear of taking a risk, and therefore the fear of moving towards creativity, is the trace of this vital necessity of belonging.

I do not describe this in order to reproach people for their caution, as though they were doing things wrong. I am describing psychic processes at work, processes that can be explained, and that act as brakes in relation to what we are trying to do. Naming them, making them conscious, is precisely what makes it possible to free ourselves from them. This is where the facilitator’s work lies.

I call creative permission the gesture by which a group, or a person, grants themselves the right to enter into creativity, that is, to risk the judgement of others. This permission is not a given, it is built, and it is the facilitator’s work. That work does not consist in gathering answers, but in lifting these brakes, in creating the conditions in which people dare despite the fear of judgement, let themselves be enriched by one another, and become capable of fashioning new representations together. Lifting these blocks is not a nicety, it is what makes democracy possible, since democracy requires that each person be able to contribute for real, and not merely tick a box.

Three ways I give myself permission, as a facilitator

I give this permission all the time, in my facilitation work, and I want to close with points of method, describing how I go about it concretely. For this permission I grant first of all to myself, and that is where everything starts.

When I facilitate a session of collective intelligence over video, I never begin by asking people to contribute. We have a theme to work on, and I begin by having the participants speak about the frame, about why this theme matters, about what we share as to its importance. We first discuss the frame within which, in a second stage, we will contribute. While they speak, I take notes live, as a mind map displayed on the screen, of what is being said, what comes up, what arises in the spontaneity of the exchange. People thus see their own ideas appear, which legitimises them, legitimises their creativity, and at the same time structures a collective thinking before their eyes. This discussion lasts a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. Only then, over a comparable span of time, does each person contribute in writing, individually, in a very simple digital tool, within the frame we set together. Creativity, here, is mobilised during the discussion, and it is inscribed in its value by my notes in the mind map. There is no artistic creation at all in this setting, and yet creativity is at its heart. Participants sometimes say to me, surprised, “Oh, so we’re contributing now, right away?”. They are not used to it, because they are used to surveys in which people shield themselves from one another. Here, we are together, connected at the same moment, and we write together, and it is collective momentum that makes one take the risk.

At other times, in training sessions in particular, I invite people to make a drawing, take a photograph, and share them, whether we are over video or physically together. I begin with that, or nearly so, after a simple introduction. And it completely changes people’s outlook, because they have passed through creation, and creation has made them take the risk of themselves. During a debate on education in the digital age that I was helping to facilitate, I began by having the parents present make a drawing. They drew, they published their drawings, it gave them confidence, and the debate that followed was at an altogether different level from what it would have been without that passage through drawing.

The third example is more collective still. In Fontenay-sous-Bois, in 2024 and 2025, the staff of the culture and youth departments drew together a map of their town on the floor, in felt-tip on A3 sheets. The map brought to light a geographical and social boundary within the town that no inter-departmental meeting had ever articulated. The making of the map preceded the formulation of the problem, and it is the creativity of the gesture, drawing rather than discussing, that made the problem visible.

It is often objected that these ways of working only hold at a small scale, and that as soon as one has to reach many people, one must return to the questionnaire. I do not believe this. Large scale simply means many people doing something, and one can have many things done in parallel. In rooms with many participants, I have people work in pairs, I ask them to conceptualise a question together, to live an experience themselves, then to recount it and make a synthesis of it. Each person then lives something that transforms them, and it is precisely because they have lived it that they become more relevant afterwards in what they express. What scales up here is not the gathering of ready-made views, it is the simultaneous setting in motion of dozens of individual paths. Large scale is not the privilege of the questionnaire, it is a dynamic that creativity too knows how to deploy.

When artistic creation opens up the inquiry

When artistic creation becomes the heart of an approach, it is the same dynamic that unfolds, with a particular intensity. In the summer of 2023, I led for Cultures du cœur a project entitled “La machine à voyager dans le futur” (The Machine for Travelling into the Future), within the framework of the Ministry of Culture’s Été culturel. Eight organisations from the social sector, boarding houses, residential foundations, youth spaces, community centres, hosted multidisciplinary creative workshops on the theme of the future, and one hundred and five participants produced, in a few days, 73 videos, 191 pieces of music and podcasts, 1,306 photographs, 63 mood boards and 64 texts, in settings where people did not regard themselves as creators. What this output attests to is not quantity, it is the possibility, given to each person, of giving form to their relationship to the future in a way that belongs to them. A person living in a boarding house does not, at the outset, have a worked-out opinion on the future of social policy, but they have a lived relationship to the future, a history, hopes, anxieties, and creation opens up for them a way of giving form to that relationship, and so of thinking it, that no consultation would have brought into being.

In Villejuif, in November 2022, I designed and facilitated a workshop in which residents of the Bon-Lamartine neighbourhood collectively made short films out of photographs, both from the municipal archives and their own, to tell the memory of their neighbourhood. A consultation would have gathered their views on the renovation; creation allowed them to fashion the narrative that belongs to them, and that other residents were then able to receive.

In 2026, in the territorial consultation conducted with the regional agency ALCA in Nouvelle-Aquitaine on image education, we alternated times of spoken exchange with times of individual writing on a collaborative platform. Each professional wrote for fifteen minutes on a theme, and the contributions were then discussed in plenary. Writing too is a giving of form, and it allowed dozens of professionals to contribute fully, including those who express themselves less easily out loud.

From cultural democratisation to cultural democracy

Current consultation mechanisms partly fulfil the obligation placed on local authorities by the NOTRe law of 2015 and the LCAP law of 2016 to respect cultural rights in their policies. But they still largely belong to a logic of democratisation, in which the aim is to give residents the possibility of pronouncing on policies that others conceive, rather than to a logic of cultural democracy, in which residents are recognised as bearers of cultures that they can formulate and circulate themselves. Placing creativity at the heart of participatory approaches is one of the ways of making this second logic effective, because it is creativity that makes residents capable of producing new representations rather than responding to those put to them.

I would not want this text to be read as a case against questionnaires. Gathering views on a large scale is useful, and procedural consultation knows how to do it. Creativity answers a different need, one that appears as soon as we want something to be transformed: that people give themselves permission to risk themselves towards one another and to shift their representations, because it is from such moments that there comes what no gathered view could give. A public approach that takes this need seriously articulates the two, gathering and creativity, and organises passages from one to the other. Creativity has, today, less room than it deserves, partly because public commissioners do not always know its methods, and partly because engaging in it requires accepting that one will oneself be affected by what comes out of it.

Putting it into practice: seven gestures for the facilitator

Everything above can be brought down to a few gestures, which I practise and which anyone can adapt to their own situation. They do not form a recipe, but a way of holding oneself when facilitating a participatory approach, whether it brings together five people or a hundred.

Give yourself permission first. Before authorising a group to create, you must grant yourself the right as a facilitator, that is, accept not to control everything that will come out. Without this permission I grant to myself, I cannot open it to others.
Work on the frame before asking for contributions. First have people speak about the purpose of the approach, about what makes it matter, before asking anything of them. The contribution comes afterwards, once the frame is shared.
Make what is said visible, as it is said. Take notes live, as a mind map or otherwise, of what emerges from the discussion, so that people see their ideas appear. This legitimises their speech and structures a collective thinking before their eyes.
Lead through a creative gesture. Offer a drawing, a photograph, a map, a short text, a paired dialogue, depending on the context. The gesture need not be artistic: it must take people out of their acquired representations and engage them in a path.
Support a path, do not pick an answer. Start from the principle that data does not already exist fully formed in people’s heads, but is built. Give the time and the form that allow each person to fashion what they have to say, rather than asking them to hand it over as though they had it ready.
Name the fear in order to defuse it. Acknowledge, explicitly if need be, that it is normal to fear the judgement of others, and that this fear is what holds one back from daring. Making it conscious is what makes it possible to move past it.
Scale up through the parallel, not the form. To reach many people, multiply simultaneous experiences (pairs, small groups creating at the same time) rather than returning to the questionnaire. Large scale is a dynamic of paths pursued side by side, not a gathering of isolated views.