You are organising a study day, professional meetings, a symposium, an in-house seminar, and you are looking for a talk that genuinely feeds your audience’s thinking, grounded in a practice rather than in a synthesis of other people’s ideas. Often you also expect this event, which brings together fifty, one hundred or two hundred people, to produce something other than a succession of speeches, and each person present to leave with something they have worked out themselves.
This is the very logic of our talks: collective intelligence facilitation techniques are built into the way the talk unfolds. Questions put to the room, answered by standing up or remaining seated, reveal within a few minutes the actual positions of a professional community, including unexpected ones. Timed exchanges in pairs give each person the opportunity to put an idea into words out loud, facing a single other person — a very different experience from taking the microphone in front of the whole assembly. Written contributions (a summary of what has been heard, a disagreement, an additional point) are photographed and shared online by each participant, using a digital tool developed by the agency, very simple to use and hosted on sovereign infrastructure; the wall of contributions built up in this way remains accessible after the day is over, and the final discussion draws on what the whole room has written, no longer only on the questions of those who dare to take the microphone.
This way of working stems from the subjects we deal with. Cultural rights, the place of audiences and of young people, what digital technology and artificial intelligence are doing to professions are democratic subjects; the form of the experience lived during the talk has to be consistent with them. Giving each person present a place and a sense of confidence is part of the point, on a par with the ideas conveyed. A methodological moment at the end of the session spells out the formats that have just been experienced, so that participants can reuse them in their own contexts; these methods are publicly documented in Collective intelligence facilitation methods.
This work sometimes covers the whole day: we then help the organiser design the event. The path from one talk to the next, the place of contributive moments, the welcome (up to and including a book table whose bibliography the participants put together), the edited summary that extends the day for those who were there as well as for those who were not: all of this is designed with you, on the basis of several possible schedules between which we decide together.
Each talk is built for your context and your audience, and prepared with you: your situation, the live questions of your audience, what the day should leave them with. It draws on thirty years of practice and on a body of research published on an ongoing basis (research and innovation, our resources), including the book “Defending culture differently : methods for tomorrow” (2026). Talks are given in French and in English, in France and internationally.
Some recent talks: “Culture differently : postures and methods for tomorrow” for the Cultures du Cœur network; “Audiences : how digital technology reshapes our relationship to the performing arts” for Chaillot Augmenté × TMNlab; “Mental health, young people, images : what are we talking about ?” at professional meetings; “EAC and cultural rights”; and the video talks in the Giving talks and conferences section.
And among the days co-designed from start to finish: the interprofessional day on cultural professionals’ approaches to adolescents, with the Jeune Public au Centre network, at Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux (one hundred and fifty participants); the “Artistic and digital practices for young people” professional day, co-designed and co-facilitated with Act’art (Seine-et-Marne); helping young people and professionals to speak out at the “Cultures and youth policies” national meetings in Villeurbanne, French Capital of Culture; the Meetings on participative creation of the Théâtre de la Poudrerie (Sevran), whose programme is co-developed with the agency and whose online summary of the 2022 edition was produced by it; and the regional day presenting the shared assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, at the MÉCA in Bordeaux.
