Two departments of the same house that ignore each other, a network whose members only meet once a year, a merger that has put professional cultures foreign to one another under the same roof: the situations differ, the request is much the same. It rarely concerns a content, more often a way of doing things. I have been facilitating collective processes for thirty years and I have publicly documented my methods, which is rare enough in this line of work. Here are the possible ways in.
First direction: the methods themselves, experienced and then analysed
Stand-up questions, timed pairs, collective close reading of texts, the moving debate, the world café, collaborative mind-mapping, the sustainable links workshop. A talk can consist in experiencing four or five of these in one morning, then analysing with the group what each one produces, what it prevents, and when to use it. Participants leave with a repertoire they can use the following week. All these methods are documented in Collective intelligence facilitation methods, and I give them without reserve, because a method kept secret serves no one.
Second direction: what facilitation says about our relation to people
A facilitation format is never neutral: it distributes speech, it manufactures places, it authorises or prevents disagreement. An organisation that talks about cooperation while gathering its staff to listen in silence teaches the opposite of what it says. This direction suits management teams willing to look at their own practices. See The political dimension of organisational frameworks, The State of Openness and Speech takes on PowerPoint.
Third direction: digital technology as an instrument of cooperation
This is the singularity of my work, and it often surprises. At the agency we develop simple tools, hosted on our own servers, which allow a hundred and fifty people to contribute live and to leave a trace that can be consulted afterwards. A contribution wall, a bibliography composed by the room, an advocacy text written by many hands in an afternoon. Digital technology then serves internal democracy instead of cluttering it. See A web platform for collective intelligence, Digital traces as a link and Activating collective intelligence with digital tools.
Fourth direction: why beautiful away-days change nothing
A team comes out enthusiastic and nothing happens next. Validation is not transformation, and what makes the difference lies in precise things: what is written, by whom, what stays accessible, what milestone is set, who takes it up. A useful direction when an organisation has already held several seminars to no effect. See The Implementation of Methods and Why the power to act is so often experienced as a transgression.
Fifth direction: cooperating in times of crisis
Budget restrictions, reorganisation, internal conflict, external shock. Facilitating a collective in those moments requires something other than creativity techniques. I have formalised operating principles for this, in dialogue with Serge Tisseron’s work on co-resilience and Olivier Hamant’s on robustness. See Leading Collective Intelligence in the Face of Crises, Building Co-Resilience and Robustness, antifragility, resilience.
Sixth direction: the shared secret, and what intimacy does to a collective
A method I developed, which works remarkably well at bringing into a group what never gets said in meetings. It requires a solid frame and I do not propose it everywhere, but when it takes place, a collective never quite works the same way again. See The Shared Secret and Giving Ourselves Permission to Create.
What happens in the room
Here, the room is the subject. The share of exposition is the smallest of all my talks: a few short framings, and for the rest a sequence of formats, each followed by a note on method explaining what we have just experienced and how to do it again. The wager is simple: a collective of fifty or two hundred people produces more in two hours than anything I could have brought it on my own, provided someone takes serious care of the frame.
What remains
Everything the group writes stays online, and that is often the real deliverable. Depending on the case, it becomes an advocacy text, a shared assessment, a set of recommendations, a map of the collective territory. I turn it into an edited synthesis if you wish, but I always prefer the document to carry the participants’ words rather than mine.
Formats and preparation
From a ninety-minute sequence to support over several years, by way of the one-day seminar and the facilitation of a committee over time. Preparation is decisive here, more than on any other subject: what is really at play in a collective never appears in the initial request, and I need two or three conversations to perceive it. And I can pass on the role itself: supporting a member of your team in designing and facilitating this kind of collective moment, until they no longer need me [see the page “What if someone from your team did the talking?”, to be linked once published]. Talks are given in French and in English.
Some past talks
An advocacy document written by twelve people in one afternoon; Enlarging the Silo; Collaborative assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine; Giant digital brainstorming; Experimenting together to become autonomous : seven years with the cultural affairs department of Les Lilas.