The incredible resources of sociocultural facilitation for impact entrepreneurship

Statements Wednesday 19 August 2026

There are professions whose prestige seems to follow, with fairly reassuring regularity, the curve of the responsibilities they carry. As decisions become weightier, as their consequences extend further, as the number of people placed under your responsibility increases, there generally come the title, the recognition, the salary, sometimes even that little social ceremony that signals to everyone that they are in the presence of someone whose role matters.

And then there is sociocultural facilitation.

To it, we entrust children and adolescents.

We ask those who welcome them to guarantee their safety, to bring a group into being where, only a few hours earlier, there was merely a collection of individuals, to accommodate differences in personality, age, background and sometimes culture; to spot conflicts before they become impossible to address and to resolve them when they have nevertheless broken out. We ask them to plan, organize, budget, purchase, transport, feed, inform families, reassure the person who is afraid, listen to the one who says almost nothing, contain the person who takes up all the space and, when the moment comes when no one really knows what should be done anymore, to decide.

They must be capable of preparing an activity several weeks in advance and transforming it within a few minutes because the setting, the weather, the people or simply life have chosen not to comply with the programme. They must grant autonomy without shedding their responsibility. Enable participation without giving up the need to make decisions. Take a concern seriously enough not to dismiss it, but without allowing it to govern the group. Sometimes they must cancel the activity everyone has been looking forward to for three days. At other times, they must watch someone slowly do something they themselves could do in thirty seconds and resist the urge to take the object out of their hands.

And, rather remarkably, all of this has to work.

And yet we still readily speak of sociocultural facilitation as a “little job”. Something for young people. A nice commitment. A summer experience. A holiday occupation that leaves you with fond memories before you finally enter serious adult life.

That is probably a considerable mistake.

The position taken in this article is unambiguous. It requires neither compulsory indignation nor complacency towards a sector which, simply because it is poorly recognized, would thereby have acquired every virtue.

Sociocultural facilitation is profoundly undervalued. It should be better recognized, better resourced, better studied and much better paid.

It is also possible that this undervaluation has prevented us from seeing something rather surprising: some of the skills we are now trying to teach our entrepreneurs, managers and leaders have already existed, in another form and for a long time, in a profession we barely notice.

Admittedly, this proposition must be handled with caution. Not all facilitators are excellent. Not all camp or programme directors know how to build a collective. Some practices are mediocre, others astonishingly rich and high-quality; some traditions deserve serious discussion, while others embody a demanding conception of emancipation, cooperation and responsibility. Some organizations lack professionalism, while others, on the contrary, are surprisingly effective with resources that a company would regard as derisory.

There is no point, under the pretext of correcting an injustice, in manufacturing a golden legend of sociocultural facilitation.

Quite the opposite: because these professions are difficult, because they involve very real responsibilities and because their quality varies considerably depending on training, experience, teams and organizations, they should be more professionalized, studied, evaluated and valued.

There remains, however, this hypothesis, somewhat incongruous at first sight, and one that deserves closer attention:

What if some of what we are trying to teach future leaders has been practised, largely unnoticed, for decades in sociocultural facilitation?

At seventeen, responsible for reality

I began working in sociocultural facilitation at seventeen.

I had neither a leadership seminar, nor a case study, nor a spreadsheet in which a fictional company encountered, in cell F32, a problem carefully anticipated by the person who had written the exercise.

There were, among other things, groups in kayaks and others engaged in rocket-launching campaigns.

Kayaking has an educational virtue that management theories could sometimes envy: it leaves little time for abstractions once they stop working.

You prepare the route, check the equipment, assign people, explain the rules, estimate the duration, observe the sky and check the weather forecast.

Then you set off.

From that point on, reality joins the meeting.

The wind picks up earlier than forecast. The person who seemed entirely comfortable on the shore discovers that they are afraid as soon as the craft moves away. Another, by contrast, discovers a degree of confidence considerably greater than their abilities. Two personalities that seemed perfectly compatible on dry land find, in the middle of the water, excellent reasons not to be. The group stretches out. Someone gets tired. A small equipment problem, which would have been of no interest on a sheet of paper, suddenly becomes the problem around which the entire rest of the afternoon has to be reorganized.

The programme still exists.

The river simply had not read it.

There are worse introductions to project management.

This profession therefore taught me very early on a rule whose appearance is almost contradictory:

Prepare properly, so that you are capable of not following your plan.

The purpose of preparation has never been to make the world obedient.

Preparation is about knowing a situation well enough to be able to identify, when it changes shape, what has actually changed. Without preparation, every unexpected event appears exceptional. With serious preparation, it becomes easier to distinguish what disrupts the project from what merely inconveniences it.

There is, however, an opposite trap.

Changing the plan at the first sign of discomfort is no more evidence of flexibility. It can become another form of rigidity: an inability to tolerate a difficulty that lasts. We reorganize because we want to feel the comfort of action again. We alter the arrangement so that we can say we reacted. We replace a hypothesis before we have even given it time to be tested.

Between the rigidity of the person who clings to their plan and the agitation of the person who continually changes it lies a much more difficult skill: recognizing what needs to change and what needs to be held firm.

We must distinguish what requires adaptation from what merely requires patience; what can be negotiated from what cannot; what still deserves observation from what requires a decision now.

Only a few years later, I encountered this tension again in supporting the creation and development of businesses, with particular clarity when dealing with disruptive technologies, still-uncertain business models or projects whose market itself remained partly to be built.

There too, method is required.

A great deal of method.

But method becomes dangerous the moment it begins to believe it can replace reality.

The trap of the method that already knows

Entrepreneurial support has produced its procedures, canvases, matrices, stages, validation models and methods. It needed them. A project without a method can very quickly become a collection of enthusiasms, contradictory intuitions and decisions made according to the mood of the day.

The danger appears elsewhere.

It begins when the tool created to make the project more intelligible becomes a machine for bringing it back towards what the adviser already knows how to recognize.

A method can make what is possible visible.

It can also close the door on it.

The phenomenon is particularly noticeable with unusual projects. A disruptive technology has no reason to behave politely towards established categories. An emerging market does not always have ten years of historical data to reassure a spreadsheet. A new business model has, for a period that may be long, the almost inherent flaw of resembling something that does not yet exist.

The project must nevertheless be structured, assumptions tested, evidence requested, contradictions understood, and checks made that the creator’s desire is not standing in for economic reality.

But this must be achieved without leading the person being supported, through a succession of reasonable pieces of advice, to gradually manufacture the project their adviser knows how to handle rather than the one that truly deserved to be explored.

This is where an old body of knowledge from sociocultural facilitation returns.

A framework is not the opposite of freedom. A good framework is what makes freedom practicable.

The entire difficulty lies in this strange construction: a framework solid enough for people to rely on, intelligible enough for everyone to know how far they can go, but open enough for something to emerge from it that the person who designed it had not imagined.

Giving instructions is simpler.

The profession that conceals professions

The misunderstanding surrounding sociocultural facilitation may be due, in part, to its name.

“Facilitator” gives the impression of referring to a single activity.

In practice, it refers to an astonishing layering of activities.

Let us simply take one day.

You have to have designed what is going to happen, and therefore practise education; organized schedules and sequences, which already involves planning; allocated people, equipment, locations and travel, in other words logistics; purchased whatever was missing without exceeding the available resources, a very concrete exercise in stewardship and budgeting.

You must then explain the activity, and therefore communicate; make people want to take part, and therefore mobilize; adapt an instruction for a person who cannot receive it in the same way as the others, and therefore practise an elementary form of differentiated education.

You have to notice the person who says nothing.

Prevent the person who talks all the time from becoming, without any mandate, the leader of the group.

Spot when a disagreement is turning into a conflict.

Mediate.

Assess a risk before it becomes an incident.

React when it nevertheless becomes an incident.

Coordinate several facilitators who do not necessarily interpret the situation in the same way.

Change the programme without disrupting the stay.

Then explain why it was changed and get the decision accepted.

And then, in the evening, review what happened, understand what worked, what failed and what the team will need to do differently the next day.

And the next morning, of course, you start again.

And all of this must happen in an atmosphere where kindness does not resemble a human resources procedure printed in a booklet, where it must be real, spontaneous, perceptible, and where the framework remains, as far as possible, emancipatory.

The full list of functions and micro-functions would deserve an appendix — it appears further below — because it would be too long here and because its interest goes far beyond the cumulative effect.

What matters for now can be summed up in one observation.

The facilitator does not practise a simple profession. Alone, they hold together functions that companies, NGOs, administrations or Governments have become accustomed to distributing across several specialized professions.

Obviously, that does not make them a specialist in each one.

The steward of a residential programme is not the chief financial officer of an industrial group. The facilitator who organizes the movement of thirty people has not, by that operation alone, become a world expert in supply chain management. A centre director is not automatically a seasoned human resources professional.

The comparison would become a caricature if it claimed that.

What the facilitator acquires is of a different nature.

They do not merely encounter these functions one after another. They experience their integration within the same situation, with the same people, the same budget, the same place, the same time constraints, the same programme, and the immediate consequences of the way each affects the others.

Yet this capacity for integration is one of the most constant difficulties involved in leading an organization.

A company has the "right" to go bankrupt. A swimming session does not.

The comparison requires some caution here.

A company may carry human, health, social, economic or environmental responsibilities of considerable seriousness. A poor industrial, medical or financial decision may produce consequences on an entirely different scale from the failure of a holiday activity.

We would gain nothing by turning this into a contest of seriousness.

Sociocultural facilitation nevertheless has a very strong educational characteristic: some of its responsibilities immediately appear non-negotiable.

Imagine an outdoor trip that everyone on the programme has been looking forward to.

It has required several days of preparation. Participants have been talking about it since they arrived. The facilitators themselves are excited to go. The equipment is ready, transport is organized, the groups have been formed.

Then the weather changes.

The risk of a thunderstorm becomes serious.

From that moment on, participation reaches a boundary.

You can listen to every argument. Review the forecasts. Look for another route. Shift the timing. Scale down the activity. Change its form. Find a better idea.

But when the conditions for safety are no longer met, there comes a point when the person responsible must say:

No.

And, more difficult still, stand by that no in the face of everyone’s disappointment.

There is, in this ordinary scene, a lesson in governance that many organizations forget.

Collective intelligence does not erase responsibility.

Listening does not remove the need to decide.

Granting autonomy does not make the framework disappear.

And participatory leadership cannot consist in distributing to the group the responsibility that the leader’s role requires them to retain.

Going beyond

There is, however, another situation, much more common, in which immediately choosing between A and B reflects less an ability to decide than a desire to get it over with.

Two people, two teams or two parts of the same group defend different solutions.

A conventional compromise splits the difference. Everyone gives up part of what they wanted. Everyone walks away reasonably dissatisfied, which is sometimes a perfectly acceptable solution. Compromises should not be despised. Collective life needs them.

But another possibility exists.

I call it going beyond, and for this I seek a strong consensus.

Going beyond has nothing to do with soft consensus, in which disagreements are polished away until a sentence is obtained that everyone accepts because it no longer means very much. Nor does it consist in making a decision in advance and then surrounding it with meetings so that everyone can say they were consulted.

It begins when we take the reasons that lead different people to defend their solutions seriously enough for a third path sometimes to emerge.

The most interesting sign is almost always the same:

no one had proposed it at the beginning.

The confrontation did not serve to choose between two positions. It produced a solution that did not exist before it.

This work requires time, genuine quality of listening and a fairly rare ability to tolerate moments when nothing seems to be moving forward. It also requires not allowing people to believe that a temporary absence of decision means an absence of direction.

I like to use the image of a wheel.

People are the spokes. The stronger they are, the more load the wheel can carry. The person in charge has no interest in weakening the spokes in order to prove that the hub is indispensable.

But a collection of spokes lying on the ground has never made a wheel.

The role of leadership therefore consists in increasing people’s strength without making disappear what allows the collective to retain its shape and move forward.

It is a far less spectacular form of leadership than some representations of the role of a leader.

It can even be fairly thankless.

The paradox of the good facilitator: eventually, they become less visible

An evening activity can be magnificent.

The facilitators have dressed up, built a set, rehearsed their characters, prepared surprises. The children laugh, participate, applaud. No one would have any reason to look down on this form of facilitation.

But the centre of gravity can be shifted.

Instead of creating the evening activity for the children, we can help them create it themselves.

Everything then becomes more difficult.

Ideas have to emerge without being supplied. Groups have to be formed without artificially manufacturing affinities. One person has to be helped past their shyness. Another has to be prevented from making all the decisions simply because they speak louder. Materials have to be found. Two or three techniques have to be passed on that will make their project possible. They have to be allowed to fail a little. We must accept that they do less well than we would have done ourselves. And yet intervene when they are no longer learning from their mistake but genuinely heading into a wall.

And then evening comes.

The children lead the activity.

The facilitators become much less visible.

That was the goal.

Here we have a rather remarkable form of leadership: the person in charge has worked harder in order to become less necessary.

The same paradox exists in organizations.

The manager who centralizes everything produces an impressive quantity of visible signs of their work. Decisions come to them. Requests go through them. People call them. They decide. They correct. They follow up. Their presence is visible.

The person who builds a competent team, passes on knowledge, delegates, gives people the means to decide, prepares them gradually to manage without them and intervenes only when their role adds genuine value can end up seeming less active.

A hurried observer might even wonder what they do.

In some organizations, people almost come to believe that the position is vacant.

This is one of the risks of empowering leadership: the more successful it is, the less some of its effects visibly bear the signature of the person in charge.

The collective must therefore understand something about how it itself functions. The organization must also know how to recognize the value of a person in charge who does not measure their importance by the number of matters that have become dependent on them.

There is a formula here that perhaps deserves a more serious place in management training:

Train more in order to control less.

But one must still know when to let go.

Too early, “autonomy” becomes an elegant name for abandoning someone in the face of a difficulty they do not yet have the means to handle.

Too late, “support” ends up describing carefully organized infantilization.

You teach someone to swim before leaving them alone in the water.

Then comes a moment when continuing to hold them is precisely what prevents them from swimming.

The challenge must energize, not crush

The question of balance reappears elsewhere, in a skill very familiar to sociocultural facilitation: designing a challenge.

Too easy, and it interests no one. People complete it, then move on to something else.

Clearly impossible, and it may produce the opposite of the intended effect. The group does not surpass itself: it gives up internally before it has even begun.

Between these two extremes lies a fertile zone. The difficulty is great enough to force the group to seek something other than its usual solutions, but accessible enough for the existence of a path to remain credible.

This is an educational skill.

It appears almost unchanged in entrepreneurship.

A team that no longer encounters any difficulty often ends up merely managing what it already knows how to do. A team that is persistently given targets it considers absurd does not necessarily enter into some extraordinary dynamic of self-transcendence: it learns to protect itself from those who set the targets.

The work of the person in charge is therefore not so much to “apply pressure”, to use that old lazy expression of management, as to create the conditions in which difficulty releases energy, intelligence and cooperation instead of producing paralysis.

The knowledge is educational.

It immediately becomes strategic.

Worry earlier in order to stay calm later

There is also a strange temporality to responsibility.

A good person in charge can seem almost excessively worried when the deadline is still far away.

Three weeks out, they ask where the equipment is, who has actually confirmed the transport, whether the authorization has been received or merely requested, who knows how to drive a particular vehicle, what will happen if a certain person is absent, why this issue that everyone has been describing for fifteen days as “almost resolved” is still not resolved.

They can sometimes be irritating.

Everything still seems a long way off. There is time.

Then the final days arrive.

The supplier announces a delay. Someone falls ill. The authorization that was supposed to arrive automatically has not arrived. A vehicle becomes unavailable. The weather changes. An error no one had noticed means part of the programme has to be revised.

And the person who was worried when everyone else was calm must then become strangely calm when everyone else starts to worry.

Because panic could still have been useful three weeks earlier, when it could prompt a check, a phone call, a booking, a backup plan.

The day before, it is no longer of any use.

Worry early enough to be able to remain calm late enough: that is a leadership skill one learns quite well in professions where reality does not give you the option of postponing the deadline forever.

Making sure the bricks support one another

Planning should also be viewed differently.

A mediocre programme is a succession of elements.

You do A.

Then B.

Then C.

The quality of a programme appears when these elements begin to have something other than a chronological relationship with one another.

Activity A establishes the trust that B will require. B reveals an ability that C will then enable someone to exercise. The responsibility given to a participant solves a logistical problem while also developing their autonomy. A budget constraint forces the team to invent a more participatory arrangement. Tidying up a space ceases to be merely the chore that follows the activity and becomes, without any grand speech, an opportunity for cooperation.

At that point, logistics is no longer merely logistics. Education is no longer confined to a timeslot labelled “educational time”. The different parts of the programme begin to support one another.

I encountered this same logic again in business projects.

A Gantt chart can be admirably perfect and yet become a nightmare.

Every box is filled in. Dependencies have been drawn. Deadlines are colour-coded. Everyone knows their task. And despite all that, a considerable amount of energy has to be injected every week simply to prevent the whole thing from falling apart.

The interesting question is therefore not simply:

how should the project be broken down correctly?

It becomes:

how can the different components be constructed in such a way that the success of each makes the success of the others easier?

A hire can solve an immediate need while bringing into the organization a skill that will serve the next three projects. A technical experiment can simultaneously produce new knowledge, the beginnings of commercial evidence and part of a funding application. A communications operation can become a recruitment tool. A partnership can reduce a cost while increasing the project’s credibility with a third party.

From that point on, one is no longer simply assigning tasks.

One is designing reinforcements.

The project obviously never becomes automatic. But it begins to generate some of the energy required for its own progress.

Sociocultural facilitation does not know everything

A limit must now be drawn, otherwise enthusiasm would itself destroy the hypothesis.

Turning sociocultural facilitation into a universal school of business would be just as absurd as treating it as a simple profession requiring no expertise.

Sociocultural facilitation does not, by itself, teach corporate finance. It replaces neither advanced accounting, nor company law, nor taxation, nor strategic analysis, nor marketing, nor knowledge of financial markets, nor complex forms of governance.

An excellent facilitator does not, through some mysterious transmutation, become an excellent entrepreneur.

That is not the point.

The proposition is more limited in scope, but far more ambitious in its consequences.

Some of the skills that leaders currently acquire late, empirically and sometimes painfully could be developed much earlier through situations inspired by sociocultural facilitation.

Human management of uncertainty.
Leading heterogeneous groups.
Progressive empowerment.
Conflict management.
Maintaining direction without rigidity.
Decision-making under constraints.
Attention to weak signals.
Practical organization.
The ability to enable participation without abandoning responsibility.

And behind each of these skills, something that a lecture hall has difficulty teaching:

the relationship with reality.

The MBA and the campfire

Imagine a business school.

The first weekend of the year.

One could organize the usual orientation weekend, with the best that this kind of ritual can produce and, sometimes, the worst.

Or one could do something else.

The group sets off into a natural environment selected in advance, supervised and prepared with every necessary precaution. It has to reach a designated place. Equipment has to be distributed, progress organized, different paces accommodated, and a few difficulties resolved that present no great danger but are real enough that the group cannot deal with them through abstraction.

On arrival, a very simple challenge: under permitted conditions, prepare the evening meal together around a fire.

The fire itself matters very little.

It serves as a revealer.

Who speaks immediately?

Who observes before acting?

Who has useful information but does not dare share it?

Who decides for others without realizing they have just done so?

Who settles into waiting for the most willing people to do the work?

Who notices that a member of the group is disengaging?

Who asks for help before the situation becomes difficult?

Who treats an error as a fault, and who knows how to turn it into information?

Within a few hours, the abstract “management students” have begun to become people obliged to do something together.

The next morning, the situation changes significantly.

The group is given a problem that genuinely concerns the world in which they will have to act:

Sudden climate change forecast for the next three years,
Collapse of Biodiversity,
Loss of access to water,
Lack of energy,
Crisis of inclusion in society.

The subject matters less here than its nature. It must be real, broad enough to deserve attention and sufficiently framed for a team to begin acting.

The students form groups, choose an angle, imagine a project that they will have to advance for real during the year, and present it at the end of this second day.

They go home with teams already tested a little by reality, projects in their heads and, if everything has gone well, a few aspirations in their hearts.

On Monday, classes begin.

But their place has changed.

Finance is no longer simply the module the programme requires them to pass: their project needs a budget.

Law ceases to be an abstract subject when a legal constraint blocks one of their ideas.

Marketing becomes necessary because they need to understand a user who does not react as they had imagined.

Negotiation ceases to be a role-playing exercise because a real partner has just said no.

Impact measurement becomes useful the day they discover that a generous intention provides no evidence of its effectiveness.

Knowledge then arrives in a mind that already has a question.

Experience creates the need for knowledge; theory arrives at the moment when it makes it possible to go further.

Replacing theory with experience would be foolish.

But putting them back into conversation with each other would already change a great deal.

What if the Brevet d’Aptitude aux Fonctions d’Animateurs were part of the path taken by future leaders?

The hypothesis can be taken much further.

Or, in reality, something much simpler can be done.

Before embarking on a global reform of MBAs, an experiment already exists. In France, one of its forms has a familiar name: the BAFA. Other countries have their own systems. With Step and Go, we created the CARE Certificates (Certificate in Responsible and Engaged Facilitation) for all countries that do not have such training.

What would happen if we encouraged more teenagers and young adults who imagine one day creating a business, leading an organization or managing a team to go through a genuine experience of sociocultural facilitation?

It should certainly not be done to embellish their CV.

The point lies elsewhere: to have had, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen or twenty years old, concrete responsibility for something that stubbornly refuses to be governed from PowerPoint.

You have to prepare, explain, count, check, convince, observe. Enable participation. Manage conflict. Respond to the unexpected. Be tired and remain responsible.

You need the opportunity to make mistakes about things that can safely go wrong, then understand why you were wrong.

To discover that an instruction perfectly clear to the person giving it can be completely obscure to the person receiving it.

That being right is not enough to move a group forward.

That an enthusiastic collective can head in the wrong direction with remarkable energy.

That a silent person may have noticed what everyone else missed.

And that responsibility consists neither in controlling everything nor in simply watching things happen by themselves.

It would be strange to regard these forms of learning as incidental in the education of those whom we will later ask to lead organizations.

Above all, do not value sociocultural facilitation because it might be useful to the powerful

One trap remains.

It would be serious enough to undermine part of the argument.

After spending several pages explaining that sociocultural facilitation is undervalued, we could end by making exactly the same mistake:

“You see, this profession really is important after all: its skills can be useful to business leaders.”

No.

Sociocultural facilitation does not need any board of directors to justify its existence.

Supporting children and adolescents, helping them build their autonomy, enabling them to discover, create, cooperate, meet other people, take responsibility, grasp their own capacity to act and learn to live with people they would not have chosen is a social function important enough to be recognized in its own right.

If the profession deserves more training, resources, research, recognition and remuneration, that is first and foremost why.

Its possible value to business comes afterwards.

Indeed, it provides a kind of additional proof of the collective miscalculation we have made.

In a poorly valued sector, we discover skills that other worlds know how to charge very highly for as soon as their names are changed.

Facilitation.

Leadership.

Risk management.

Project management.

Team building.

Coaching.

Conflict resolution.

Change management.

Empowerment.

The vocabulary has changed.

The price has too, sometimes, or even often.

The question deserves closer attention.

Reversing the direction of transfer

For several decades, the nonprofit, educational and sociocultural worlds have regularly been invited to learn lessons from business.

They are told they should become more professional, measure more, steer, evaluate, optimize, build indicators, learn to seek funding and present their impact.

Some of these contributions are useful. Some were even necessary.

But there is nothing to prevent us from seriously organizing the journey in the opposite direction.

This is not about importing a few summer-camp games into an executive seminar.

Still less about renaming an evening activity a “transformational leadership experiential workshop” before multiplying its price by twenty.

The idea would be amusing.

But it would miss the point.

The interesting transfer lies elsewhere: in the way of preparing a situation without pretending to lock it down; of building a group; of progressively increasing the responsibility left to people; of holding safety and freedom within the same framework; of living with uncertainty without confusing it with permanent improvisation; of seeking a way beyond when disagreement can still produce something better; and also of knowing that all participation eventually reaches its limit, when the person who carries responsibility must take it back and decide.

And perhaps, above all, in this unusual measure of leadership: not how many decisions did I make myself, but how many people became capable of acting properly without needing me?

Taking seriously what we had dismissed as a little job

So what should be done with this hypothesis?

The first task would be almost thankless: document it.

Map out the professions and micro-professions actually practised within sociocultural facilitation. Look at what a facilitator, a programme director, a steward, an educational lead or a coordinator actually does during a day, a week, a residential programme, rather than what their job titles suggest.

Then compare these practices with the skills required of entrepreneurs, project managers and organizational leaders.

Look at MBA and management-training programmes with the same curiosity: what is already taught remarkably well; what students understand intellectually but experience very little; what some leaders learn only after five, ten or fifteen years in practice, often at the cost of a few mistakes whose consequences are no longer merely educational.

Then experiment.

Invite seasoned professionals from sociocultural facilitation into leadership and project-management programmes.

Build situations long enough for real behaviours to have time to emerge.

Create alliances between popular education organizations and business schools.

Entrust students with projects for which neither they nor their teachers already know the answer.

Introduce theoretical knowledge at the point when experience has given them the questions that allow them to understand it.

Measure what happens.

Publish the successes, but also the failures.

And if the hypothesis proves wrong, abandon it.

If, on the other hand, it holds up, we will need to accept its consequences.

Why not imagine hybrid pathways, perhaps one day master’s degrees, bringing together project management, entrepreneurship, new education, sociocultural facilitation and experiential learning?

Why should serious experience in sociocultural facilitation not become a particularly relevant part of the journey of those who hope one day to take responsibility for an organization?

And above all, regardless of the use business schools might make of it, why would we continue to socially and economically undervalue the people whom we already ask to exercise these responsibilities with children and adolescents?

There may be a rather healthy reversal here.

We thought we were looking at a simple profession; we had not looked at the professions it contained.

We thought we were looking at an implementation role; the field was full of trade-offs.

We thought we were looking at someone who “keeps children occupied”; in reality, they had to prepare, organize, keep safe, mobilize, pass on knowledge, observe, negotiate, decide, improvise — and then, more difficult still, gradually enable others to act without them.

We had grown accustomed to thinking that the world of sociocultural facilitation needed to become more professional by observing business.

On several points, that is true.

But the journey in the opposite direction deserves to be opened.

Because business may have a great deal to learn from a profession in which one discovers very early that a plan is never reality; that possessing formal authority is not enough to secure commitment; that giving someone responsibility presupposes first giving them the means to exercise it; that a collective decision never relieves the person responsible of answering for what happens; and that successful leadership may have the strange effect of making the leader less visible.

The question, then, is not to bring the training of future leaders down to the level of sociocultural facilitation.

The less comfortable question may lie in the opposite movement.

What if it were our perception of the level of sociocultural facilitation that had been far too low from the very beginning?

Then let us take it seriously.

First for its own sake.

For the children and young people it serves, for the adults it also serves, for those who make it their profession, for the organizations that make it possible.

What it might teach elsewhere can come later.

Some forms of knowledge are developed in books. Others in laboratories. Others in consulting firms and boardrooms.

And then there are those we do not always think to preserve.

They are sometimes born one evening, in the middle of a tired group. The planned programme no longer works. A storm is approaching. Half the group wants to do one thing, the other half suggests another. One person is worried, another plays it down, someone remains silent even though they may have noticed the problem before everyone else. Time is running out. People need to be protected without stripping them of all capacity to act, the collective needs to be helped to grow a little further even as the situation deteriorates, what deserves to be heard must be heard and, despite everything, a decision must be made.

Someone does it.

The next day, we may still call it sociocultural facilitation.

We would be wrong to believe that, because the scene took place in a holiday centre rather than on the top floor of an office tower, what was learned there is worth less.