Thomas EGLI

Participatory Science and Research as an Expression of a Swiss Culture of Cooperation

Thomas EGLI — 2026-08-21T14:50:55Z

Participatory Science ; participatory research ; international cooperation ; Switzerland ; science diplomacy ; subsidiarity ; federalism ; direct democracy ; development ; citizen participation ; International Geneva.

Participatory Science and Research are neither a Swiss invention nor a method specific to Swiss foreign policy. They nevertheless display a remarkable affinity with several principles that Switzerland claims as central to its political organisation, international action and development cooperation: participation, subsidiarity, power-sharing, local autonomy, dialogue, the search for inclusive solutions, innovation, stability and multilateralism.

This convergence does not relate solely to values. It also concerns a way of organising action: distributing responsibilities, recognising the skills and expertise present within territories, involving the people concerned in producing solutions, and building mechanisms capable of operating across several scales without depriving local actors of their autonomy.

Applied to development cooperation, Participatory Science and Research can therefore be seen as a particularly coherent operational translation of principles deeply associated with the functioning of the Swiss political system. They offer a form of scientific cooperation that no longer consists solely in producing knowledge about territories or for populations, but in increasing the capacity of territories and populations to produce, discuss and use for themselves the knowledge necessary for their development.

1. A very strong affinity of principles

It would be excessive to claim that Participatory Science and Research are, by nature, a Swiss practice. Their history is international, their forms are diverse, and their intellectual traditions belong to very different scientific, social and political contexts.

The relevance of drawing a parallel with Switzerland lies here in the values and strategies that have been developed.

The Confederation's Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-2027 notably describes Switzerland through concepts of dialogue, inclusive solutions, power-sharing, subsidiarity, stability and innovation [1]. Democracy, good governance, peace, human rights, sustainability and multilateralism are also part of the framework within which Switzerland presents its foreign policy [2].

Genuinely participatory research is based precisely on several of these principles.

It distributes certain research functions among several categories of actors. It recognises the existence of situated knowledge. It organises dialogue between different forms of expertise. It enables local actors to contribute to identifying a problem, producing data, interpreting them and, depending on the mechanism, designing responses.

There is therefore less an identity between « Swiss values » and « participatory science » than a structural affinity between two ways of organising collective action.

This distinction is important. It makes it possible to move beyond a superficial cultural comparison and examine the mechanisms themselves.

2. From direct democracy to participation in knowledge production

One of the most visible characteristics of the Swiss political system lies in the role given to direct citizen participation. Switzerland's institutional presentation emphasises the role of direct democracy and the instruments that allow the population to intervene regularly in public decision-making [3].

The comparison with Participatory Science and Research obviously does not consist in confusing political decision-making with scientific activity. The criteria for validating scientific knowledge are not those of a popular vote.

The affinity lies in another principle: a person concerned by a collective issue is not necessarily reduced to the role of recipient of a decision or of expertise produced elsewhere.

In a participatory mechanism, citizens can observe an environment, collect data, contribute to formulating a question, document a situation, participate in interpreting results or take part in designing an intervention.

A shift therefore occurs that is comparable to the one characterising participatory democracy: citizens are no longer merely informed after knowledge has been produced; they can be involved in certain stages of its production.

This logic takes on particular importance in development cooperation.

The traditional vocabulary of cooperation has long distinguished between donors, experts, operators and beneficiaries. Participatory research makes it possible to alter this architecture. A population affected by a problem relating to water, biodiversity, agriculture, environmental health or natural resource management can become a producer of part of the knowledge on which action will be based.

Participation is then no longer merely a form of consultation. It becomes a component of the project's knowledge infrastructure.

3. Subsidiarity: producing and acting at the most relevant level

The principle of subsidiarity occupies an important place in Switzerland's federal organisation. It assumes that responsibilities should be exercised, as far as possible, at the level capable of assuming them, rather than being systematically transferred to a higher authority [4].

The Federal Office of Justice also describes federalism as an organisation that enables communities to retain autonomy while ensuring their integration within a common whole [5].

Participatory Science and Research offer a particularly clear translation of this principle into the field of knowledge.

An observation can be made by a resident. A series of observations can be organised by a local association. Their analysis can involve a university. Their comparison may require a national or international network. Their political use may fall within the remit of a local authority, a State or a multilateral organisation.

Not all functions need to be concentrated in the same place.

This architecture makes it possible to design knowledge systems in which the international level does not replace the local level, but provides it with additional capacities: common methods, comparison, expertise, digital infrastructure, funding or institutional recognition.

In development cooperation, this approach profoundly changes the relationship between external expertise and local capacity.

It is no longer a matter of automatically assuming that relevant knowledge must flow down from an international institution to the field. Part of that knowledge can instead be produced in the field and then connected to broader scientific systems.

Cooperation then becomes an organisation of the circulation of knowledge across scales.

4. Federalism as a model for distributed networks

Federal logic is not based solely on decentralisation. It allows several entities to retain their identity and certain competences while belonging to a common architecture.

This characteristic has a direct equivalent in many participatory science projects.

A water-monitoring programme can bring together schools, local authorities, associations, laboratories and administrations distributed across several catchment areas. Each can produce observations locally. Common protocols nevertheless make it possible to compare and aggregate them.

The same principle can be applied to biodiversity, soils, climate, pollution, landscapes or other scientific subjects.

The value of this architecture for international cooperation is considerable. It avoids two opposite pitfalls: absolute fragmentation, in which each initiative remains isolated, and excessive centralisation, in which an international actor imposes its tools, categories and operating methods on the entire network.

Between these two extremes, a federative model emerges: locally autonomous actors connected through common standards, tools, objectives and spaces for cooperation.

This way of designing an international scientific programme has an obvious affinity with the Swiss search for unity compatible with diversity.

5. From power-sharing to sharing authority over knowledge

The concept of power-sharing is explicitly among the characteristics highlighted in Switzerland's Foreign Policy Strategy [6].

This concept takes on a particular meaning when applied to research.

Producing knowledge is never an operation entirely separate from power relations. Defining the questions to be studied, selecting relevant data, determining the categories used, interpreting results and deciding how they will be used confers considerable capacity for action on the people and institutions that control these operations.

Participatory research can redistribute part of this capacity.

It leads to several questions:

Who defines the problem?

Who chooses what should be observed?

Who produces the data?

Who can access them?

Who interprets them?

Who decides on possible uses of the results?

Who ultimately has the capacities needed to continue the work?

In the context of international cooperation, these questions are particularly important because asymmetries in resources between donors, scientific institutions, operators and local communities are often considerable.

One of the major contributions of participatory research can consist precisely in partially rebalancing the power to produce and use knowledge.

This does not mean eliminating scientific expertise or considering all forms of knowledge to be equivalent. It means distinguishing scientific rigour from the institutional concentration of scientific power.

A method can be rigorous while remaining open to participation.

6. Dialogue, compromise and constructive confrontation between forms of knowledge

Swiss politics places particular importance on dialogue and on seeking solutions that are inclusive enough to be supported by different actors. The functioning of the Federal Council itself is based on an institutional culture of seeking common solutions rather than on a permanent logic of majority confrontation [7].

Participatory Science and Research require a similar capacity.

They bring together actors who speak neither the same language nor from the same position: researchers, residents, farmers, teachers, civil servants, companies, associations, local authorities or international organisations.

Their cooperation requires different demands to be made compatible.

Scientists must be able to maintain the conditions required for a robust protocol. Participants must understand what they are doing and why. Local actors must be able to connect the research to a real problem. Public organisations must have usable data. Communities must be able to recognise their experience in the way the problem is framed.

Scientific participation is therefore not the erasure of differences. It constitutes an organised mechanism for productive confrontation between different forms of knowledge, interests and responsibilities.

This characteristic brings it close to a culture of compromise that does not necessarily seek uniformity, but rather the possibility of building common action despite the plurality of positions.

7. Recognising diversity without abandoning scientific requirements

Switzerland was politically constructed around the coexistence of different communities, languages, traditions and minorities. Its federal organisation helps precisely to make this plurality compatible with the existence of common institutions [8].

A similar issue arises in knowledge production.

A researcher possesses scientific and methodological expertise. A farmer possesses in-depth experience of their soils. A community may possess a memory of the territory accumulated over several generations. A manager knows the institutional constraints. A resident can document everyday phenomena that remain invisible during a one-off scientific campaign.

Recognising this diversity does not imply considering all statements to be scientifically equivalent.

The function of rigorous participatory research is precisely to create the conditions for collecting, distinguishing, testing, confronting and articulating different forms of knowledge.

In development cooperation, this capacity is essential. It limits the risk that an international programme will interpret a territory solely through categories constructed outside it.

It also enables groups that are usually distant from scientific institutions to participate in describing the problems that concern them.

8. From beneficiary to actor: autonomy and local ownership

The approaches of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation give significant importance to partner participation, capacity development and the adaptation of interventions to local contexts [9].

This orientation constitutes one of the most direct points of convergence with participatory research.

In a conventional approach, an international scientific project can intervene in a territory, produce data, publish results and leave. The territory has been studied without necessarily increasing its own capacity to produce knowledge.

Participatory research makes it possible to introduce another evaluation criterion.

At the end of the project, are there more people capable of using the protocol?

Do local actors have the necessary instruments?

Can they access the data?

Do they understand how the data are produced?

Can they continue certain observations?

Have relationships been created between local authorities, scientists, citizens and field organisations?

Does institutional capacity remain after external funding has ended?

From this perspective, the success of scientific cooperation is no longer measured solely by the quantity of knowledge produced. It is also measured by the knowledge capacity that remains within the territory.

This evolution brings participatory research and capacity development very close together.

An SDC document devoted to the latter also emphasises the importance of local skills, partnerships and a donor posture that avoids permanently substituting itself for the actors it seeks to strengthen [10].

9. Participation as an infrastructure for good governance

Scientific participation does not only produce knowledge. It can also change the conditions under which public decision-making takes place.

When a community is able to regularly measure the quality of a river, changes in a forest, air pollution or a transformation of its environment, it acquires a new capacity to engage in dialogue with an administration, an operator or a decision-maker.

Data become a form of mediation between lived experience and public decision-making.

The SDC itself supports participation and citizen-monitoring approaches aimed at strengthening transparency and accountability [11].

Participatory Science and Research can extend this logic when governance issues depend on phenomena that need to be observed, measured or documented.

They then give citizens not only a voice, but also the means to produce factual elements that can enter into collective discussion.

This function obviously guarantees neither agreement nor good decisions. It can, however, increase actors' capacity to discuss matters on the basis of a shared documented object.

10. From trust to the production of a common factual basis

Trust is a central resource in relations between institutions, communities and territories.

Yet in many situations involving development or natural resource management, disagreements also concern the facts.

Is water quality really deteriorating?

Which activity contributes to pollution?

Is biodiversity declining?

Is a public intervention producing the announced results?

When data are produced exclusively by one of the parties, their legitimacy may be challenged by the others.

Participatory research can sometimes shift the issue. Different actors can participate in designing the protocol, understand the methods used and contribute to collecting observations.

They do not necessarily come to agree on their interests or on the solution to adopt. They can nevertheless share a more broadly accepted factual basis.

This characteristic is of major interest in the fields of water, agriculture, biodiversity, management of common resources or the transboundary environment.

11. Participatory Science, good offices and science diplomacy

Switzerland places particular importance on peace promotion, dialogue and good offices in its foreign policy. The Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-2027 also mentions science diplomacy among the instruments that can contribute to international relations [12].

Caution is required here.

Participatory research does not, by itself, resolve a political conflict. The joint production of data does not erase divergent interests or power relations.

It can nevertheless provide a space for cooperation around an issue concrete enough to enable relationships between actors who find it difficult to cooperate on other subjects.

A river basin, animal migration, pollution, a forest resource or a climate phenomenon can cross several borders. Observing them sometimes requires a continuity that political boundaries do not easily allow.

Transboundary participatory science can then create a relational infrastructure: common protocols, training, data exchanges, meetings, mixed teams and communities of practice.

Scientific knowledge in this case becomes a field of cooperation before potentially becoming a field of negotiation.

Participatory Science and Research could thus occupy a particular place within the continuum of science diplomacy: a science diplomacy conducted not only between research institutions or governments, but also rooted in populations and territories.

12. A multilateralism connecting institutions with territories

Switzerland supports multilateralism and places particular importance on Geneva's role in international governance [13].

Participatory Science and Research offer an interesting possibility for complementing this institutional multilateralism.

International organisations work mainly with States, institutions, experts and representative organisations. Participatory networks make it possible to connect these structures with a much larger number of territorial actors: universities, cities, associations, schools, communities, citizens or field managers.

It then becomes possible to imagine a multilevel form of multilateralism.

International organisations can provide common frameworks.

Universities contribute methods.

States create the regulatory conditions.

Local authorities organise territorial action.

Associations mobilise participants.

Citizens produce certain observations.

Data flow upwards towards national and international systems, while knowledge and resources flow back down towards the territories.

It is therefore no longer only a matter of connecting States with one another, but of connecting the different scales of the same global issue.

This characteristic makes Participatory Science and Research particularly relevant to International Geneva, many of whose fields of action — environment, health, climate, development, peace, human rights — depend precisely on the capacity to connect international standards with realities on the ground.

13. Environment and responsibility towards the commons

The preservation of natural resources is among the objectives associated with Swiss foreign policy [14].

It is also one of the fields in which participatory science is most immediately applicable.

Citizen participation makes it possible to considerably increase observation capacities: multiplying measurement points, repeating observations over time, and covering territories that are difficult to monitor exclusively through professional scientific teams.

But its value goes beyond the quantity of data produced.

Regularly observing an environment creates a particular relationship with it.

A person who monitors a river, soil, an animal population or a landscape over several years acquires knowledge and often a greater capacity to perceive ongoing transformations.

Producing data can therefore potentially become a form of territorial responsibility.

In a cooperation programme, citizens are no longer merely made aware of the environment through a message designed by an institution. They become among those who help to make transformations of that environment visible.

Participatory science can thus connect knowledge, education, capacity for action and management of the commons.

14. Innovation and distributed experimentation

Innovation is among the characteristics that Switzerland's foreign policy strategy associates with the country's positioning [15].

Participatory research can contribute to a particular form of innovation: distributed experimentation.

When a network includes many relatively autonomous territories, each context can test certain adaptations, methods or uses. Solutions that work can then be documented, compared and transferred.

This model is particularly suited to international cooperation.

Since social, ecological and institutional contexts differ, replicating a programme identically rarely produces the same effects everywhere.

A participatory architecture, by contrast, makes it possible to maintain a common methodological core while allowing significant local adaptation.

Innovation therefore no longer comes solely from a centre that designs and then disseminates a solution. It can also emerge from the peripheries and circulate horizontally between territories.

15. Stability through ownership rather than dependence

Stability is also among the concepts highlighted in Swiss foreign policy [16].

Applied to cooperation, this concept can be understood not only in a political sense, but also in terms of the sustainability of the mechanisms put in place.

A project in which all skills, instruments, data and decisions remain concentrated with the external operator becomes vulnerable when that operator leaves the territory.

By contrast, a programme that gradually develops the capacities of several local actors may retain some of its functions after the initial funding disappears.

Participation can therefore become a possible condition for institutional resilience.

It is no longer merely a value.

It becomes a technology for sustaining action over time.

16. Solidarity based on the capacity to act

Development cooperation has historically been based on a logic of solidarity. Swiss foreign policy places its action in particular within the framework of reducing poverty and hardship, promoting human rights, peace and the peaceful coexistence of peoples [17].

Participatory Science and Research make it possible to introduce an additional requirement into this solidarity: helping without rendering unnecessary the capacity for action of those being helped.

From this perspective, the desired progression is no longer merely:

assistance → service provision.

It can become:

assistance → participation → competence → partnership → autonomy.

External aid sometimes remains indispensable. It can provide funding, equipment, expertise, institutional access or infrastructure.

But its objective can be designed in such a way that a growing share of functions is gradually assumed by actors within the territory.

Scientific participation then becomes consistent with a conception of cooperation in which solidarity and autonomy are not opposed.

17. Reciprocity as a principle of scientific cooperation

The relationship between international expertise and local knowledge is not necessarily unidirectional.

A Swiss university or organisation can provide a method, protocol, network or technology. But the local partner possesses what the external actor does not: detailed knowledge of the field, continuity of observation, social understanding of the context, relational networks, memory of the territory and the ability to interpret certain situations.

Participatory research can therefore potentially transform cooperation into a relationship of mutual learning.

In its documents devoted to capacity development, the SDC emphasises the importance of partnerships and of a relatively modest posture on the part of external actors [18].

This reciprocity is probably one of the most important elements distinguishing participatory scientific cooperation from a simple international scientific service.

The partner is not merely the person or institution to which a method is applied.

It becomes the person or institution with which knowledge is constructed.

18. Historical continuity with certain Swiss conceptions of decentralisation

The connection between the Swiss approach to cooperation and decentralised organisation is not merely a contemporary interpretation.

A document devoted to decentralisation in Swiss bilateral cooperation already highlighted the importance given to participation, local resources, needs expressed at the local level and collaboration with local organisations. It explicitly drew a parallel with the Swiss tradition of subsidiarity and with a conception of the State built from the bottom up [19].

This point gives the comparison with Participatory Science and Research particular depth.

Participatory Science and Research can be regarded as an extension of this logic into the field of knowledge.

If subsidiarity implies that action should be carried out at the closest level capable of assuming it, scientific subsidiarity could mean that knowledge production should also be distributed down to the closest level capable of reliably carrying out part of it.

Professional researchers remain indispensable for certain functions.

But they do not need to perform every function.

A school can observe, while an association can coordinate, a community can identify a question, a university can validate a protocol, a laboratory can carry out certain analyses, an international organisation can harmonise indicators, and an administration can integrate the results into public decision-making.

This architecture does not necessarily reduce scientific rigour. It distributes differently the responsibilities required to meet that rigour.

19. Towards a Swiss conception of participatory scientific cooperation

Taken separately, each of these parallels might seem relatively general. Many countries support participation, innovation, dialogue or good governance.

The value of the approach becomes apparent when they are considered simultaneously.

Participatory Science and Research combine:

citizen participation ;
distribution of responsibilities ;
autonomy of local actors ;
cooperation between several levels ;
recognition of the diversity of knowledge ;
production of a common framework ;
dialogue between different interests ;
capacity development ;
transparency ;
distributed innovation ;
the pursuit of sustainability ;
international cooperation ;
connections between territories and global institutions.

Taken together, these elements display a distinctive affinity with the political and diplomatic architecture Switzerland itself uses to describe its system: participatory democracy, federalism, subsidiarity, power-sharing, dialogue, inclusive solutions, stability, innovation and multilateralism.

It therefore becomes possible to formulate a more ambitious hypothesis.

Participatory Science and Research could constitute one of the most coherent contemporary forms of a Swiss approach to international scientific cooperation.

Not because they are exclusively Swiss.

Not because Switzerland holds an intellectual or historical monopoly over them.

But because they make it possible to translate into operational methods several principles that already structure its political organisation and international action.

20. From scientific cooperation to a diplomacy of participation through science

Science diplomacy generally refers to the relationships between science and foreign policy: scientific cooperation between States, the mobilisation of expertise in international relations, or the use of science as a space for dialogue.

Participatory Science and Research make it possible to add another dimension.

They enable a form of science diplomacy that no longer connects only governments, international organisations and universities, but also local authorities, associations, schools and citizens.

This approach could be described as a diplomacy of participation through science.

It would be particularly well suited to Switzerland's position.

A country of limited size can hardly build its international influence on demographic or military power. It can, however, help to build methods, institutions, spaces for dialogue and infrastructures that enable different actors to cooperate.

From this perspective, Swiss added value would not necessarily consist in becoming the centre that produces all knowledge.

It could consist in becoming one of the places where the architectures enabling many others to produce knowledge together are designed and organised.

---

Participatory Science and Research should therefore not be presented as merely a technique for science communication or as an economical way of increasing the number of available observers.

Their scope is potentially much broader.

They propose an organisation of knowledge in which participation, subsidiarity, local autonomy, the sharing of certain responsibilities, the confrontation of forms of knowledge, cooperation between levels and capacity development are integrated into the method itself.

This is precisely what makes it possible to connect them with several principles strongly associated with Switzerland.

In the field of development cooperation, this convergence becomes particularly significant.

Switzerland applies to its own political functioning a principle according to which the people and territories concerned must have a genuine capacity to participate in the conduct of affairs that affect them. Participatory Science and Research apply a comparable principle to knowledge production: the people and territories affected by a problem can contribute to describing it, understanding it and building the means to act upon it.

As such, their development within international cooperation could be understood not as the importation of a new fashionable method, but as the extension, into the scientific field, of a political culture already familiar to Switzerland.

A culture of participation rather than centralisation.

Of subsidiarity rather than substitution.

Of partnership rather than assistance alone.

Of supported autonomy rather than dependence.

Of dialogue rather than imposition.

And, at the international level, of the patient construction of institutions that enable different actors to jointly produce the knowledge they need in order to act.

[1] Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, « Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-2027 », https://www.eda.admin.ch/fr/strategie-de-politique-exterieure-2024-2027.

[2] Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, « Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-27 », https://www.eda.admin.ch/en/foreign-policy-strategy-2024-27.

[3] Swiss Confederation, « Political system », https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/fr/systeme-politique.

[4] Swiss Confederation, « Federalism », https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/fr/le-federalisme.

[5] Federal Office of Justice, « Federalism », https://www.bj.admin.ch/fr/federalisme.

[6] Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, « Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-27 », https://www.eda.admin.ch/dam/eda/en/documents/publications/SchweizerischeAussenpolitik/aussenpolitische-strategie-2024-27_EN.pdf.

[7] Swiss Confederation, « Duties of the Federal Council: decision-making », https://www.admin.ch/fr/attributions-conseil-federal-decider.

[8] Swiss Confederation, « Political system », https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/fr/systeme-politique.

[9] Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, « Development cooperation », https://www.deza.eda.admin.ch/fr/cooperation-au-developpement.

[10] Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, « Capacity Development », https://www.eda.admin.ch/content/dam/deza/en/documents/die-deza/strategie/202114-capacity-development-sdc_EN.pdf.

[11] Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, project relating to « citizen-led monitoring », https://www.eda.admin.ch/deza/de/home/projekte-fokus/projekte.olddesign.par_projectfilter_copy_page2.html/content/dezaprojects/SDC/en/2/7F11708/phase1.

[12] Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, « Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-2027 », https://www.eda.admin.ch/fr/strategie-de-politique-exterieure-2024-2027.

[13] Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, « Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-27 », https://www.eda.admin.ch/en/foreign-policy-strategy-2024-27.

[14] Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, presentation of the foundations of Swiss foreign policy, https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/aussenpolitik/strategien.html.

[15] Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, « Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-27 », https://www.eda.admin.ch/dam/eda/en/documents/publications/SchweizerischeAussenpolitik/aussenpolitische-strategie-2024-27_EN.pdf.

[16] Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, « Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-27 », https://www.eda.admin.ch/dam/eda/en/documents/publications/SchweizerischeAussenpolitik/aussenpolitische-strategie-2024-27_EN.pdf.

[17] Swiss Confederation, « Foreign policy », https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/foreign-policy.

[18] Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, « Capacity Development », https://www.eda.admin.ch/content/dam/deza/en/documents/die-deza/strategie/202114-capacity-development-sdc_EN.pdf.

[19] Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, document on decentralisation in bilateral cooperation, https://www.eda.admin.ch/dam/deza/en/documents/themen/staats-wirtschaftsreformen/156896-decentralisation-bilateral-cooperation_EN.pdf.

The incredible resources of sociocultural facilitation for impact entrepreneurship

Thomas EGLI — 2026-08-19T15:42:57Z

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.

How Do You Stay in Control When an Organization Becomes Too Large to Control Everything?

Thomas EGLI — 2026-08-17T19:17:03Z

What the organization of living systems can teach us about steering, growth and regulation in large organizations

There is a rather pleasant problem to have: that of an organization that works.

It finds new resources. Activities increase. So do requests. A team that used to work in one city now works across several regions. An association becomes national. A company that used to make one product now makes ten. A humanitarian organization opens new field operations, recruits new skills, creates specialized departments. What could still be handled among a few people must now pass between professions, offices, countries and different responsibilities.

This development is generally sought after. It is even often regarded as one of the signs of success.

Yet something gradually changes in the very nature of the organization.

With ten people, the person in charge can still know almost every case.

With fifty, they generally know the people who know the cases.

With five hundred, they already depend on other people to learn what is happening, understand what is being reported to them, distinguish the important problem from the spectacular problem, decide, and then find out what became of the decision.

With several thousand people, the organization can end up generating a considerable share of its internal activity simply to allow its leadership to continue operating as it did when the organization was small.

Information flows upward, dashboards appear, meetings multiply.

Approvals are introduced, then levels of approval to make the first approvals more reliable. One person is tasked with coordinating two teams that were struggling to work together. Then another is needed to coordinate the coordinators. A procedure is created following a problem. It joins the procedures created following previous problems.

Taken separately, each of these choices may be rational.

The interesting phenomenon may lie elsewhere.

At what point do the mechanisms created to maintain control begin to reduce the actual capacity to control?

Growing is not simply becoming bigger

It is easy to think of growth as an increase in quantity.

An organization has one hundred people. It recruits fifty more. It has therefore become an organization of one hundred and fifty people.

Living systems do not grow quite like that.

A ten-ton animal is not a one-ton animal in which every cell has become ten times larger.

Growth produces differentiation. Some functions are strengthened, others appear. Certain structures specialize. Circulation networks must expand. The system must simultaneously maintain a boundary, receive matter, energy and information, process them, distribute what its different parts need, produce, store, eliminate, defend itself, repair itself, reproduce and continue to perceive what is happening around it.

In Les Idées du Vivant, I chose to look at human organizations in this way: not first through the organizational chart, but through the functions they must perform in order to continue to exist.

This shift is useful.

In a traditional organizational chart, we ask:

“Who is responsible for what?”

In a functional reading, we can also ask:

“What must continue to function, wherever it happens to sit in the organizational chart?”

The two questions do not necessarily produce the same map.

The function that enables an organization to perceive its environment is not contained within a single department. Sales receives information from customers. A field team sees a local transformation before headquarters does. Human resources sees certain signals emerge through recruitment or departures.

A scientist detects a technical development. A lawyer sees a regulatory risk approaching. Someone responsible for purchasing notices that a resource is becoming difficult to obtain.

All of them contribute, from different places, to the same major function of receiving information.

But what has been received still needs to be decoded.

Receiving is not understanding

This is a fairly obvious distinction in an organism, and curiously less obvious in organizations.

An eye receives light.

By itself, it does not “see” a truck approaching.

It transforms a signal that must then be processed, combined with other information and interpreted. An organization can also receive enormous amounts of information without understanding what is happening to it. It can even become extraordinarily effective at collecting information.

Dashboards are completed on time. Indicators are up to date. Reports move upward. Minutes exist. Everything is stored somewhere.

And yet an important change can remain invisible for several months because that change did not fit into any expected category.

This is one of the difficulties of growth: the more information an organization produces about itself, the less the existence of that information guarantees that it will be noticed.

Leadership can therefore receive more and see less.

The problem does not necessarily come from the quality of the people. It may come from the architecture of the system.

A very simple exercise could be carried out in many organizations.

Take a recurring report.

Then ask a single question:

What is the last important decision that this report actually changed?

If no one remembers, that does not automatically mean the report is useless. It may have legal, historical, accounting or scientific value.

But the question becomes interesting.

And the reverse is even more interesting:

what important information could appear somewhere in the organization today without any mechanism enabling leadership to understand that it is important?

Control is a function. It is not necessarily a place

When an organization is small, several functions can be combined in the same person.

The founder hears from a customer. They immediately understand the problem. They know what resource is available. They decide. They call the person who will carry out the action. They then check whether it worked.

Reception, decoding, decision-making, allocation of resources, regulation: a few minutes of conversation made all of this work.

When the organization grows, it is possible to try to preserve the same mechanism.

More and more situations are then escalated to the person who knows.

That person becomes very important.

They are often extraordinarily competent. They know the history of the organization, the people, old agreements, risks, exceptions to the rules and sometimes the reasons why those rules were written.

They can solve in ten minutes what would take others two days, and that is precisely how the system gradually learns to depend on them.

The more problems they solve, the more problems are brought to them. The more problems are brought to them, the more indispensable they become. And the more indispensable they become, the more rational it seems to continue escalating problems to them. It is a very effective feedback loop.

Until the day their effectiveness itself becomes a limit to growth.

The right question is probably not whether this person exercises “too much power”. That vocabulary quickly leads to a rather unproductive ideological debate.

A functional question is more useful:

how many essential functions has the organization gradually concentrated in this person?

Memory?

Decoding?

Arbitration?

Authorization?

Relationships with certain stakeholders?

Risk detection?

Transmission of culture?

Coherence between several activities?

If this person disappears for three months, it is not their titles that interest us.

It is the functions that stop.

Deciding, authorizing, being alerted, knowing

Confusion between these four situations probably produces a considerable share of bureaucracy in large organizations.

Leadership may need to know that a decision has been made.

That does not mean it needed to make it. It may want to be alerted when a situation exceeds a certain level of risk.

That does not mean it has to examine every situation below that threshold. It may need to authorize an irreversible or unusual commitment.

That does not mean it needs to design the solution itself. And some decisions do indeed need to remain within its remit.

It then becomes possible to retain a great deal of control over the system while reducing the number of decisions that reach the center.

This is less contradictory than it may seem.

A driver does not control their car by personally adjusting fuel injection several thousand times per minute. They have systems that regulate this operation and a few pieces of information that allow them to intervene when something leaves the normal range.

The human body takes this organization much further. A vast amount of regulation takes place without conscious decision-making. Temperature changes, blood vessels react, chemical concentrations change, cells locally correct disturbances. Several mechanisms intervene simultaneously, sometimes in opposite directions.

The brain is not absent; it is simply not responsible for doing everything.

And this allows it to process other things.

Escalating decisions may not be the right object

In many organizations, people try to define how much someone is allowed to spend.

1,000 euros here.

10,000 euros there.

100,000 euros higher up.

This is useful, but very partial.

Two decisions involving 10,000 euros can have radically different systemic meanings. One buys something the team purchases every month. The other may legally commit the organization for several years.

An almost cost-free decision can affect its reputation. A local technical modification may have major safety consequences.

The logic of living systems therefore leads us to shift the question again.

Which events should trigger a change in the level of regulation?

That is not exactly the same as “who has the right to decide?”.

A team can have a high degree of autonomy as long as it remains within certain limits. A piece of information can automatically trigger an alert. A particular risk may require an external opinion.

A completely new situation may fall outside established rules and be escalated immediately. The boundary becomes more intelligent. A biological membrane is not a wall.

It lets some things through, retains others, recognizes substances, maintains a difference between inside and outside.

An organization needs the same kind of function.

The more autonomous a unit is meant to be, the clearer its boundary must be.

What resources can it commit? What risks can it take? What belongs within its scope? What must be shared with others?

From what event onward must the higher level be informed?

Vague autonomy creates anxiety. Autonomy with precise boundaries can, on the contrary, increase leadership's visibility.

What looks like duplication

Organizations have learned to seek efficiency by eliminating duplication.

The intuition is excellent as long as the duplication is genuinely redundant.

Living systems are much less economical from this point of view.

Two kidneys.

Two lungs.

Overlapping regulatory circuits.

Information received simultaneously from several places.

Different species sometimes performing similar functions within an ecosystem.

This apparent inefficiency has an interesting property: something can disappear without the function immediately disappearing with it.

This can be called useful redundancy.

Applied to an organization, it obviously does not mean recruiting two people for every position.

Once again, the question concerns functions.

Does a vital function depend on a single department? Can critical information only be detected by one team? Does an essential external relationship depend on one person? Is a core capability genuinely transferable?

When an entire function is confused with a single organ, the organization can appear extremely efficient until that organ disappears.

Robustness sometimes looks like an unnecessary cost as long as nothing happens.

That is true of almost every form of insurance.

Each department is not an isolated organ

The biological analogy becomes misleading if we decide that finance is the blood, leadership the brain, IT the nervous system, and so on.

A real organization is more interesting than that. The same department performs several functions. The same function is distributed across several departments. Leadership regulates, of course.

But an accounting procedure also regulates.

Peer review regulates.

A field team that refuses a technically impossible decision contributes to regulation. An IT system can prevent an unauthorized operation. A customer, member or beneficiary can trigger a correction.

In a sufficiently developed organization, the quality of regulation therefore depends less on the power of a central organ than on the quality of the relationships between all the functions involved in that regulation.

This in no way removes leadership. It changes its work.

It can devote less energy to handling every event itself and more to creating the conditions under which ordinary events will be handled correctly elsewhere.

That is a system-design function.

Growing like a cell?

There is another way to look at growth.

A cell reaches a certain size. It does not generally become a gigantic cell. It divides.

Human organizations sometimes experience something comparable.

Imagine an activity that has become very large.

One possibility is to continuously enlarge the same department. People are recruited. More managers are needed. The managers are grouped under another manager. Interactions increase.

Central functions must absorb the additional volume.

We call this growing, and it is indeed a form of growth.

Another possibility is sometimes to replicate a relatively complete unit.

A new team receives a mission, resources, skills and a sufficiently coherent decision-making space to solve a large proportion of the problems it will encounter itself.

The two units remain connected.

They can use shared resources.

They share a memory, certain standards, perhaps an identity, a technical infrastructure.

But their growth no longer requires every new person to interact with all the people already present.

This difference becomes enormous as size increases.

An organization that keeps adding connections ends up devoting a growing share of its energy to managing those connections. A modular organization can add capacity without increasing the number of interfaces to manage in the same proportions.

This is one of the questions proposed in the tool Growing Without Slowing Down, proposed by the Geneva Forum:

if your activity increased by 20%, by how much would the amount of coordination required increase?

The answer sometimes says more about the organization's future capacity than its available budget.

The pyramid is not dead

It would be tempting to conclude this reasoning by deciding that hierarchical organizations are old and bad, while networks are modern and desirable.

Living systems do not teach us that lesson.

They use several forms at the same time.

Some functions must be extremely controlled.

A surgical operation does not necessarily benefit from holding a vote on where to make the incision.

A safety chain may require perfectly identified responsibilities.

An emergency situation may temporarily justify a strong concentration of decision-making.

In other situations, information is so distributed and the environment changes so quickly that a center simply cannot receive, understand and process everything that is happening.

A viable organization therefore probably knows how to use several geometries.

A mechanical and hierarchical part where repeatability and safety require it.

A biological and networked part when different units need to adapt locally while remaining coherent.

Sometimes something even more fractal, when small units emerge, recombine and disappear around problems that no one could have predicted.

The problem begins when a single architecture is applied everywhere because it feels reassuring.

The unique role of purpose

If not all decisions are escalated anymore, something must allow local decisions to remain compatible.

In an organism, this coherence is obviously not produced by sending a daily strategic memo to every cell.

Cells have common mechanisms, signals, constraints, a history embedded in the way they function.

In a human organization, part of this role is played by purpose.

The word “mission” is often used for communication.

It can serve a much greater purpose.

A mission becomes a genuine regulatory function when it enables decisions.

Two teams encounter two solutions that are equally legal, equally fundable and technically feasible.

One better serves the collective project.

Do they know which one?

If so, part of the arbitration has been distributed without losing coherence.

If not, someone will probably have to arbitrate above them.

An organization whose purpose is extremely clear can therefore allow much more autonomy.

It is not less controlled.

Part of the control has been embedded in the very criteria from which everyone makes decisions.

This phenomenon is familiar in organizations with a very strong culture.

The person who has just arrived asks for authorization.

The person who has deeply understood the project already knows what is compatible with it.

Of course, culture can also produce collective blind spots. Any sufficiently powerful mechanism can produce its own pathologies.

Hence the need for information coming from outside, diversity, contradiction and the capacity to question assumptions.

Leadership work changes with scale

In a small organization, leading can largely consist of making decisions.

This model works because the variety of problems remains compatible with the variety that one or a few people can absorb.

As the system grows, leadership progressively becomes something else.

Defining boundaries. Ensuring that critical information can circulate. Seeing that certain functions have become too dependent on one person. Knowing where local regulation is sufficient and where a central decision remains essential.

Observing deviations. Maintaining a sufficiently precise purpose. Deciding exceptionally and very quickly when the system moves outside its normal range.

The leader progressively stops being the person who handles a large share of events.

They become more the person who ensures that the organization knows how to handle events.

The difference is considerable.

And it explains a paradox.

Leadership can make fewer decisions while exercising far greater control over the whole.

Because boundaries are better understood, because exceptions become more visible, because a local decision leaves a trace, because a concerning signal triggers an alert instead of waiting for the next meeting, because functions no longer disappear with the people who carried them, because the top of the organization regains time to observe what the system does not yet know how to handle.

Five questions are sometimes enough to begin

There is no need to reorganize the company to check whether this issue exists.

Simply take a few real situations.

1. Which decision regularly reaches your level even though your intervention almost never changes the outcome?

If the answer is “many”, the escalation mechanism may be worth examining.

2. What important information could appear somewhere in the organization today without you being alerted?

The answer says more about actual control than the number of reports received.

3. Which essential function still depends on a person or team you would not know how to replace quickly?

It is a very simple snapshot of certain vulnerabilities.

4. In which situations does a team know exactly when it must stop deciding on its own and escalate the problem?

If no one knows the boundary, the organization will often compensate by multiplying approvals.

5. If activity increased by 50% next year, which part of your steering system would also have to increase by 50%?

That may be where the next limiting factor lies.

Take the “Growing Without Slowing Down” test.

A question I have been working on for a long time

In 2001, I published Les Idées du Vivant.

The starting point was fairly simple: billions of organisms and ecosystems function, develop, absorb disturbances, exchange matter, energy and information, specialize, cooperate, compete and sometimes disappear.

For our part, we spent enormous amounts of time designing human organizations while describing them almost exclusively through their power structures.

It seemed useful to try another angle.

Look at what living systems do.

Identify functions.

Look for their equivalents in a company, an association, an administration, a project.

Then observe what happens when one of these functions is absent, poorly connected to the others, oversized, monopolized by a single organ or unable to receive signals from its environment.

The proposal was not to turn companies into human bodies.

The analogy served as a framework for exploration.

In particular, it made it possible to look differently at information, boundaries, regulation, diversity, growth and the reproduction of organizations.

Twenty-five years later, some of these questions connect with my current research on collaborative governance and on ways of making these phenomena more observable and measurable.

One question has not changed much.

When the organization is small, the person who knows almost everything may indeed be the person who controls it best.

When the organization becomes immense, the proposition may eventually reverse.

The person who wants to continue knowing every problem, checking every arbitration and authorizing every decision may become, without intending to, one of the factors limiting the very system they are trying to protect.

The interesting question may therefore not be:

How far can I delegate?

It could be:

What do I actually need in order to retain control of the whole?

The two questions seem similar.

They produce very different organizations.

View the book on Bio-Inspired Management of Organizations Les Idées du Vivant.

Children Apart: What Their Place in Society Says About the Value We Place on the Future

Thomas EGLI — 2026-08-12T15:11:55Z

We entrust childhood professionals with what is most precious to us, we ask them to prepare future generations, yet we often continue to treat their work as a secondary function. What if this contradiction stemmed from a deeper problem: the place we have collectively chosen to give to children themselves?

A society can say many things about the importance it gives to children. Yet all we need to do is look at where it actually allows them to be.

There is a fairly simple way to observe a society's deepest priorities: look at the place it gives to its children.

Not just in its rhetoric.

Almost all contemporary societies state that childhood must be protected, that education is essential and that younger generations represent the future.

The question becomes much more interesting when we look at the concrete organization of collective life.

Where are children allowed to be present?

Which activities can they participate in?

Which responsibilities can they progressively take on?

In which ordinary places within society are they considered legitimate participants, and in which others does their absence seem self-evident?

And above all: when we keep them away, is it really because they are incapable of participating, or because we have organized these spaces without making provision for their participation?

This distinction might seem secondary.

On the contrary, it lies at the heart of the problem.

Childhood is not a waiting room

We have become accustomed to thinking of childhood as a period of preparation.

Children learn today what they will need tomorrow. They go to school for their future life. They are educated in order to become citizens, professionals, parents, voters, taxpayers or active members of society.

This view obviously contains some truth.

But it can also produce a strange effect: implicitly considering that genuine participation in society begins later.

The “serious” world would be the world of adults.

Childhood would have its own places: school, leisure centers, playgrounds, sports clubs, after-school facilities, specialized activities.

This specialization has immense advantages. In particular, it makes it possible to create environments suited to children's development and to ensure their protection.

But when it becomes systematic separation, it raises another question:

Have we adapted society to children, or have we progressively built a society from which we have removed children?

Because a child is not merely a future adult.

A child is already a member of society.

The political question then becomes that of the conditions under which children can progressively take part in it.

Protecting does not necessarily mean separating

We must avoid caricature here.

Children need particular protection.

Their physical, cognitive and emotional development imposes real limits. Certain responsibilities obviously cannot be entrusted to them. Some environments are dangerous. Certain decisions require a maturity or legal capacity that they do not yet possess.

No one seriously proposes denying these realities.

But not all restrictions imposed on children arise from such impossibilities.

Some of them result from social choices.

A regulation.

An organization of work.

A convention.

An insurance policy.

A lack of staff.

Architecture designed exclusively for adults.

A time constraint.

Fear of an incident.

Adult convenience.

Or simply habit.

We should therefore learn to distinguish between two sentences that sound similar but mean completely different things:

“A child cannot participate in this activity.”

“We have not organized this activity in a way that allows a child to participate.”

In the first case, the limitation belongs to the child.

In the second, it belongs to our organization.

And that difference changes everything.

When a societal choice ends up being seen as a natural law

One of the difficulties lies precisely in the fact that social choices quickly become invisible.

When a particular form of organization has existed for several decades, it eventually begins to seem natural.

Children are at school while adults work.

Teenagers have activities designed for teenagers.

Adults attend adult meetings.

Older people, in turn, have specialized institutions and activities.

Each arrangement has its own logic.

But the sum of all these logics can produce something that no one explicitly decided: a society strongly segmented by age.

Generations do cross paths, of course.

But they do things together less often.

Yet there is a considerable difference between meeting someone and participating with them in a real activity.

Watching an adult work.

Helping them.

Being entrusted with a small task.

Then a more complex task.

Failing without disaster.

Trying again.

Receiving advice.

Becoming competent enough to act independently.

Then, in turn, teaching someone less experienced.

All of this constitutes an extraordinarily ancient form of learning.

And we may sometimes be at risk of losing it.

The continuum we have forgotten

We could call this mechanism the continuum of participation.

It is based on a very simple idea: we do not suddenly move from incapacity to competence.

We progress.

A child begins by watching.

Then participates.

Then helps.

Then is entrusted with part of a task.

Then the whole task.

Then becomes capable of carrying it out without assistance.

Finally, they can support someone else.

This continuum still exists wherever several levels of experience can genuinely coexist: in some families, in crafts, in sports, in the arts, in associations, in youth movements, on some farms, in scientific field activities, in popular education or in collective projects.

It produces something very different from the simple transmission of knowledge.

It transmits a capacity to act.

The child does not merely know how something works.

They progressively discover that they are capable of doing it.

You do not become autonomous by being kept apart

This is where one of the most important paradoxes in our contemporary relationship with childhood appears.

We want young people to become autonomous.

But autonomy has an inconvenient property: it cannot truly be learned without being exercised.

Choosing.

Deciding.

Carrying.

Building.

Organizing.

Caring.

Negotiating.

Using a tool.

Getting around.

Managing a budget.

Preparing something for other people.

Participating in a collective decision.

Resolving a conflict.

Assessing danger.

Taking responsibility.

All these skills require experience.

A society that sought to protect children from every situation in which they were not yet perfectly autonomous would therefore risk creating a particularly absurd circle:

We refuse them certain responsibilities because they are not yet autonomous, while removing the very situations that would enable them to build that autonomy.

This obviously does not mean allowing anything and everything.

The entire educational challenge lies precisely in the space between two extremes: abandonment and prevention.

The real educational profession: making experience possible

Supporting a child does not simply mean telling them what to do.

It often means creating an environment in which they will be able to do something themselves that they could not yet have accomplished alone.

It is a subtle operation.

It requires simultaneously ensuring safety and enabling experimentation.

Giving rules while allowing freedom.

Intervening early enough to prevent significant harm, but late enough to allow the child to look for a solution.

Taking the individual into account while maintaining the group.

Accepting some mistakes without accepting every risk.

Protecting without preventing.

Passing on knowledge without doing things in their place.

Deciding while preparing the other person to decide.

These tensions are strikingly similar to those we readily associate with prestigious professional functions: management, leadership, team management, change management, mediation, risk management, training or governance.

Yet when they are exercised with children, we tend to view them differently.

When the activity leader becomes a guard

The way we regard children directly transforms the way we regard those who work with them.

If the child is primarily perceived as someone who must be prevented from putting themselves in danger, the professional's mission mechanically shifts toward supervision.

The educator becomes the person who prevents.

The activity leader becomes the person who keeps children occupied.

The center director becomes the person who ensures that no incident occurs.

The activity becomes a way of filling time.

The project becomes entertainment.

And an extremely complex educational skill can end up being reduced, in collective perceptions, to a childminding function.

This may be one of the most powerful mechanisms behind the devaluation of childhood professions.

Because if we think that an activity leader is essentially there to “watch the children,” their relatively low pay can almost begin to seem consistent.

If, on the other hand, we understand that they are responsible for creating situations in which people progressively learn to become capable of acting, the value of the profession appears in an entirely different light.

Considerable responsibilities for limited recognition

The contrast is then striking.

We may expect a sometimes very young professional to be simultaneously capable of:

ensuring the physical safety of a group;
understanding individual needs;
detecting a concerning situation;
preventing and managing conflicts;
organizing a complex activity;
making decisions quickly;
communicating with families;
applying regulations;
working as part of a team;
supporting children in difficulty;
maintaining group dynamics;
encouraging initiative;
setting boundaries;
managing unforeseen events;
and nevertheless creating a joyful, stimulating and empowering experience.

The collective message then becomes difficult to understand:

“Your work is important enough for us to demand that you take considerable responsibility for the safety, education and development of our children; but not important enough for your profession to systematically receive the prestige, resources and remuneration corresponding to that responsibility.”

The vicious circle of devaluation

This contradiction is not merely unfair to professionals.

It ultimately damages the system itself.

A profession with little recognition has greater difficulty attracting people.

A poorly paid profession has greater difficulty retaining experienced professionals.

When teams experience rapid turnover, accumulated skills are lost.

When experienced professionals leave, the transfer of knowledge to newcomers declines.

When teams become more fragile, institutions legitimately seek to reduce risks.

They then strengthen procedures, prohibitions and control mechanisms.

Professionals have less autonomy.

They can organize fewer complex activities.

The profession becomes less interesting.

It attracts even fewer people.

And when quality eventually declines, this decline can be interpreted as proof that the sector is intrinsically unprofessional.

Underinvestment thus produces some of the difficulties that are then used to justify the low value assigned to the sector.

Expertise we no longer even know how to recognize

The loss does not stop there.

An experienced activity leader, educator, center director, teacher or trip leader may accumulate over the years an extremely refined understanding of complex human phenomena:

motivation;
group dynamics;
cooperation;
leadership;
conflicts;
inclusion;
fatigue;
engagement;
learning;
empowerment;
decision-making;
relationship with rules;
trust;
managing uncertainty.

In many other sectors, some of these skills have prestigious names.

They are called management.

Facilitation.

Team leadership.

Crisis management.

Collective intelligence.

Mediation.

Skills development.

When they have been acquired in youth work or education, they are far less systematically recognized as transferable expertise.

Society therefore loses twice.

It undervalues the professionals.

Then it underuses the knowledge they have produced.

Separating children also means separating generations

The issue becomes even broader when we look at the effects of specialized spaces.

A child surrounded almost exclusively by children of the same age obviously learns a great deal from their peers.

But they lose part of another kind of learning: that which arises from regular contact with people at different levels of experience.

The younger person observes the older one.

The older person learns to help the younger one.

The teenager discovers that they can become a point of reference for a child.

The young adult learns to pass things on.

The adult must adapt the way they explain.

An older person can pass on experience that their professional status may no longer necessarily allow them to practice.

The continuum is therefore not only useful to children.

It transforms everyone who takes part in it.

A society excessively segmented by age risks losing part of this constant circulation of skills, responsibilities and roles.

The paradox of the suddenly responsible teenager

This break in the continuum becomes particularly visible during adolescence and early adulthood.

For years, we may tell a young person that they are too young to decide, too young to participate, too young to organize, too young to take on certain responsibilities.

Then an administrative age arrives.

And suddenly, we expect them to know how to choose an educational or career path, manage their money, work, vote, drive, live alone, understand administrative procedures, organize their time, make important decisions and answer for the consequences of their actions.

We sometimes turn autonomy into a switch.

Before: no.

After: yes.

But human maturation does not work that way.

Between dependence and autonomy there should be a succession of gradual responsibilities.

That is precisely what the continuum makes possible.

A society that repairs much of what it could have prevented

This reflection also has an economic dimension.

A considerable share of public action occurs once difficulties are already visible.

School dropout.

Isolation.

Difficulties entering the workforce.

Violence.

Loss of confidence.

Social exclusion.

Health difficulties.

Unemployment.

Relationship difficulties.

The causes of these phenomena are multiple. It would obviously be simplistic, and scientifically false, to claim that they are all caused by childhood or that better educational policy would be enough to make them disappear.

But it would be equally unreasonable to consider that experiences during the first decades of life have only a marginal effect on what follows.

The question therefore deserves to be asked differently:

what proportion of the sums devoted to repairing certain difficulties in adulthood could be avoided, or their severity reduced, through greater investment in the conditions for children's and adolescents' development, education, socialization and autonomy?

We should not presume the answer.

We should measure it.

But failing to ask the question is already a political choice.

The trap of the long term

Childhood faces a particular disadvantage here.

Its results appear slowly.

Creating an additional position in an educational organization immediately creates an expense.

Providing more training to an activity leader costs money today.

Reducing the number of children entrusted to one professional costs money today.

Creating spaces that allow more experimentation costs money today.

By contrast, the adult who, fifteen years later, cooperates better, takes more initiative, avoids certain difficulties, creates a company, becomes involved in an association, participates more effectively as a citizen or in turn passes on certain skills will never easily be linked back to that investment.

The cost is recorded immediately. The diffuse benefit belongs to the future.

Conversely, when a problem has already appeared, public action becomes visible.

A program is created.

Beneficiaries are identified.

A budget is mobilized.

Indicators can be produced.

A problem that has been prevented, however, has no face.

This is one of the great economic paradoxes of prevention:

it is much easier to measure the cost of a preventive policy than to show the small or considerable disasters that, thanks to it, never occurred.

What if the care and consideration given to childhood were an infrastructure?

We readily speak of investment when we build a bridge, a rail network, a university, or digital or energy infrastructure.

We then accept that present expenditure can create capacities for several decades.

Why not apply the same reasoning to childhood?

Not to reduce children to their future economic productivity.

But because human capacities are themselves a collective infrastructure.

Knowing how to cooperate.

Learning.

Taking initiative.

Listening.

Making an argument.

Trusting.

Resolving a conflict.

Creating.

Caring.

Adapting.

Taking responsibility.

All these capacities are subsequently needed by the economy, democracy, associations, companies, institutions, families and collective life.

From this perspective, youth activities, education, culture, sport, Participatory Science and other spaces that enable young people to experience collective activities are no longer simply social expenditures.

They become part of a society's human infrastructure.

Changing the place of children would mechanically change the value of the professions

This may be where the real reversal lies.

We regularly try to raise the status of childhood professions.

We talk about salaries.

Training.

Status.

Working conditions.

Professionalization.

All these dimensions are essential.

But perhaps we sometimes try to treat the symptom without sufficiently addressing its cultural cause.

As long as childhood is implicitly regarded as a peripheral area of social life, the professions associated with it will also risk remaining peripheral.

Conversely, if we regarded the progressive support of new generations as one of society's strategic functions, the hierarchy could change.

The activity leader would no longer be the person who keeps children occupied while adults do important things.

They would be one of the professionals who organize children's progressive entry into the capacity to act.

The educator would no longer simply be the person who protects.

They would be the person who knows exactly how far to protect so that the other person can learn to no longer need that protection.

The director of a youth organization would no longer simply be responsible for a facility.

They would manage a complex human environment in which cooperation, autonomy, safety, trust and responsibility are built every day.

Not idealizing the past: inventing something else

Recognizing the virtues of the intergenerational continuum obviously does not mean longing nostalgically for a return to an older society.

Historically, children have endured forced labor, economic exploitation, educational violence, authoritarianism and many forms of domination from which contemporary protections have fortunately distanced us.

The aim is not to go backward.

It is precisely to invent something better.

To preserve the fundamental achievements of child protection while refusing to allow protection to become synonymous with exclusion.

To create real situations without reproducing exploitation.

To give responsibilities without transferring to children those that belong to adults.

To allow reasonable risk without neglecting safety.

To involve without instrumentalizing.

To include without abandoning.

In short: replace separation with progressive and organized participation.

The right question may therefore no longer be: “Is this allowed for children?”

We could begin by changing the question.

When faced with an activity, a place, an institution, a project, a collective decision or a responsibility, we should no longer ask only:

“Can children participate in it?”

But:

“What would objectively prevent their participation?”

“What genuinely relates to their age and what relates to the way we organize things?”

“What form of participation would be possible at age 6, 10, 14 or 17?”

“What support would make this participation sufficiently safe?”

“What progressive responsibility could be entrusted to them?”

These questions produce an entirely different philosophy.

They no longer assume that exclusion is the rule and participation the exception.

They require us to justify exclusion when it is genuinely necessary and to organize participation when it is reasonably possible.

Does what is most precious to us really deserve our least valued professions?

We then arrive at the central paradox.

We say that children are what is most precious to us.

We state that they represent our future.

We know that their earliest experiences profoundly influence the development of their future capacities.

We ask the people who support them to simultaneously ensure their safety, development, socialization and autonomy.

Then we accept that many of these professions experience low recognition, recruitment difficulties, high staff turnover and salaries that are sometimes out of proportion with the level of responsibility required.

This paradox should alert us.

Because ultimately, it does not concern only childhood professionals.

It reveals our collective way of thinking about value.

Reinvesting in the continuum

Revaluing childhood therefore does not simply mean increasing a budget.

It could mean rethinking much more broadly the way new generations enter society.

Creating more intergenerational spaces.

Creating more progressive responsibilities.

Involving young people in real projects.

Recognizing learning that takes place outside school.

Allowing children to observe and contribute to adults' real activities whenever possible.

Valuing mentoring.

Developing situations in which teenagers support younger children.

Professionally recognizing skills acquired in youth work.

Training professionals not only to prevent incidents, but to organize reasonable risk and autonomy.

Evaluating public policies over much longer time horizons.

And above all, considering the capacity to act as an educational objective just as fundamental as the acquisition of knowledge.

It would no longer simply be a matter of preparing children for society.

It would be a matter of enabling them to progressively enter it as they grow.

Another definition of protection

Perhaps we ultimately need to reconsider the word itself.

Protecting a child does not necessarily mean removing from them every danger, every difficulty, every responsibility and every uncertainty.

Protection can also mean enabling them to encounter these things progressively under appropriate conditions.

A child who is effectively protected today should be able to need a little less protection tomorrow.

Then a little less again.

Until they are able to protect other people themselves.

That may be the best indicator of success.

Protection does not achieve its objective when it becomes permanent. It achieves it when it progressively builds the capacities that will make it possible to do without it.

Ultimately, the question is not about children. It is about the society we want to become.

The place given to children reveals the way a society thinks about time.

Does it invest only in what produces an immediately visible result?

Or does it know how to invest in capacities whose effects will appear ten, twenty or thirty years later?

It also reveals our conception of competence.

Do we think it appears with age, a diploma or status?

Or that it is built progressively through experience, trust and responsibility?

Finally, it reveals our conception of protection.

Does protecting mean keeping apart?

Or creating the conditions that allow participation without abandoning someone to danger?

These choices also determine the place given to childhood professionals.

Because a society that regards children mainly as people who need to be watched will need guards.

A society that regards them as people called upon to become progressively capable of acting will need highly skilled professionals to organize that progression.

And it will probably need to train, pay and recognize them accordingly.

What if we finally reversed the calculation?

For decades, one question has repeatedly arisen whenever we talk about education, youth activities, culture, sport, prevention or support:

“How much will it cost?”

It is a legitimate question.

But it is incomplete.

A second question should systematically be added:

“How much will what we choose not to do today cost us in ten, twenty or thirty years?”

And a third:

“What collective capacities are we choosing not to build when we prevent a generation from learning progressively through participation?”

We might then discover that childhood professions are not on the periphery of the economy and society.

They work on what will make both possible tomorrow.

And that the child is not a citizen in waiting, placed in a protected space until the day they are finally ready to enter the real world.

They are already part of it.

The question that should concern us now may therefore no longer be how to prepare children to enter our society one day.

It is much more ambitious:

How can we build a society in which each new generation can progressively take its place, experiment, contribute, learn from previous generations, pass things on to the next, and become autonomous without first having to be kept away from the world for their own protection—the very world for which we claim to be preparing them?

Perhaps only under this condition will we finally be able to escape the paradox: proclaiming that childhood represents our future while underinvesting in those who, every day, make that future possible.

Premium immersive conferences

Thomas EGLI — 2026-08-05T14:06:39Z

These conferences are designed for management committees, executive committees, corporate conventions, executive seminars, innovation days, HR events, strategic forums and client meetings.

In 90 minutes, your executives will leave with a method they can apply immediately to...

1. Turn the impossible into a competitive advantage

Every company faces challenges that seem impossible to solve: saturated markets, stalled innovation, global competition, a lack of resources or profound transformations.

Yet some organisations succeed in turning these constraints into extraordinary opportunities.

This conference shows how to identify the hidden levers within a complex situation, generate unprecedented solutions and build a sustainable business or organisational model where no one else could see a way forward.

Participants leave with a new approach to strategic problems.

Contact

2. Organisations inspired by living systems perform better

Living systems have functioned for nearly four billion years without a permanent crisis committee.

Why do some organisations continue to perform despite constant change, while others become exhausted?

Drawing on the principles of biomimicry, systems thinking and bio-inspired organisations, this conference offers practical ways to build companies that are more adaptable, innovative and resilient.

An original vision of tomorrow's governance.

Contact

3. Build a strong consensus when everything divides the stakeholders

How can teams, departments, executives or partners with conflicting interests work together?

This conference presents a method for transforming conflict into cooperation, creating a shared language and generating decisions that everyone genuinely supports.

A skill that has become essential in complex organisations.

Contact

4. Tomorrow's leadership: less power, more influence

Modern leadership is no longer about having all the answers.

It is about creating the conditions that enable others to build better answers together.

Discover how to develop leadership based on listening, trust, collective intelligence and shared responsibility.

A conference particularly suited to managers, executives and transformation leaders.

Contact

5. Collective intelligence is not a meeting: it is a method

Many companies organise collaborative workshops.

But few truly know how to produce collective intelligence that creates long-term value.

This conference presents the mechanisms that make it possible to transform groups of individuals into genuine innovation systems capable of producing higher-quality decisions.

Contact

6. Reinvent your business model before the market forces you to

Every company will one day need to transform its business model.

The highest-performing companies do so before they are forced to.

This conference explains how to progressively design a new business model, secure each stage of the transformation and create an organisation capable of evolving sustainably.

Contact

7. Cooperate with sectors you never work with

The greatest innovations often emerge at the intersection of several sectors.

How can partnerships be created between companies, public authorities, researchers, investors, NGOs or public institutions?

This conference shows how to build unlikely alliances capable of generating value that none of the participants could create alone.

Contact

8. Resilience: why some organisations survive every crisis

Crises are becoming the norm.

Some organisations disappear.

Others emerge stronger.

This conference presents the principles for building lasting organisational resilience, anticipating disruptions and transforming crises into accelerators of change.

Contact

9. Participatory governance: decide faster by involving more people

Contrary to popular belief, participation does not necessarily slow down decision-making.

When properly organised, it accelerates engagement, improves decisions and facilitates their implementation.

This conference presents practical methods for building governance that is more effective, robust and sustainable.

Contact

10. Innovating in complexity

Traditional methods work when the problems are known.

But how can you innovate when no one truly knows where to go?

This conference shows how to navigate uncertainty, experiment intelligently, learn rapidly and progressively turn the unknown into a strategic advantage.

Contact

11. Impact-driven companies will be tomorrow's economic leaders

Economic performance and positive impact are no longer opposites.

Investors, talent and markets now expect organisations to create lasting value for all their stakeholders.

This conference presents new business models that combine profitability, innovation and societal contribution.

Contact

12. Think like a strategist in an unpredictable world

Uncertainty has become permanent.

Rigid plans are no longer enough.

This conference offers a new way of thinking about strategy by integrating complexity, interactions between systems, weak signals and emerging dynamics.

Participants discover how to make better decisions when no one has all the information.

Contact

What Kind of Next Generation Do We Want?

Thomas EGLI — 2026-07-15T16:59:47Z

A few days ago, I explored the question of the emergence of two distinct human species.

Equipped with tools such as education for autonomy and responsibility, or tools as powerful as Participatory Science, we can very seriously ask ourselves a new question: What Kind of Next Generation Do We Want?

We are trying to prepare children for tomorrow's world. But are we certain that we are not leaving them ill-equipped?

We often ask ourselves how to offer future generations a better life. Families, institutions and countries mobilize considerable resources to improve education, health, safety, academic achievement and access to technology. The intention is generally sincere: to help raise human beings who are better educated, freer, more capable and better protected.

Yet some of the daily routines designed to achieve this objective produce exactly the opposite effect.

We want to protect children from boredom, so we fill every silence with a screen. We want to spare them from failure, so we deprive them of opportunities to learn how to fall, try again and persevere. We want to ensure their academic success, so we overload their days to the point of reducing their sleep, movement, free play, relationships and time spent in nature. We want to protect them, so we prevent them from making the decisions, taking the measured risks and assuming the responsibilities that would enable them to become prudent. We want to give them access to all knowledge, yet we sometimes accustom them to receiving an answer before they have even formulated a question.

The same paradox appears at the national level. To improve their competitiveness, some education systems multiply assessments, standardize learning pathways and concentrate their efforts on what can be measured quickly. They may therefore improve indicators while weakening initiative, curiosity, cooperation, the ability to investigate, practical skills and the courage to act in a situation for which there is no answer key.

We are gradually removing uncertainty from everyday life at the very moment when future generations will have to face a world marked by unprecedented ecological, technological, economic and geopolitical transformations. We are automating intellectual processes at the very moment when we need to strengthen judgment. We are making lives more comfortable while risking making people less capable of acting when that comfort disappears.

The question is therefore no longer merely how to pass more on to children, but rather what kind of next generation do we truly want to raise?

What Kind of World Do We Want to Pass On?

We speak a great deal about the futures we want to prevent. We speak less precisely about the human capacities that would need to be preserved in order to endure them.

Which collapses would seem least serious to us? The collapse of certain infrastructures, or that of our ability to organize ourselves when they no longer function? The collapse of certain economic models, or that of our capacity to care for one another? The collapse of certain technologies, or that of our attention, judgment and collective memory? The collapse of our certainties, or that of our ability to learn through direct contact with reality?

Conversely, which emergences do we want to make possible?

Do we want to welcome generations that are highly proficient in the use of tools, but incapable of acting without them? Generations capable of instantly accessing billions of pieces of information, but less capable of distinguishing tested knowledge from a plausible assertion? Generations protected from all discomfort, but helpless in the face of contradiction, loss, loneliness or effort?

Or do we want to raise people capable of thinking with technologies without delegating their thinking to them, of cooperating without giving up their discernment, of assuming responsibility without waiting for an authority to provide them with every instruction, of producing knowledge, repairing, investigating, deciding and caring?

This question calls for neither technological panic nor nostalgia. It is not about returning to an idealized past. It is about understanding that every organization of daily life trains certain faculties and allows others to wither. Every educational policy, every piece of equipment, every timetable, every investment and every renunciation contributes to producing a certain type of human being.

Education does not merely prepare for a future. It helps to select it.

We Risk Confusing Transmission With Making Answers Available

Transmission is one of the founding acts through which human beings give themselves a common world. It is neither a cultural supplement nor a school formality. No child comes into the world with the language, symbolic reference points, social dispositions, knowledge and habits that will enable them to live with others. Each generation receives a world already underway, incorporates it, transforms it, then consciously or unconsciously chooses what it will carry forward.

Humanity is therefore sustained not only by its biological capacities. It endures through this collective heritage, gradually incorporated into each individual.

Artificial intelligence is not merely an additional tool within this transmission. It changes the material nature of traces, the places where we seek authority, the forms of memory, modes of learning and the operations we had until now regarded as specifically human. It forces us to determine what can be automated, what can be assisted and what should never be fully delegated.

The first mistake would be to confuse transmission with information.

Receiving an answer does not mean learning. Accessing a summary does not mean knowing how to produce one. Reading a line of reasoning does not mean having constructed the intellectual operations required to verify it. Genuine learning often requires encountering resistance, recognizing an error, reorganizing an initial representation, tolerating a period of incomprehension and confronting one's idea with that of another person.

Cognitive conflict is not an anomaly in the learning process. It is often one of its driving forces.

Children, adolescents and adults learn through social interaction, speech, experimentation, movement, concrete manipulation, observation and relationships of attachment. They learn because someone answers them, contradicts them, reassures them, waits for them, trusts them or invites them to try again. They also learn because reality does not immediately conform to their expectations.

A technology designed to reduce friction can be extremely useful. But an education that removed all friction would also remove some of the conditions required for learning.

Instant answers may therefore reduce the space of the unknown before the learner has had time to explore it. They may damage attention if they constantly replace prolonged observation. They may flatten intellectual obstacles if they bypass them before the student has developed the means to overcome them. They may also create the belief that every problem already has a stable formulation and an immediately available solution.

Yet a large proportion of the problems future generations will face will not be properly formulated. They will have to determine what is happening, identify missing information, observe contradictory signals, work with people who do not share the same interests and make decisions without complete certainty.

We must therefore learn to use artificial intelligence without allowing it to eliminate the necessary stages of doubt, inquiry and effort.

The risk does not lie in the existence of the machine. It arises when we permanently externalize a faculty without continuing to exercise it. The automation of writing, translation, summarization, planning, memorization, calculation or navigation does not mechanically cause deskilling. It does, however, increase the possibility of it when users no longer acquire the skills that would enable them to understand, control, correct or replace the tool.

A generation may become remarkably proficient in the use of artificial intelligence while becoming less capable of carrying out certain intellectual operations on its own. This development is not inevitable. It depends on how we design tools, learning processes and rules of use.

Educational artificial intelligence should help learners think rather than continually think in their place. It should ask questions, reveal contradictions, offer graduated guidance, request justification, encourage the comparison of hypotheses and make the limits of its answers visible. It should be able to adapt to different cognitive profiles without confining a person within a supposedly fixed profile.

The objective should not be to obtain a correct output as quickly as possible. It should be to increase the learner's ability to produce, verify, explain and transfer what they have understood.

Transmission also relies on realities that machines cannot replace: relationships, attachment, presence, material and symbolic security, adult responsibility and the feeling of belonging to a shared history. A child does not learn solely because information is accurate. They learn because it is addressed to them within a relationship in which they feel recognized and capable of making progress.

This relational dimension includes storytelling. A society transmits by recounting where its knowledge comes from, why certain choices were made, which mistakes were committed, which struggles made certain rights possible and which responsibilities accompany the freedoms received. It does not transmit results alone. It transmits paths, controversies, losses, bifurcations and reasons for acting.

It also transmits a relationship with solitude, limits and vulnerability.

The ability to be alone for a while, not to receive immediate stimulation, to remain with an unresolved question or to endure an absence contributes to the construction of thought. Vulnerability is not merely a flaw to be eliminated. It is one of the conditions through which human beings recognize their need for others, develop their attention and discover the limits of their own power.

Transmission therefore requires adult responsibility. Caring for a child, an elderly parent, a vulnerable relative or a community does not consist solely of providing them with services. It means assuming a presence, continuity and commitments that cannot be fully automated.

Human beings also remain embodied beings. Living knowledge circulates through gestures, gazes, postures, movements and practices. Knowledge that is merely described but never experienced often remains fragile. Understanding a natural environment cannot be reduced to looking at images of it. Understanding a material cannot be reduced to reading about its properties. Understanding cooperation cannot be reduced to knowing its principles. One must encounter the terrain, manipulate, act, feel resistance and observe the consequences of one's decisions.

Transmission therefore concerns movement, the desire to investigate and the way we inhabit the world just as much as it concerns the content itself.

This possible weakening of our faculties is compounded by a material paradox. The digital world gives the impression of unlimited space even though it depends on physical infrastructure, materials, water, energy, networks and data centers. The more content we generate, duplicate and store, the more resources we consume to preserve it.

At the same time, part of digital culture is already disappearing. Pages, forums, archives, creations, academic databases and image collections become inaccessible as formats, companies, media and infrastructure evolve. Accumulation therefore does not guarantee memory. It can produce a volatile culture, saturated with ephemeral traces and incapable of identifying what deserves to be preserved over time.

Transmission does not mean preserving everything. Transmission requires choices.

We must decide what is meaningful, what should remain accessible, what deserves to be documented and in which forms knowledge will still be understandable to those who receive it. A civilization that stores everything without establishing priorities eventually loses what matters most in the noise. Conversely, a civilization that selects without debate risks erasing indispensable experiences and voices.

The solution lies in an explicit policy of memory: durable archives, open formats, distributed copies, publicly debated preservation criteria, digital sufficiency and education that enables people to distinguish a meaningful trace from merely abundant content.

Another transformation deserves particular vigilance: the development of avatars, synthetic voices and digital doubles intended to artificially prolong a person's presence after death. Systems can already be trained using writings, images and videos in order to produce a posthumous interlocutor capable of responding in a familiar style.

These technologies may be presented as tools for memory or consolation. They may also profoundly alter our relationship with grief, absence, finitude and irreversibility. A bereaved parent could be invited to continue watching a virtual representation of their child grow. Descendants could maintain a simulated conversation with an ancestor. The trace would no longer simply be consulted: it would give the appearance of presence and agency.

We must examine these uses before they become widespread. Who will decide what an avatar may say? How will historical speech be distinguished from algorithmic generation? Who will own the data of a deceased person? How can people in mourning be protected from economic models built on their attachment? What limits should be established when a simulation prevents the loss from being fully acknowledged?

Accepting finitude, experiencing grief and recognizing the irreversibility of certain situations are not technical failures awaiting a solution. These experiences contribute to the way we assign value to time, relationships and transmission.

The answer is not to oppose human beings to machines. It is to restore transmission to the full depth of experience.

This requires irreplaceable relational time, spaces without automated assistance, explicit education in attention, mastery of fundamental skills before their automation, technologies designed to support reasoning, restraint in data production, governance of digital memories and special protection for vulnerable people.

We must not ask only what artificial intelligence can accomplish. We must decide which human faculties we want to continue exercising, even when a machine can reproduce them more quickly. The issue is not a spectacular catastrophe. It is a slow erosion of our capacities to receive, experience, choose and transmit to one another.

Putting Experiential Learning Back at the Heart of Education

Experiential learning constitutes one of the strongest responses to the risk of disembodied knowledge. It is opposed neither to theory, nor to digital technology, nor to artificial intelligence. It restores their proper function: to illuminate, prepare, document or extend an action instead of replacing it.

Learning through experience does not simply mean “doing an activity.” An occupation can be physically very active while producing little learning. Experience becomes educational when a person acts with an intention, encounters the consequences of their action, observes what happened, compares interpretations, modifies their approach and tries again.

It produces a complete cycle: act, experience, understand, conceptualize, try again.

This cycle develops capacities that purely declarative teaching reaches with greater difficulty. It teaches learners to connect knowledge to a situation, detect the differences between a model and reality, identify missing information and adjust their behavior when circumstances change.

In a classroom, a student can learn the principles of cooperation. In a real project, they discover that roles must be distributed, help must be requested, a delay must be reported, an objection must be heard, an instruction must be reformulated and the consequences of an unfulfilled commitment must be assumed. They understand that cooperation is not an abstract value, but a demanding practice.

They can study biodiversity in a textbook. In the field, they must learn to look, wait, acknowledge uncertainty, record an observation and accept that they may not immediately identify what they encounter. The environment does not provide them with an ordered list of answers. It forces them to construct their attention.

They can learn the principles of mechanics. By making or repairing an object, they encounter tolerances, measurement errors, material constraints, the tools available and the consequences of an imprecise gesture. They discover that knowledge does not abolish reality: it makes it possible to negotiate with it more effectively.

Experience thus strengthens the transfer of learning. Knowledge memorized in a single context risks remaining tied to the form in which it was taught. Knowledge mobilized in several situations becomes more flexible. The learner no longer merely recognizes an exercise. They know how to identify the structure of a problem beneath different appearances.

This capacity will be decisive in a world where many routine tasks will be automated. Human value will not lie solely in carrying out a known procedure, but in the ability to understand a singular situation, choose the relevant tools, detect their errors and act when the usual procedure is no longer sufficient.

Experiential learning also gives error a constructive status. In a system oriented mainly toward the correct answer, error can become evidence of incompetence. In an experimental approach, it becomes information about the relationship between a hypothesis, an action and a result.

This does not mean that all errors are desirable or that children should be exposed to unnecessary risks. It means that an educational environment must allow reversible, observable and analyzable errors. An error without consequences sometimes teaches nothing. An error with disproportionate consequences prevents learning. The challenge is to organize situations in which a person can experience the reality of their choices without being crushed by them.

Experience then builds a confidence that is more solid than simple verbal encouragement. A child does not feel capable only because they are repeatedly told that they are. They acquire confidence based on lived evidence: they have prepared a meal, repaired an object, organized a journey, presented an investigation, resolved a conflict, cared for an animal, conducted an observation or carried a project through to completion.

This confidence is neither an illusion of omnipotence nor a dependence on approval. It takes the form of a more realistic conviction: “I do not yet know how to do everything, but I know how to learn, ask for help, persevere and correct my actions.”

Experience also increases motivation when it makes it possible to understand the purpose of learning. Many students do not reject effort itself. They reject effort whose purpose and relationship to their lives they cannot perceive.

A mathematical skill takes on a different status when it makes it possible to build, budget, measure a phenomenon or analyze data collected by the group. Writing takes on a different status when it serves to persuade a partner, document a discovery, transmit a method or draw attention to an injustice. Geography gains a different depth when it makes it possible to prepare a route, understand a watershed, analyze a conflict of use or compare living conditions.

Knowledge is then no longer an obstacle placed between the student and their future. It becomes a means of increasing their capacity to act.

Experiential learning also makes it possible to integrate the body. Yet prolonged immobility, fragmented attention and the separation between intellectual and practical activities impoverish part of the learning process. Movement supports observation, spatial memory, sensory adjustment and the understanding of concrete causal relationships.

Walking through a landscape, handling tools, cultivating, building, cooking, caring, navigating, measuring or experimenting simultaneously mobilizes intellectual, motor, social and emotional faculties. This integration produces richer memories and more closely connected knowledge.

Experience also teaches temporality. Some processes cannot be accelerated without being distorted. A plant grows at its own pace. A relationship of trust is built through continuity. A rigorous investigation requires repeated observations. A well-made object requires trials and corrections. A conflict does not disappear because a quick answer has been proposed.

In a culture of immediacy, experiencing these temporalities is already an education.

Finally, experiential learning exposes learners to a plurality of viewpoints. In a real situation, the criteria for success are not always unique. A technically effective solution may be too costly, ecologically questionable or socially unacceptable. A project that is useful to one group may impose a constraint on another. A choice then requires arbitration between several legitimate values.

The learner thus discovers that decision-making cannot be reduced to applying knowledge. It entails responsibility.

To generalize this approach, however, it is necessary to move beyond occasional and peripheral activities. An annual outing or a project week is not sufficient if the rest of the educational organization values only the individual reproduction of standardized content.

Every learning pathway should include long-term projects, field investigations, real production situations, collective responsibilities, encounters with professionals, missions useful to a territory and moments of reflective analysis. Experience must be prepared, supported and reviewed. Without this process of making meaning, it may remain anecdotal or reproduce inequalities between those who already possess the codes needed to benefit from it and those who do not.

The role of the adult then becomes more demanding, not less important. They no longer merely deliver an answer. They design a framework, make risks acceptable, observe dynamics, support people in difficulty, help put the experience into words and provide the necessary knowledge at the moment when it becomes intelligible.

Assessment must also evolve. It cannot focus solely on the final product. It must recognize the quality of the process, the ability to document an error, progress, cooperation, reliability, initiative, consideration of constraints and the transfer of learning to a new situation.

It is also necessary to preserve moments when the learner works without algorithmic assistance, followed by moments when they use the tool critically. For example, they can first formulate their hypotheses, conduct an observation and produce an initial analysis. They can then ask an artificial intelligence to identify objections, compare proposals, check formulations or suggest overlooked variables. Finally, they must decide what they retain, what they reject and why.

Artificial intelligence then becomes a methodological interlocutor, not a substitute for experience.

This transformation requires places: workshops, laboratories, gardens, kitchens, natural environments, associations, businesses, farms, public institutions, cultural venues and fabrication spaces. It also requires uninterrupted time, because a project constantly interrupted by short sequences does not always allow learners to engage deeply with a situation.

Above all, it requires institutional trust. Accepting experiential learning means recognizing that part of the outcome cannot be fully predicted. It means giving up control over every minute in order to better guarantee the quality of the process. It means accepting that several groups may achieve comparable learning outcomes by following different paths.

We want generations capable of innovating. We must therefore allow them to experiment.

We want resilient generations. We must allow them to encounter graduated difficulties.

We want generations that know how to cooperate. We must entrust them with projects whose success genuinely depends on others.

We want generations capable of using technologies with discernment. We must give them a sufficiently rich experience of the world so that they can compare the outputs of machines with something they have actually observed, made, felt and understood.

Making Participatory Science an Educational and Democratic Infrastructure

Participatory Science offers a particularly powerful response to the weakening of our relationship with reality. It does not consist of asking the public to mechanically reproduce actions designed elsewhere. It enables citizens, students, professionals, associations and researchers to contribute to a shared investigation: formulating questions, collecting observations, producing or interpreting data, testing hypotheses and discussing the consequences.

It transforms science from a body of results to be learned into a collective practice to be experienced.

In a context in which information is abundant, generated content is becoming difficult to distinguish from human-produced content and trust in institutions is weakening, this direct experience of the scientific method becomes decisive.

A person who has participated in an investigation better understands why an observation must be described precisely, why a protocol limits certain interpretations, why an isolated piece of data is insufficient and why a result may be revised without science thereby becoming arbitrary.

They discover that scientific knowledge is neither one opinion among others nor a certainty that has fallen from the sky. It results from a demanding organization of doubt.

Participating in research teaches people to distinguish what has been seen, what has been measured, what has been interpreted and what remains unknown. This distinction constitutes essential protection against disinformation. It makes it possible not to assign the same value to an appealing claim, sincere testimony, a statistical correlation and a conclusion supported by several independent methods.

Participatory Science also trains attention. Observing a bird, an insect, water quality, a type of soil, a temperature variation, an urban use or an astronomical phenomenon often requires slowing down. One must learn to recognize, compare, record, photograph, sample, measure or return to the same place.

The environment ceases to be a backdrop. It becomes a readable living environment.

This transformation of perception produces a profound educational effect. What one has learned to observe becomes more difficult to ignore. A river whose temperature, turbidity or biodiversity is regularly measured is no longer an abstraction. A wetland monitored over several seasons is no longer merely an available surface on a map. A glacier documented year after year becomes a visible history. Pollution is no longer merely general information: it has a location, a temporality, possible causes and consequences to be discussed.

Knowledge can thus strengthen a sense of responsibility without resorting to guilt.

Participatory Science also makes it possible to produce volumes of observations that a professional team might sometimes be unable to collect on its own. Large networks can cover vast territories, monitor phenomena over time and quickly report changes. They also contribute local knowledge, practices and perceptions that conventional scientific systems do not always capture.

But their value is not limited to increasing the amount of data. Their major contribution lies in creating a community of inquiry.

People from different generations, professions and backgrounds can work on the same question. A researcher contributes a theoretical and methodological framework. A resident knows how a place has changed. A professional possesses practical experience. A child sometimes notices what adults no longer see. An association understands the social relationships and needs of the territory.

Research becomes a space for translation between several forms of knowledge.

This cooperation can restore some trust between science, society and public decision-making. Distrust often arises when citizens see only a final result, communicated in specialized language, without understanding how it was obtained or what uncertainties accompany it. Participating in one stage of the investigation makes the method more visible and its limitations more understandable.

This does not eliminate disagreements. It makes it possible to shift them toward more precise questions: is the protocol appropriate? Are the observations representative? Which competing hypotheses should be tested? Which interests are concerned? What can reasonably be concluded?

Conflict becomes more fruitful when it concerns elements that can be examined.

Participatory Science also develops political capacity in the most concrete sense. It enables a population to document a situation before requesting action. A community that measures changes in a coastline, air quality, water availability or biodiversity has a stronger basis for dialogue with an administration, a company or a scientific institution.

This capacity must, however, be protected against two forms of misuse.

The first would consist of using citizens as unpaid labor to collect data without giving them access to the questions, results or decisions. Participation limited to execution can be useful, but it should not be presented as scientific co-decision if participants have no influence over the project.

The second form of misuse would be to suggest that all contributions automatically have the same scientific value. Participation does not eliminate the requirements of method, training, quality control and transparency. On the contrary, it requires making them accessible and shareable.

A serious program must specify what is being observed, how, for what purpose, with what limitations and under whose responsibility. It must organize data validation, document possible biases and enable participants to understand what becomes of their contributions.

Data governance is central. Who owns the data? Who may use it? Could it reveal the location of vulnerable species, information about individuals or sensitive practices? Can participants access the consolidated results? Can a company reuse a collectively constructed database free of charge? How can contributions be acknowledged without exposing individuals?

These are not administrative questions. They determine the trust and sustainability of the system.

Participatory Science can also reduce certain inequalities in access to science, provided that its design does not reproduce ordinary forms of exclusion. A project based exclusively on a recent smartphone, expensive travel, constant connectivity or specialized vocabulary will not be genuinely open.

It is therefore necessary to provide shared equipment, protocols that can be carried out offline, training, translations, facilitators, formats adapted to different ages and recognition of the skills already present within communities.

Participants must also receive feedback. Too many initiatives mobilize people for data collection whose results they never see. This silence turns a promise of participation into extraction. Every contributor should be able to understand what the data revealed, which uncertainties remain, which decisions were influenced and which new questions are emerging.

Reporting back should not be regarded as the final stage of communication. It is part of the scientific process and the moral contract of participation.

At school, Participatory Science can connect several disciplines around the same investigation. Monitoring water quality mobilizes chemistry, biology, mathematics, geography, the history of uses, law, writing, mapping and democratic debate. An astronomical observation can connect physics, mathematics, programming, the history of science, photography and international cooperation.

This interdisciplinarity does not dilute knowledge. It shows why different forms of knowledge must first be distinguished and then connected.

Students also discover that science is not reserved for people who already know the answer. It often begins with ignorance formulated well enough to become an investigable question.

This stance is particularly important in relation to artificial intelligence. A machine can rapidly generate an explanation, propose a protocol or simulate data. But it does not replace the responsibility to verify that the phenomenon described exists, that the measurement is appropriate, that local conditions are taken into account and that the interpretation respects the limitations of the observation.

Participatory Science gives learners a real-world reference point from which to evaluate algorithmic outputs. They can ask the tool to compare hypotheses, detect inconsistencies or help visualize data. But they also know that the plausibility of an answer does not guarantee that it corresponds to conditions on the ground.

To make this approach a genuine educational infrastructure, each territory could have permanent participatory observatories connected to schools, universities, associations, local authorities and research centers. Projects would not be limited to one-off campaigns. They would monitor phenomena over several years and enable successive generations to continue an investigation begun before them.

Transmission would become visible: new participants would receive the data, methods and questions of those who came before them, then enrich this heritage.

Public, philanthropic and private funding should recognize that these systems simultaneously produce several forms of value: knowledge, scientific education, environmental vigilance, territorial cooperation, data useful for decision-making and citizens' capacity to act.

Funding must therefore support not only tools and data-collection campaigns, but also training, facilitation, governance, reporting back, community maintenance, long-term archiving and the translation of results into decisions.

A project that funds sensors but not human relationships produces data without a community. A project that funds communication but not methodological rigor produces enthusiasm without knowledge. A project that funds research but gives nothing back to participants produces distrust.

Participatory Science succeeds when it holds together scientific quality, social usefulness and the dignity of participation.

It can help raise a generation that does not merely consume knowledge, but knows how to contribute to its production. A generation that does not ask only “what should we think?”, but “how do we know?”, “what would we need to observe?” and “what can we verify together?”.

Restoring the Lived Dimension of Autonomy and Responsibility

We readily value autonomy in educational discourse. Yet we often organize daily lives in which children and adolescents make few real decisions, assume few consequences and contribute little to the practical functioning of their community.

They are asked to be autonomous in carrying out tasks defined by adults, while rarely being given the power to determine a priority, allocate resources, choose a method, solve a collective problem or repair the consequences of a mistake.

This form of autonomy remains merely formal.

Lived autonomy does not mean the absence of rules, abandonment by adults or the possibility of doing whatever one wants. It refers to the progressive capacity to understand a situation, make a decision, act, ask for help when necessary and assume the effects of one's choice.

It is built within a framework of trust and graduated limits.

A child becomes autonomous when adults stop systematically doing in their place what they can learn to do themselves. This can begin with preparing their belongings, taking part in household tasks, organizing part of their time, caring for a space, travelling along a familiar route or resolving a simple disagreement.

As they grow older, responsibilities may involve a budget, the organization of a project, a mission serving the group, an investigation, a repair, the preparation of a journey, responsibility for equipment or the representation of their peers.

Responsibility must be real in order to produce its effects. A fictitious mission whose failure changes nothing does little to develop reliability. A useful mission requires anticipation, communication, verification and sometimes acknowledging that one will not be able to fulfil the commitment alone.

This lived experience transforms the relationship with effort. Effort is no longer an arbitrary requirement imposed from outside. It becomes what makes it possible to achieve an objective to which the person genuinely contributes.

Responsibility also teaches consequences. In environments where adults immediately correct every oversight, replace every lost object, arbitrate every conflict and prevent all frustration, a child can hardly build a stable understanding of the connection between their choices and their effects.

This is not about allowing failures to accumulate or punishing every mistake. It is about allowing proportionate and repairable consequences to exist. If equipment has not been prepared, a solution will have to be found. If a collective commitment has not been honoured, it will have to be explained and the person will have to contribute to repairing the situation. If a budget has been poorly allocated, priorities will have to be reconsidered.

Repair educates more effectively than humiliation.

An education in responsibility does not seek to produce people who never make mistakes. It develops people capable of acknowledging a mistake, understanding its effects and acting to restore what has been damaged.

This competence will become essential in societies confronted with complex choices. Future generations will probably have to manage consequences produced before they were born: ecological disruption, ageing infrastructure, debt, inequalities, technological dependencies and transformations in employment. They will not be able to repair everything, but they will have to decide what they will take responsibility for, with whom and according to which priorities.

It would be inconsistent to suddenly demand this responsibility from them in adulthood after having organized their entire youth around protection, conformity and obedience to instructions.

Autonomy also develops judgment in relation to risk. A person who has been protected from every uncertain situation does not automatically become prudent. On the contrary, they may underestimate danger, overestimate their abilities or remain permanently dependent on those who assess risks for them.

Prudence is learned by encountering graduated, supervised and analysed risks: using a tool, cooking, travelling, moving through a natural environment, speaking in front of a group, managing a sum of money, conducting an experiment, organizing an activity or intervening in a conflict.

The objective is not risk-taking for its own sake. It is the capacity to distinguish between an unacceptable danger, a manageable risk and a difficulty that is merely uncomfortable.

This distinction is often lacking in contemporary organizations. The legitimate pursuit of safety can lead to treating every uncertainty as a threat. It then reduces opportunities to acquire the competence that will make people genuinely safer: knowing how to observe, prepare, decide, withdraw or ask for support.

Lived autonomy also teaches that absolute independence is an illusion. An autonomous person does not do everything alone. They know their limits, know how to mobilize resources, cooperate and respect the interdependencies from which they benefit.

This understanding protects against two opposing tendencies: passive dependence and individualism.

An educational community should therefore entrust its members with responsibilities that genuinely contribute to the common good: maintaining a place, welcoming newcomers, passing on a skill, preparing an activity, caring for a living being, organizing the circulation of information, solving a practical problem or representing the group within a body.

When a person realizes that others partly depend on their reliability, they discover an essential dimension of citizenship. They are no longer merely the beneficiary of a service. They become a contributor.

The lived experience of responsibility also develops empathy. Caring for a younger child, an elderly person, an animal, a garden or shared equipment requires taking into account a rhythm and needs that do not coincide with one's own. Care ceases to be a declared value. It becomes sustained attention.

This dimension is particularly important in the face of the development of automated services. When many needs can be met without human contact, we risk losing certain ordinary opportunities to learn patience, reciprocity and recognition.

A society in which everyone receives personalized services is not necessarily a society in which everyone knows how to care for others.

Autonomy must also be exercised in governance. Children and adolescents can participate in defining certain rules, allocating resources, organizing projects and assessing collective functioning. This participation does not mean that all decisions belong to them or that adults relinquish their role.

It means that rules are also objects of understanding and responsibility.

When a group participates in developing a rule, it discovers divergent interests, constraints, exceptions and unforeseen effects. It learns that democracy is not the immediate satisfaction of every preference, but the organization of lasting disagreement within a common framework.

This experience prepares people for civic life more effectively than simply memorizing institutions.

However, participation must not be turned into a performance. Asking young people for their opinion on decisions that have already been made produces cynicism. Entrusting them with choices without resources or support produces failure. Serious participation must clarify what can be decided, what cannot be decided, which constraints exist and how proposals will be handled.

Responsibility finally requires a coherent relationship with adults. Adults must accept that they cannot control everything, but they cannot withdraw. They determine the acceptable level of risk, guarantee fundamental safety, intervene when the person cannot yet handle the situation alone and maintain expectations.

Kindness does not consist of removing every expectation. It consists of creating the conditions in which an expectation can become formative rather than overwhelming.

To develop this autonomy, families can give children a daily contribution suited to their age, beyond tidying their own space. Educational institutions can incorporate lasting responsibilities, project budgets, journeys prepared by students, repair workshops, governance councils and missions serving the local area.

Local authorities can create spaces in which young people can move around, experiment, meet and act with proportionate supervision. Associations can offer long-term projects in which responsibilities gradually increase. Companies can open up opportunities for observation, learning and real production instead of limiting themselves to presentations about professions.

Residential programmes, journeys, expeditions, work projects, scientific projects and immersions in nature have particular value in this respect. They temporarily remove certain routines and make interdependencies visible. Participants must prepare their equipment, manage time, contribute to meals, take the weather into account, support someone who is tired, follow a protocol and respond to the unexpected.

These experiences should not be considered peripheral leisure activities reserved for those who can afford them. They constitute major educational situations and should be accessible to everyone.

Artificial intelligence can support this autonomy if it is used as a tool for enhancement rather than as a permanent tutor. It can help prepare a project, explore scenarios, translate information or identify resources. But the person must continue to formulate their own objectives, verify the results, decide and bear final responsibility.

When a tool gives a recommendation, the user should be able to answer three questions: what information is this recommendation based on? What could make it inappropriate? Who will bear the consequences if it is followed?

Without this responsibility, automation can produce a strange situation: everyone has extremely powerful assistance, but no one fully recognizes themselves as the author of the decisions made.

Lived autonomy is therefore a condition of future freedom. A person who does not know how to act without instructions will remain dependent, even if they possess many rights. A person who has never assumed real responsibility will find it difficult to exercise power with discernment. A person who has never contributed to a collective may come to regard society solely as a set of services to which they are entitled.

The next generation must not only learn how to succeed within existing systems. It must become capable of maintaining, repairing and transforming those systems when they no longer meet human needs.

The Future Is in Our Hands, but Not Only in Our Intentions

The next generation will not be produced solely by school curricula. It will be shaped by all the environments we organize: families, educational institutions, media, platforms, territories, leisure activities, public policies, businesses and economic models.

We can raise people who are accustomed to receiving answers, services, recommendations and protections quickly. We can also raise people capable of questioning, investigating, experimenting, contributing, deciding, repairing and caring.

These two directions are not entirely mutually exclusive. Technologies can free up time, broaden access to knowledge, compensate for certain difficulties and considerably increase our capacities. But the time freed must be reinvested in experience, relationships, attention, creation and responsibility. Otherwise, automation does not liberate human beings: it gradually atrophies the faculties they cease to exercise.

The future is therefore in our hands in an extremely concrete sense. It depends on what we decide to fund, the time we protect and the activities to which we grant legitimacy.

A family chooses between an additional hour of digital consumption and an hour devoted to making, cooking, walking, discussing or caring.

An educational institution chooses between further increasing the time devoted to standardized instruction and opening up a project involving investigation, cooperation or real action.

A local authority chooses between creating a completely prescribed space and allowing young people to explore it and contribute to its transformation.

A State chooses between measuring primarily the reproduction of knowledge and also recognizing autonomy, cooperation, reasoning, creativity, reliability and the capacity to act.

A philanthropist chooses between funding a visible activity on a one-off basis and providing lasting support to the teams, places and communities that make experiential learning accessible.

An investor chooses between accelerating tools that capture attention and developing economic models that increase human capacities, shared knowledge, the quality of relationships and the resilience of territories.

A technology company chooses between maximizing user dependence and designing a tool that progressively gives users greater autonomy.

It is therefore not enough to declare that we want better generations. We must verify that the daily organizations we fund genuinely cultivate the qualities we claim to desire.

With every educational, technological or economic decision, we should ask a simple question: does this activity increase or reduce a person's capacity to understand, decide, cooperate and act without depending entirely on a system they do not control?

Then a second: does this activity make it possible to care for a common world, or merely to succeed individually within it for a time?

Many activities already exist that are capable of strengthening future generations: project-based learning, Participatory Science, educational residential programmes, expeditions, fabrication workshops, territorial investigations, mentoring, shared governance, artistic practices, intergenerational cooperation, immersion in nature, community involvement, care, repair and responsible entrepreneurship.

The question is not whether these solutions exist.

The question is what place we decide to give them in our choices, policies, schedules and budgets.

This is where our responsibility lies. In the time and money we invest. In the activities we make accessible or allow to become privileges. In what philanthropy chooses to support. In what investment chooses to make profitable. In what public authorities choose to recognize as essential infrastructure.

We can bequeath to future generations tools more powerful than any we have ever possessed. But these tools will constitute progress only if the people who use them remain capable of thinking, choosing and taking responsibility for what they do with them.

The next generation may be more assisted, more connected and better informed than any before it.

It is up to us to decide whether it will also be more autonomous, more responsible, more attentive, more cooperative and more alive.

Toward Two Human species?

Thomas EGLI — 2026-07-13T12:53:44Z

More than 20 years ago, I considered the hypothesis that humanity might split into two distinct human populations, one population living mainly in urbanized and technological environments, and another maintaining a direct relationship with natural environments. Having recently revisited this foresight exercise, the subject proves highly fruitful from both a scientific and strategic perspective, provided that several levels of divergence between “humanities” are distinguished.

Despite the very strong original premise, the near-term formation of two human species, in the biological sense, remains highly unlikely. Speciation requires the lasting establishment of reproductive barriers that greatly reduce gene flow between two populations. Yet humans living in cities, rural areas, or natural environments remain biologically compatible, mobile, and widely interconnected. Global genetic mixing instead acts as a homogenizing force.

By contrast, an anthropological, cultural, cognitive, physiological, and political bifurcation is already underway. Human groups may gradually cease to inhabit the same sensory world, acquire the same skills, depend on the same infrastructures, or share the same knowledge and criteria of truth, long before becoming biologically distinct.

The most robust formulation of this thesis would therefore be the following:

Humanity could rapidly differentiate into several modes of existence, with two poles consisting of a humanity primarily integrated into the technosphere and a humanity primarily integrated into living systems. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, economic concentration, and health and climate crises could transform this cultural and functional divergence into lasting stratification, and eventually into an organized biological divergence. Genuine speciation would nevertheless remain unlikely without voluntary or imposed reproductive isolation over many generations.

The nearest tipping point is therefore not the emergence of two species. It is the emergence of human populations that would still be biologically similar, but would become socially alien to one another, cognitively asymmetrical, physiologically differentiated, and politically incapable of building a common world.

1. Origins of the Reflection

In my previous discussions within United Nations, professional, or personal contexts, this intuition appears to be the convergence of several long-standing lines of reflection.

In an entirely non-exhaustive manner, a series of studies had been requested on harmony with living systems, bio-inspired governance, Participatory Science, the rights of Nature, regenerative finance, regenerative cities, sufficiency, planetary ethics, and responsible artificial intelligence.

One of the requirements recently formulated in this field of work was that artificial intelligence should, from its inception, be aligned with the principles of living systems, placed at the service of an alliance with the Earth, and governed through a participatory framework involving citizens and international institutions. The earlier excesses of social networks were already regarded as a warning: a technology presented as a tool for connection can become an infrastructure for capturing attention, fostering polarization, and enabling manipulation.

The reflection also linked:

resilience to diversity and interconnection;
the regenerative economy to restoring the conditions that sustain living systems;
impact finance to valuing Nature without commodifying it;
informal education to direct experience;
learning to a non-anthropocentric relationship with Nature;
Participatory Science to citizens' capacity to observe, understand, and act upon their environment;
participatory democracy to the prevention of centralization, dependency, and dispossession.

This thesis, once again developed as a foresight exercise, is therefore less an isolated idea than a general framework for connecting several concerns already expressed: the loss of contact with living systems, dependence on infrastructure, the concentration of technological power, the weakening of autonomy, the fragmentation of knowledge, and the possibility of regenerative governance.

2. The Fundamental Distinction: Biological Species or Human Condition?

2.1. What Is a Species in the Biological Sense?

In the classical biological conception, a species consists of populations whose members can reproduce with one another and are reproductively isolated from other populations. Speciation does not result solely from physical, cultural, or behavioral differences. It requires the emergence of barriers that prevent or durably reduce fertile interbreeding.

Ecological divergence can contribute to speciation when two populations occupy different habitats, experience different selection pressures, and gradually choose their partners within their own group. However, gene flow between groups tends to slow this evolution.

People living in cities and those living in rural or natural areas currently constitute neither reproductively isolated populations nor coherent genetic lineages. Travel for education, work, migration, tourism, online encounters, and relationships between territories instead maintain considerable gene flow.

The spontaneous emergence of two human species, one urban and the other natural, is therefore not credible in the short or medium term.

2.2. A Bifurcation Can Precede Speciation by a Very Long Time

It would nevertheless be a mistake to conclude that the absence of biological speciation means the absence of profound divergence.

Among humans, culture modifies environments, behaviors, diets, physical activities, social relationships, and selection pressures. This is the domain of gene-culture coevolution and niche construction. Humans do not merely adapt to an environment: they transform that environment, which then transforms their own conditions of development.

The city is one of the most complex human niches ever constructed. It alters light, noise, temperatures, rhythms, movement, diet, social density, air quality, the environmental microbiome, and the way knowledge is acquired.

The fastest divergence will therefore probably be:

cultural;
cognitive;
sensory;
physiological;
immune and metabolic;
economic and political;
possibly genetic or technically heritable much later.

3. An Inadequate Opposition Between City and Nature

The distinction between “city people” and “nature people” is intuitive, but scientifically too simplistic.

The United Nations has moreover shifted its methods toward a continuum distinguishing cities, intermediate settlements, and rural areas, rather than a binary opposition. The 2025 revision of the World Urbanization Prospects nevertheless confirms that future population growth will be concentrated mainly in cities and settlements.

A person living in a rural area may be entirely dependent on global supply chains, industrial seeds, digital platforms, vehicles, imported products, and centralized administrative systems. Conversely, a city resident may garden, understand ecosystems, participate in naturalist surveys, repair equipment, and possess considerable practical autonomy.

The true dividing line lies less between two places than between two modes of integration into the world.

The Technospheric Pole

It is characterized by the strong mediation of existence through:

digital networks;
automated services;
energy infrastructure;
logistics systems;
climate-controlled environments;
professional specialization;
the delegation of knowledge and decision-making;
limited direct awareness of the origins of water, energy, food, and materials.

The Biospheric Pole

It is characterized more strongly by:

a direct relationship with ecological cycles;
practical knowledge of territories;
more diverse sensory and microbial exposure;
the ability to produce, maintain, repair, or observe;
a more visible dependence on seasons, soils, and resources;
local and intergenerational knowledge;
community relationships that are often more directly connected to the territory.

These poles do not describe two pure categories. They form the endpoints of a gradient.

4. The Biological Dimensions of an Already Observable Divergence

4.1. The Human Body Is Shaped by Its Environment

Environmental differences influence health without immediately altering the genome. Diet, pollution, physical activity, stress, sleep, light, noise, and exposure to biodiversity affect the development and functioning of the body.

Urbanization can offer major benefits: access to healthcare, education, transportation, information, and protective infrastructure. At the same time, it can expose people to pollution, stress, sedentary lifestyles, heat islands, and extreme inequalities. The WHO emphasizes that urban benefits and risks are distributed very unevenly, sometimes from one street to the next.

There is therefore no privileged “urban body” and healthy “rural body.” Social, economic, and political determinants remain essential.

4.2. The Microbiome and Exposure to Biodiversity

Significant divergence can nevertheless occur in the communities of microorganisms living on the skin, in the gut, and in the respiratory tract.

The biodiversity hypothesis suggests that contact with a greater diversity of environmental microorganisms contributes to the regulation of the immune system. Reduced contact with these microorganisms in certain urbanized environments is associated with an increase in inflammatory or immune disorders, although the mechanisms and causal relationships remain complex.

Interventions involving soils, gardens, and green spaces show that increased microbial exposure can alter certain microbiomes and immune markers. Restoring biodiversity-rich urban spaces could therefore reduce some of the divergence between environments.

These are, however, potentially reversible functional and ecological differences, not a separation between species.

4.3. Stress, Cognition, and Mental Health

Contact with natural environments is associated with reduced stress, improved mood, and certain cognitive benefits. These findings do not prove that all rural life is preferable to all urban life, but they confirm that environmental characteristics directly contribute to shaping psychological and cognitive capacities.

Studies have also observed different immune responses to social stress depending on the childhood environment, particularly between people raised in cities and those who grew up in rural environments in contact with animals. These findings are suggestive, but they do not establish a general rule applicable to all societies.

4.4. Epigenetics Is Not Sufficient to Create Two Species

Urban and rural environments may be associated with differences in DNA methylation and markers of biological aging. These mechanisms can influence health throughout life.

However, an excessively Lamarckian interpretation should be avoided. In humans, genuine epigenetic transmission across several generations remains difficult to demonstrate. A large proportion of epigenetic marks are reprogrammed during the formation of germ cells and in the early stages of embryonic development. Effects observed across generations may also result from culture, the family environment, pregnancy, or the persistence of the same social conditions.

The environment can therefore rapidly produce different bodies and states of health, but it does not automatically create two separate human lineages.

5. COVID-19 as an Accelerator

We had the opportunity to use the COVID-19 pandemic to conduct a number of observations useful to this foresight exercise.

In our view, the pandemic did not create the bifurcation, but it accelerated several mechanisms that were already present.

5.1. Forced Digitalization

Work, education, administrative procedures, commerce, healthcare, and social relationships were transferred on a massive scale to digital interfaces. The OECD notes that the pandemic accelerated the digitalization of work and social interactions, as well as the lasting acceptance of remote work.

For part of the population, this transformation increased residential mobility and the ability to live outside urban centers. For others, it reinforced dependence on platforms, isolation, or the inability to access services because of a lack of equipment, connectivity, or skills.

5.2. Selection Through the Capacity for Digital Adaptation

Companies and individuals that were already digitalized were generally able to adapt more quickly. Actors that had not previously used digital platforms fell further behind, while online sales tended to become concentrated among dominant companies.

The pandemic thus revealed an initial form of social selection: not genetic selection, but selection based on compatibility with the digital environment.

5.3. Widening Educational Gaps

Distance learning often benefited children who had computers, a reliable internet connection, a quiet space, and parents able to support them. In several countries, learning losses were greater among poor households and students with the least access to educational resources.

These differences can subsequently produce divergent professional, social, and reproductive trajectories. Their mechanism remains cultural and economic, but their effects may persist across several generations.

5.4. A Symbolic Break in the Relationship With the Body and Space

The COVID-19 period also accustomed part of humanity to living, working, shopping, learning, and meeting others without physical presence. It made a social life primarily mediated by screens conceivable.

At the same time, it prompted other people to seek rural territories, autonomy, gardens, proximity, and natural spaces more actively. This movement did not reverse the global trend toward urbanization, and some of the migration observed was temporary.

The pandemic therefore separated cities from the countryside less than it reinforced two opposing aspirations: the dematerialization of existence and the recovery of a territorial connection.

6. Artificial Intelligence Is Changing the Scale and Speed of the Bifurcation

Artificial intelligence introduces a qualitatively new factor. It is not merely transforming the tools used by humans. It is entering the processes of language, learning, memory, creation, orientation, and decision-making.

6.1. Hybrid Cognition

Tools have always extended the human mind: writing, maps, libraries, calculators, and search engines. Generative AI nevertheless represents a further step by participating in the formulation of ideas, arguments, and decisions.

Researchers describe collaborations between humans and AI as hybrid thinking systems in which biological and non-biological resources are closely interconnected.

A person who uses AI daily does not merely have an additional tool. They may gradually acquire a different way of searching, writing, deciding, imagining, and perceiving their own abilities.

6.2. Two Opposing Cognitive Directions

AI can enhance human capabilities when it is used to question, verify, compare, simulate, and free up time for complex tasks.

It can also lead to excessive delegation: answers accepted without verification, reduced analytical effort, diminished memory training, dependence on recommendations, and weakened initiative. The first studies are still too recent to establish general neurological consequences, but they already demonstrate the importance of distinguishing active cooperation from passive dependence.

The future dividing line may therefore lie less between people who use AI and those who do not than between:

those who learn to think with it without surrendering their judgment to it;
those who become dependent on systems they neither understand nor control;
those who are excluded from it;
those who own the infrastructure, models, and data.

6.3. Concentration of Power

Stanford's 2026 AI Index report indicates that industry produced more than 90% of the leading AI models identified in 2025 and that organizational adoption continues to increase rapidly. Investment, computing infrastructure, and the most powerful models are concentrated among a limited number of companies and countries.

This concentration may produce a greater asymmetry than the opposition between cities and rural areas. The decisive divide could lie between populations that control AI systems, those that know how to guide them, those that depend on them, and those that remain invisible within their data.

6.4. Occupational and Wealth Inequalities

The IMF estimates that AI could complement the work of certain highly skilled groups while replacing or devaluing other tasks. When complementarity with high-income workers is strong, wage inequalities may increase. Capital income and wealth inequalities are also likely to rise as productivity gains become concentrated.

The ILO emphasizes that the digital divide strongly determines the ability of countries and workers to benefit from AI. Some populations may face limited exposure to the immediate replacement of their jobs while remaining unable to benefit from the increased capabilities made possible by AI.

6.5. Divergence of Informational Realities

Social networks have already shown that weak individual preferences for similar people can produce strong segregation across a network. Digital audiences can become differentiated by their sources of information, their vocabulary, and even the meaning attributed to the same words.

Personalized AIs could intensify this phenomenon by generating for each person an explanation of the world adapted to their preferences, beliefs, and behaviors. Two populations could then speak the same language while no longer sharing the same facts, categories, or causal relationships.

The divergence would become epistemic: not merely different opinions, but incompatible ways of determining what is real.

7. Ecological Competence as Another Form of Intelligence

The population living in nature should not be regarded as a humanity that has “fallen behind.”

Quite the opposite: the abilities required to observe an ecosystem, anticipate a season, interpret animal behavior, manage water, cultivate, repair, navigate, or cooperate within a small community are sophisticated forms of intelligence.

A person who performs extremely well within a digital system may be unable to meet their basic needs without complex infrastructure. A person with few formal qualifications may possess irreplaceable ecological, bodily, or territorial understanding.

The divergence could therefore involve two sets of skills:

symbolic, abstract, digital, and distributed intelligence;
ecological, sensory, practical, and relational intelligence.

These forms of intelligence are not incompatible. Their separation would result primarily from educational, economic, and territorial systems.

Participatory Science activities, scientific field trips, project-based learning, and direct experiences of living systems promoted through the work of Objectif Sciences International take on a strategic dimension here. They do not merely serve to disseminate scientific culture: they keep abstract intelligence, sensory experience, practical autonomy, and cooperation connected.

8. Social Divergence Could Precede Biological Divergence

Humans already often choose their partners according to social, geographical, cultural, or educational proximity. Educational homogamy — the frequency of couples with comparable levels of education — is well documented.

If the most technologically advanced groups lived in separate environments, attended different institutions, had access to different healthcare, and primarily chose partners from within their own group, a certain demographic structuring could emerge.

This would not be sufficient to form a species. However, the following sequence is theoretically possible:

economic inequality;
residential segregation;
educational and cultural separation;
social homogamy;
differences in health and reproduction;
unequal access to medical technologies;
heritable biological interventions;
a lasting reduction in unions between groups.

The issue becomes particularly serious with human enhancement technologies.

9. A Genuine Threshold: Transforming Social Inequality Into Hereditary Difference

9.1. Neurotechnologies

Brain-machine interfaces are advancing primarily in therapeutic and assistive applications: restoring communication, controlling devices, and compensating for motor or sensory impairments. Future developments could also enhance certain perceptions or abilities.

The OECD has already identified issues relating to autonomy, mental privacy, manipulation, human enhancement, and inequalities in access.

These technologies are generally not hereditary. They could nevertheless create functionally different classes: unequipped humans, assisted humans, enhanced humans, and humans subjected to neurotechnological surveillance.

9.2. Genome Editing

Heritable genome editing would represent a far more significant threshold. The WHO emphasizes the need for international governance, particularly because of the medical, ethical, and social risks involved.

The US National Academies have explicitly raised the risk that privileged access by wealthy populations to heritable modifications could transform a culturally produced inequality into a biological difference and lead to “parallel populations.”

Recent studies show that the simultaneous editing of several variants could theoretically reduce certain susceptibilities to polygenic diseases significantly. This remains a theoretical possibility surrounded by considerable scientific obstacles, but it demonstrates that the issue no longer belongs solely to science fiction.

The scenario of two biologically divergent humanities would become more plausible if four conditions were combined:

heritable modifications;
highly unequal access;
lasting homogamy within enhanced groups;
social or legal isolation limiting interbreeding.

Even then, these would initially be technically differentiated populations, not necessarily two species.

10. The Four Types of Civilisations Concealed by the Image of Two Humanities

Reality is likely to produce at least four major human conditions rather than a simple opposition. These four examples are, of course, proposed within a foresight framework and do not take into account forms of humanity that already exist, including highly isolated ones that could become genuine reservoirs of resilience in the event of the collapse of the populations explored here.

10.1. The Enhanced Technospheric Elite

It would control or master AI, data, capital, personalized medicine, digital infrastructure, and possibly enhancement technologies.

It could benefit from better health, greater longevity, extended cognitive abilities, and high mobility.

10.2. The Dependent Technospheric Population

It would live in highly urbanized and digitalized environments without controlling the systems on which it depends.

Its behavior, work, movements, access to services, and knowledge could be guided by algorithms. It would be connected, but have little autonomy.

This population could constitute the majority of urban humanity.

10.3. Economically Vulnerable Biospheric Populations

They would maintain a direct relationship with land, forests, seas, or natural cycles, but could suffer from poverty, inadequate healthcare, ecosystem degradation, resource appropriation, and the consequences of climate change.

It would be a mistake to romanticize their situation. Proximity to nature is equivalent to neither freedom nor security.

10.4. Scientifically Equipped Biospheric Communities

They would combine local ecological knowledge, Participatory Science, appropriate technologies, artificial intelligence, cooperation, and territorial autonomy.

They would not reject technology. They would subordinate it to the conditions of living systems.

This fourth possibility corresponds to a regenerative path: not choosing between nature and intelligence, but developing human and artificial intelligence capable of living within the limits and dynamics of ecosystems.

11. Foresight Scenarios

Scenario 1 — Accelerated Functional Divergence

Time horizon: already underway, particularly between 2026 and 2035.

Populations acquire different skills, rhythms, attention patterns, and dependencies. Some delegate an increasing share of their memory and reasoning to digital systems. Others retain or rebuild territorial and practical skills.

Interactions between groups remain numerous. These are not biologically distinct populations.

Plausibility: high.

Scenario 2 — Incompatible Sociocultural Archipelagos

Time horizon: 2030-2050.

Educational systems, personalized media, places of residence, and professional networks produce groups that no longer share the same knowledge or standards.

Professional, political, and cultural languages diverge. The groups remain capable of reproducing with one another, but relationships and unions become less frequent.

Plausibility: high to medium, depending on public policies.

Scenario 3 — Techno-Biological Castes

Time horizon: after 2040, with considerable uncertainty.

A minority has access to a combination of advanced preventive medicine, personalized AI, neurotechnologies, embryo selection, life extension, and possibly genetic modifications.

Social differences begin to be embodied and transmitted through unequal access to technologies, or even through heredity.

Plausibility: low to medium, but with potentially considerable consequences.

Scenario 4 — Two Human Species

Time horizon: unpredictable and probably very distant.

A population isolated over a prolonged period accumulates genetic differences until reproductive barriers emerge. This scenario would probably require extreme geographical separation, a closed reproductive policy, intentional genetic engineering, or prolonged space colonization.

The mere opposition between cities and natural environments is not sufficient.

Plausibility in the coming decades: extremely low.

12. What Could Invalidate or Reverse the Thesis

Several developments could prevent the bifurcation.

12.1. The Renaturalization of Cities

Cities can become more permeable, greener, more productive, more walkable, and richer in biodiversity. The health benefits of green and blue spaces show that it is possible to reintroduce a relationship with living systems within urban environments.

12.2. The Spread of Decentralized Technologies

Artificial intelligence, networks, telemedicine, local energy production, and portable scientific tools can strengthen rural territories rather than marginalize them.

AI is therefore not intrinsically urban. It can enable distributed communities to access advanced knowledge without leaving their territory.

12.3. Education Combining Digital Technology and Experience

The opposition between scientific culture and knowledge of living systems can be overcome through an education that alternates between:

abstract reasoning;
direct observation;
experimentation;
physical activity;
cooperation;
making;
understanding infrastructure;
critical use of AI.

12.4. Global Governance of Human Enhancement

International rules could prohibit hereditary enhancement practices, protect neurorights, guarantee equitable access to healthcare, and prevent the formation of biological castes.

Governance is not peripheral to the issue. It will largely determine whether technologies become common goods, instruments of emancipation, or mechanisms of separation.

13. Indicators for Monitoring the Bifurcation

The thesis could be monitored empirically through an interdisciplinary observatory. It would measure not only urbanization, but also several forms of distance between human groups:

actual exposure to biodiversity;
microbiome diversity;
physical and motor abilities;
food, energy, and technical autonomy;
daily time spent in front of interfaces;
level of cognitive delegation to AI;
ability to verify algorithmic outputs;
access to healthcare and personalized medicine;
access to neurotechnologies;
concentration of ownership of data and models;
educational, social, and technological homogamy;
mobility between territories and social groups;
linguistic and informational divergence;
knowledge of local ecosystems;
ability to act without digital infrastructure;
intergenerational transmission of practical knowledge;
participation in collective decision-making;
trust between social and territorial groups.

The most alarming indicator would not be an isolated difference. It would be the growing correlation between all these dimensions: the same people being privileged in their access to healthcare, AI, education, capital, longevity, and the ability to choose their environment.

14. Conclusion

In light of all the above, the thesis could ultimately be formulated more precisely as follows:

Humanity is entering a period of anthropological bifurcation during which living environments, technical systems, and forms of learning are producing increasingly different human modes of existence. One is moving toward an existence heavily mediated by cities, infrastructure, platforms, and artificial intelligence. The other retains or rebuilds a direct relationship with territories, ecosystems, practical knowledge, and local communities.

COVID-19 accelerated digital dependence, revealed inequalities in adaptive capacity, and legitimized the dematerialization of part of social life. Artificial intelligence is now accelerating the divergence by entering the core of cognitive, economic, and decision-making processes.

This development is not currently producing two biological species. It is producing functionally and culturally different humanities that may one day no longer share the same abilities, dependencies, or representation of reality.

A transition toward biological divergence would become plausible only in the event of prolonged reproductive segregation or highly unequal access to hereditary modifications. The most immediate risk is therefore less speciation than the emergence of anthropological castes: some humans controlling and incorporating technological systems, others depending on them, others being excluded from them, and still others organizing a different alliance between science, technology, and living systems, even if they must fight to preserve their vital autonomy.

Upon closer analysis, this initial intuition appears broadly valid as a hypothesis of anthropological divergence, but premature when formulated as the imminent emergence of two human species.

Science confirms that environments can already produce significant differences in health, microbiomes, cognition, stress, behavior, knowledge, and social relationships. Culture and technology can intensify these differences much faster than genetic evolution.

COVID-19 was a historic accelerator of digital mediation. Artificial intelligence is an even more profound accelerator, because it no longer merely mediates exchanges: it now mediates thought itself.

The main dividing line will probably not run between those who geographically live in cities and those who live in the countryside. It will run between:

those who control their technological mediations and those who are subjected to them;
those who maintain active contact with living systems and those whose environment becomes almost entirely artificial;
those who combine technological intelligence with ecological intelligence and those who are confined to only one of these dimensions;
those who have access to medical and cognitive enhancements and those who are deprived of them.

The true alternative is therefore not between a modern humanity and a natural humanity.

It lies between a humanity fragmented into technological and ecological castes, and a symbiotic humanity, capable of combining artificial intelligence, direct experience, Participatory Science, autonomy, cultural diversity, and respect for living systems.

From this perspective, regenerative cities, experiential education, participatory research, bio-inspired governance, and responsible AI are not merely sector-specific projects. They can be understood as elements of a policy intended to prevent humanity from ceasing to form a community with a shared destiny.

Back to origins

Thomas EGLI — 2026-03-30T16:53:20Z

Finance that generates profits while staying connected to the real world

It may be time to return to a forgotten truth: originally, finance was not meant to float above the world. It was made to irrigate the real economy, to enable useful activities to be born, to grow, to produce, to employ, to repair, to pass on. It was a means. Not a separate universe.

Yet, for several decades, a growing share of financial flows has moved away from the field, from concrete needs, from human timeframes, from projects led by women and men who are building something tangible. This disconnection has produced a great deal of sophistication, but not always much meaning. It has also created a paradox that has become central: there is a huge amount of capital available, and yet a multitude of solid, useful, profitable, and necessary projects still struggle to find the right financing. This is precisely the diagnosis set out in the White Book of the Geneva Foundation for the Future, which describes the coexistence of excess capital and a deficit of financed solutions, as well as a lack of common interfaces between investors, philanthropists, and project leaders.

Returning to the origins therefore does not mean going backward. It means rediscovering the primary vocation of money: to support what has value in the real world, while generating income for those who commit it.

This idea is now attracting very different profiles. Long-established wealthy families seeking to pass on something other than financial assets. More recent, entrepreneurial fortunes that want their capital to keep building. Banks, funds, family offices, foundations, companies, individual investors. More modest wealth as well, because they too want to grow their money without feeling that they are feeding an abstract or destructive mechanism.

The good news is that this reconnection between profit and reality is no longer a marginal intuition. The global impact investing market is estimated at 1.571 trillion dollars in assets under management in 2024, with strong growth since 2019, and the GIIN explicitly reminds us that impact investments can target returns ranging from below market to above market, depending on the investor's intention and strategy.

In other words: yes, it is possible to seek a ROI for oneself while financing projects connected to the field.

Making money “with,” no longer “against”

For a long time, an implicit opposition structured people's thinking: on one side profitability, on the other usefulness. On one side return, on the other ethics. On one side performance, on the other impact.

This opposition is holding up less and less.

Why? Because the major risks of the 21st century are no longer peripheral. They are at the heart of the economy. Climate, resource scarcity, the fragility of supply chains, social tensions, public distrust, regulatory change: all of this ends up affecting profitability itself. Projects that integrate these realities from the outset are not outside the market; they are often better suited to the world that is coming. Looking risks in the face and integrating them into the business model already means turning them into drivers of value and resilience.

Finance connected to the real world therefore does not mean sacrificing financial return. It means producing a financial return rooted in concrete usefulness, in tangible assets, in necessary services, in business models that respond to real needs.
It is also, quite simply, a question of readability. When an investor understands what their money is actually doing, whom it serves, through what flows it returns, with what risks and what governance, they recover an intelligence of investment that growing complexity has sometimes blurred.

Another promise made to the investor: understandable income

One of the major contributions of the approach defended by the Geneva Foundation for the Future is to place at the center a finance directly connected to the field, with an explicit desire to bypass as much as possible opaque layers of intermediation and overly abstract instruments. The foundation's brochure speaks of a finance “directly connected to the field,” of a desire to “re-enchant finance without derivatives,” and the official White Book even states: “We believe in reconnecting finance to real initiatives, bypassing financial derivatives and complex intermediation to ensure full transparency and tangible outcomes.”

This orientation changes many things for the investor.

First, it changes their relationship to risk. A risk is not necessarily lower because it is more sophisticated. On the contrary, it may become less readable. Conversely, a well-structured, well-governed, well-phased field project, with identified revenues, traceable costs, and simple indicators, can offer a more concrete reading of the risk-return ratio.

It then changes their relationship to time. Not all investors seek the same timeframe. Some want to grow capital over ten years. Others seek quarterly flows. Still others want to be able to start small, without devoting much time to it, without entering into an overly demanding adventure, but with the satisfaction that their money is feeding a useful economy.

This is precisely where the “back to origins” approach becomes powerful: it does not ask everyone to become a field expert. It offers simple entry modes, gradual, not very time-consuming, but connected to real projects.

The real issue is not only impact. It is the circulation of money

One of the central problems is less the absence of capital than the poor circulation of that capital. There are many relatively recurring obstacles: a mismatch between the timeframe of capital and that of projects, fragmentation of financing channels, absence of refinancing mechanisms, unsuitable allocation criteria, withdrawal of funders in the face of perceived risk, and weakened monitoring when liquidity is lacking.

The AGILE White Book addresses this problem in its various chapters on this excess capital facing a large number of very good unfunded projects, on the flows to unlock for scaling up, and on the fracture between local projects and globalized finance.
This analysis aligns with a broader observation: UNCTAD estimates that the annual investment gap to achieve the SDGs in developing countries is around 4 trillion dollars per year, while the decline in international project financing and sustainable investment is aggravating this tension.

The issue therefore becomes very concrete: how can money be made to circulate more directly, more intelligently, more quickly, toward truly useful projects, while enabling investors to obtain the income they are seeking?

ROI for oneself is not taboo

It must be said clearly here: wanting a return for oneself is not a problem. It is even healthy, provided one is clear-eyed about what one is financing to obtain it.
A bank needs profitability. A fund must serve its subscribers. A company must allocate its capital with discipline. An individual wants to grow their savings. An institution seeks to secure and enhance its assets. None of this is contradictory to a connection with the real world.

What changes is the type of return one agrees to look at.

First, there is purely financial return. It matters, of course, and today impact projects and mission-driven companies are capable of delivering very good financial returns on investment. Then there is the stability created by more resilient models. There is also avoided risk. There is the quality of territorial anchoring. There is reputation, compliance, social acceptability, access to new markets, the loyalty of communities of clients or partners. Many of these dimensions end up translating into economic performance, even if they do not all appear immediately in a spreadsheet.

The GIIN also reminds us that impact investing is compatible with a wide range of financial objectives, and that investors are involved in very concrete sectors: energy, health, sustainable agriculture, infrastructure, housing, microfinance.
True maturity therefore consists in embracing a simple idea: seeking ROI and seeking real usefulness can now go together.

All forms of wealth are concerned

It would be wrong to believe that this transformation concerns only a few major international players.

It concerns:

small fortunes that want to begin with modest but visible tickets;
established families that wish to pass on capital more consistent with their vision of the world;
new fortunes resulting from recent wealth transfers, which quite rightly seek to give meaning to their new financial capacities;
entrepreneurs who have recently become wealthy, who prefer to invest in dynamics they understand;
banks and managers seeking more credible and better-justified offerings;
companies that want to transform cash reserves, a foundation, an investment vehicle, or a diversification strategy;
individual investors who have neither the time nor the desire to become experts, but who want their money to serve something real.

There is a new generation of very diverse investors: individuals, family offices, public or philanthropic institutions, all interested in different return horizons and in a more direct relationship with the field.

This point must be emphasized: there is no single culture of wealth. Some fortunes are cautious, patrimonial, discreet. Others are aggressive, entrepreneurial, opportunistic. Some are inherited, others are earned in a single generation. Some seek transmission first, others growth, and still others moral consistency. A finance reconnected to the real world can speak to all of them, because it does not ask them to adopt a single philosophy; it offers them the chance to rediscover a readable link between capital, activity, and result.

How to do it without it becoming time-consuming

This is often where everything is decided. Many investors are interested in theory, then step back in practice because they imagine an involvement that is too heavy, too technical, too uncertain.

Yet there are simple, not very demanding ways of feeding an economy connected to field projects.

The first consists in investing in vehicles or portfolios already structured around real projects, with an evaluation methodology and pooled monitoring. The investor is not asked to analyze everything by themselves. They benefit from a selection framework, governance filters, a reading of risk, and light but serious monitoring.
The second consists in favoring phased projects, broken down into successive sub-projects. Your working document insists strongly on this point: a large project does not need to be financed as a single block; it can be structured into economically viable stages, each with its needs, revenues, milestones, and possible returns. This makes it possible to diversify entry points, obtain gradual returns, and reinvest as progress is made.

The third consists in accepting the plurality of timeframes. Not all returns have to arrive in ten years. Some projects can generate shorter-term flows: monthly, quarterly, or within a three- to five-year horizon. Others require more patience. Your notes specifically mention this multi-temporality and the idea of adapting instruments to the real rhythms of projects.

The fourth consists in entering through simple and understandable forms of financing: straightforward debt, revenue sharing, financing backed by phases of activity, small-scale impact bonds, revolving funds, micro-leasing, or hybrid vehicles when justified. When the structure remains readable, the investor does not need to devote excessive energy to it.

The fifth consists in relying on a translation body between worlds. This is exactly the role that the Geneva Foundation for the Future assigns to its operational center and to the AGILE tool: creating a bridge between financiers, philanthropists, institutions, and project leaders, streamlining evaluation, pooling criteria, simplifying dialogue.

Simple can be more serious than complicated

There is a very strong temptation in the financial world to confuse sophistication with solidity.

Yet, very often, robustness comes from elsewhere: from a clear intention, reliable governance, an understandable economic model, a capacity to actually produce, an anchoring in lasting needs.

That is why the AGILE tool is interesting. In its official reference version, it is based on five families of criteria: Alignment, Governance, Intention, Leadership, Efficiency. It is a common grammar for identifying, evaluating, supporting, and growing impact initiatives.

This amounts to examining five very concrete things:

Alignment: is the project consistent with values, local needs, reference frameworks, and the reality of the field?
Governance: who decides, how, with what transparency, what responsibility, and what capacity for adaptation?
Intention: is the project truly seeking to create native positive impact, or merely dressing up an unchanged model?
Leadership: do the people leading the initiative have the vision, credibility, and capacity to mobilize others around them?
Efficiency: are resources used with frugality, intelligence, and economic viability?

This logic also aligns with international impact management standards. The Operating Principles for Impact Management, supported by the IFC and now widely adopted by investors, are specifically aimed at integrating impact throughout the entire investment cycle, from design to monitoring.

In other words, simplicity is not amateurism. Simplicity can be a higher form of rigor.

Disintermediate without disorganizing

Speaking of finance connected to the real world does not mean eliminating all intermediation. It means eliminating unnecessary or opaque intermediation, or intermediation that creates distance.

Analytical skills are needed. Monitoring, compliance, and structuring are needed, but it is not necessary to add layers that move money ever further away from what it is actually financing.

The right intermediary is the one that brings closer, clarifies, secures, makes visible. Not the one that dilutes understanding.

That is why blended finance or hybrid structuring approaches can be useful, provided they remain faithful to their purpose. The OECD reminds us that blended finance must be anchored in a development logic, mobilize private capital in an additional way, be adapted to the local context, and rely on partnerships based on trust and transparency.

In simpler terms: the right structure is the one that helps a real project cross a threshold, not the one that complicates investment to the point of making its purpose forgotten.

What each type of investor can do

For an individual investor, the simplest path often consists in entering through a pooled vehicle, or through clearly structured and already supported projects, with an explicit return horizon and light reporting. No need to be omnipresent; above all, one must be able to understand.

For a bank, the challenge is to build or attach itself to a credible offering: investment products linked to real impact assets, co-financing, dedicated lines, risk-sharing mechanisms, services for clients who now demand meaning without giving up return.

For a fund, the priority is to strengthen the quality of sourcing, evaluation, and monitoring, while avoiding both greenwashing and poorly designed idealism. This is precisely where a common grammar such as AGILE can reduce friction costs and improve mutual understanding.

For a company, it may involve directing part of its cash reserves, foundation, innovation investments, or diversification strategy toward projects connected to its territories, value chains, or transformation challenges.

For a philanthropic institution, the question is no longer only to give, but also to invest part of the balance sheet in a way that is consistent with its mission. Your reference documents in fact insist on this evolution: philanthropy tends to move closer to investment for the future, in a more strategic, measurable, and systemic logic.

For a family office, reconnecting to the real world is often a way of bringing together several objectives in a single movement: preserving, growing, passing on, giving meaning, staying close to reality.

Finance that is closer is not naive finance

This is not about romanticizing field projects. Not all of them are solid. Not all are financeable. Not all generate a return. Not all are well governed.

That is precisely why evaluation matters.

The AGILE tool approach of Impact Finance does not seek to idealize the field but to make it readable, comparable, credible, and supportable. It is designed to identify, evaluate, monitor, coach, accelerate, and then assess projects, with a logic of monitoring and progression.

A finance reconnected to the real world is therefore not a “kind” finance. It is a finance that is more demanding about what matters: the reality of the need, the quality of the model, the consistency of the intention, the reliability of governance, the possibility of income.

Returning to the origin may mean rediscovering the future

At bottom, the choice of a “Back to origins” says something very current.

It is not about rejecting finance. It is about putting it back in its proper place and restoring its nobility. About once again making investment an act of discernment and an economic, social, and environmental driver. About reconnecting money to projects that produce something visible. About acknowledging that one can seek a return for oneself while strengthening an economy that repairs, heals, feeds, trains, relocalizes, transforms.

That may be the most important shift: no longer asking the investor to choose between personal interest and the general interest. Instead, offering them

mechanisms where the two converge.

The Geneva Foundation for the Future expresses this ambition very simply: to create a bridge between siloed worlds, to make the links between finance, philanthropy, and field projects more fluid, and to put investment back in the service of a resilient and regenerative economy.

From this perspective, generating profit while staying connected to the real world is not a moral concession made to finance. It may be its healthiest, most readable, and ultimately most robust form.

Because finance that understands what it is financing also better understands where its return will come from.

And because capital that nourishes real life often ends up creating more lasting value than capital that circulates only among abstractions.

Why Terra Scientifica

Thomas EGLI — 2026-03-12T18:37:12Z

An intuition that became a collective reality

When I imagined Terra Scientifica in 2014, the idea might have seemed marginal.

Yet the reasoning was simple.

Tourism is one of the most powerful industries in the world. It structures territories, mobilizes millions of jobs and profoundly influences the way societies perceive nature, cultures and knowledge.

If such an industry exists, then it can produce two types of effects.

It can be extractive, meaning it consumes resources, weakens territories and produces negative externalities.

Or it can become regenerative, meaning it contributes to knowledge, education, the protection of nature and the development of territories.

Terra Scientifica was born from this simple question :

What if tourism became a driver of science, education and ecological transformation ?

The idea took time to mature.

Seven years were necessary to structure the concept, meet scientists, mobilize educators, engage with tourism actors, bring together associations and entrepreneurs.

The first edition of Terra Scientifica finally took place in 2022.

In 2026, the fifth edition confirms a very clear dynamic : Terra Scientifica is no longer just an event. It has become a living platform where science, travel, regenerative economy and impact entrepreneurship meet.

All the information about the event, its program and the experiences offered are available on :
https://terra-scientifica.com

Transforming tourism rather than stopping it

For several years, part of the ecological debate has opposed two visions.

The first considers that tourism should be drastically reduced, or even stopped.

The second considers that it must be deeply transformed.

But the observable reality is unambiguous : global tourism continues to grow.

Not only has it not stopped, but it is accelerating even faster than five or ten years ago.

In its current form, this growth often follows a logic of extractive economy : pressure on ecosystems, artificialization of territories, energy overconsumption and intensive transport.

Waiting for tourism to disappear is therefore not a realistic strategy.

Meanwhile, the extractive economy continues to progress.

A pragmatic approach consists of transforming tourism from within.

And since travel can already be transformative for travelers when it is experiential, it might as well also become positively transformative for the planet : this is precisely the ambition of Terra Scientifica.

This transformation involves several profound evolutions :

shorter tourism
slower tourism
more useful tourism
participatory tourism
engaging tourism

It is no longer simply about traveling to consume a destination.

It is about traveling to contribute to understanding the world and preserving it.

Giving humans their place back in nature

Terra Scientifica is also based on a simple but often forgotten idea.

Human beings are part of nature.

The ecological debate is sometimes marked by a vision in which the best solution would be the total absence of human intervention.

But in practice, the absence of intervention often actually leaves room for the most extractive actors.

When scientists, educators and citizens actively engage in territories, it becomes possible to invent forms of regenerative human presence.

This is the logic that inspires Terra Scientifica.

Explore.
Learn.
Discover.
Understand.
Protect.
Care.

Participatory scientific travel

At the heart of the project lies a particular model : participatory scientific travel.

In this type of experience, travelers are no longer simple visitors.

They become participants in a scientific or ecological approach.

Depending on the projects, they can :

contribute to participatory science programs
collect scientific data
participate in field actions
experiment with ecological solutions
collaborate with researchers or associations

This model responds to several profound evolutions in society.

Travelers are increasingly seeking experiences that carry meaning.

Participatory Science is developing rapidly.

Educational systems are seeking experiential approaches to illustrate school curricula.

Citizens want to understand ecological challenges and contribute to solutions.

In this context, scientific travel becomes a true open-air educational laboratory.

Education as systemic impact

Terra Scientifica gives particular importance to the notion of systemic impact.

In many environmental fields, resources are mobilized to repair damage : restoring a degraded ecosystem, compensating for pollution or correcting the effects of a human activity.

These actions are necessary, but they often remain emergency reactions meant to extinguish fires started by humans.

Education acts differently : it transforms behaviors, decisions and representations.

By involving pupils, students and citizens in participatory scientific programs, we act on the root causes of problems.

This is why Terra Scientifica develops many collaborations with schools and educational programs.

Travel then becomes educational experiences in which participants do not simply observe.

They become actors of knowledge.

Terra Scientifica as an economic platform

Another aspect of the project is often less visible but just as important.

Terra Scientifica also functions as a space for economic innovation.

The organizers and actors present at the event develop a particular capacity :

identifying emerging economic opportunities very early.

These opportunities often appear at the intersection of several transformations :

responsible tourism
regenerative economy
participatory science
experiential education
ecological transition

For entrepreneurs and investors, this position allows access to markets before they become obvious to the entire sector.

Contrary to a widespread idea, ecological solutions are not necessarily less profitable.

In many cases, they are :

more efficient
less costly
more profitable

Several travel agencies present around Terra Scientifica have also chosen to become mission-driven companies.

These companies now work with :

NGOs
associations
scientists
research centers

to design journeys that produce both ecological impact and economic value.

A platform active all year round

Over time, Terra Scientifica has evolved.

What initially began as an annual event has become a platform active all year round.

Collaborations are created.

Projects are developed.

Partnerships are concluded.

Economic models are structured.

The event simply represents the moment when this entire ecosystem gathers physically.

The four pillars of the fifth edition (2026)

The fifth edition of Terra Scientifica was structured around four main mechanisms.

Citizen committees

They bring together engaged citizens, educators and participants to collectively reflect on solutions to develop.

These spaces allow concrete and applicable ideas to emerge.

Impact business strategic committees

These meetings bring together entrepreneurs, investors and experts to structure economically viable projects.

The objective is to transform ideas into companies capable of developing sustainably.

The scientific travel creation hackathon

The hackathon is one of the most dynamic moments of the event.

For several days, teams design new formats of participatory scientific travel.

Projects must meet several criteria :

scientific rigor
real ecological impact
participant involvement
viable economic model

The results of this edition were particularly impressive.

Several projects now combine science, citizen engagement and entrepreneurial potential.

The Terra Scientifica Fair : village of stands, conferences and experiences

The fourth pillar is the visible and widely open heart of Terra Scientifica : the Fair itself, organized around a large village of stands and a rich program of encounters and experiences.

During several days that conclude the 10 days of events, visitors, professionals, scientists, associations and travel agencies gather in the same space to discover and collectively build new forms of scientific and participatory travel.

The village of stands allows visitors to meet directly :

specialized travel agencies
environmental associations
natural parks
research centers
organizations engaged in participatory science

These encounters allow visitors to imagine their next experiences, understand the scientific projects proposed and build journeys that match their aspirations.

The fair is also punctuated by a program of conferences, film screenings, scientific activities and participatory workshops.

The conferences give the floor to scientists, explorers, educators and entrepreneurs who share their work, discoveries and visions of the future of tourism and participatory science.

Film screenings allow visitors to discover scientific expeditions, ecological initiatives or human experiences carried out in the field.

Activities and workshops offer visitors the possibility to directly experiment with certain scientific approaches : biodiversity observation, exploration of the celestial vault, discovery of technologies used in research programs or introduction to participatory science methods.

The fair thus becomes a space of inspiration, discovery and encounters, where everyone can imagine their own way of traveling differently.

Whether traveling solo, with family, with friends, in an educational or professional setting, Terra Scientifica allows visitors to discover projects that combine adventure, knowledge and commitment to the planet.

This fourth pillar gives the project its full dimension : that of a place where ideas conceived in citizen committees, strategic committees and the hackathon become accessible to the public and can transform into concrete experiences of scientific and participatory travel.

A strengthening dynamic

After seven years of preparation and five editions, Terra Scientifica shows steady progress.

Each year :

new actors join the ecosystem
new projects appear
collaborations take shape
economic models emerge

This growth remains deliberately progressive in order to preserve the scientific quality and the coherence of the project.

But the trajectory is clear.

Terra Scientifica is becoming an international reference in the field of participatory scientific tourism.

Dare, explore, learn, participate, change

Beyond economic or scientific concepts, Terra Scientifica above all proposes a different way of traveling.

Dare to live the adventure of participatory science.

Explore nearby or distant territories while discovering their natural and cultural richness.

Learn while traveling, thanks to scientific experiences accessible to everyone.

Participate in concrete projects that contribute to knowledge and the protection of nature.

Change the way you travel by becoming an actor of the world you discover.

Some experiences proposed within the framework of Terra Scientifica allow, for example :

tracking a population of whales in a non-invasive way
collecting scientific data on glaciers
participating in coral reef restoration
observing animal populations to contribute to their protection
building experimental ecological solutions

These experiences show that it is possible to travel differently.

A collective adventure that continues

When the village of stands of the fifth edition opens its doors, a particular feeling emerges : seeing an old idea become a collective reality.

Terra Scientifica is not only an event, but a movement in construction where researchers, citizens, entrepreneurs, educators and investors meet.

All share a common question :§

How can tourism be transformed into a lever for knowledge, ecological regeneration and economic prosperity ?

The answers continue to emerge, and they will continue to be built through the editions.

To discover the projects, experiences and scientific journeys offered :

https://terra-scientifica.com

Financing the resolution of symptoms or the source?

Thomas EGLI — 2026-02-20T05:03:18Z

Why does financing problem-solving at the source generate better revenue? (see below)
How can we transform the emotional and financial momentum generated by urgency into leverage capable of durably modifying the deep mechanisms of a system?

These questions, seemingly simple, are in fact at the heart of any credible impact strategy. They require looking beyond the obvious, moving past immediate emotion, and questioning the very structure of the problems we claim to solve.

Symptom and source: two layers of the same reality

Most impact challenges unfold on two distinct yet closely connected levels. The first layer is the symptom. It is visible, urgent, tangible. People are suffering here and now. The media take hold of it. Donations flow quickly. Results are measurable, concrete, often spectacular. Yet they frequently remain temporary. They relieve, repair, cushion, but they do not necessarily transform, and often the problem repeats itself cyclically.

The second layer is the source. It is structural, less visible, more complex to explain. This is where the deep mechanisms that sustain the problem reside: misaligned economic incentives, governance failures, dysfunctional markets, absent infrastructure, non-existent or inadequate business models, lack of educational components for both future adults and societal actors, even though these are at the origin of everything else. This layer is less media-friendly, less immediate, more difficult to finance. Yet it is at this level that the game truly changes.

Let us take a simple example. The symptom may consist of episodes of coastal pollution, followed by emergency clean-up operations. The action is necessary, urgent, visible. But the source lies elsewhere: absence of local waste management systems, lack of economic incentives, insufficient monitoring and enforcement of rules, non-existent business models making prevention profitable. The paradox is clear: the symptom mobilizes, the source transforms.

Operational urgency and systemic impact

From the perspective of project leaders, daily reality is often one of urgency. Teams face critical situations, fragile funding, and constant operational overload. "We must act now" is not a marketing slogan; it is a lived necessity. This urgency is legitimate. It justifies immediate action.

But when a project remains exclusively at the symptom level, it locks itself into chronic dependence on subsidies. It remains undersized. Its results are capped. It acts, but does not change the architecture of the problem. Systemic impact, on the other hand, requires a more ambitious construction. It involves transforming partial solutions into structured services, standards, replicable processes, governance mechanisms. It requires solid evidence, the ability to demonstrate what works and what does not. And ultimately, it requires an economic model capable of growing without constantly begging.

A simple rule can be formulated: action on the symptom provides legitimacy and traction. Action on the source brings durability, scale, and strategic power.

Philanthropy: emotion mobilizes, structure transforms

Philanthropy is naturally drawn to symptomatic causes. They are emotionally powerful, easy to tell, immediately morally rewarding. They offer quick, visible, reassuring returns. Yet a profound shift is underway. More and more actors are seeking impact-driven philanthropy: measurable results, leverage effects, clear accountability, lasting change. "Don't just treat but fix it" is becoming an increasing demand.

Structuring part of the effort to transform at the source of the problem will build loyalty among donors initially engaged through urgency.

The challenge lies in the fact that source-oriented work and projects are less “fundraising-friendly.” They are less spectacular, less photogenic, more technical. The winning strategy therefore consists of using the urgency of the symptom as a mobilization driver, then deliberately structuring part of the effort to finance the transformation of the source. Ultimately, this will build donor loyalty. An effective philanthropic architecture thus combines rapid-response funding to act immediately, design and proof funding to build governance, evidence, and standards, and catalytic capital aimed at initiating what can become investable and scalable. Urgency then ceases to be a repetitive loop; it becomes a gateway to systemic transformation.

Investment: when the source creates the market

From the investors' perspective, the question often arises: where is the revenue? The answer lies precisely in the source layer. Structural solutions change the way a system functions. And when a system changes, new markets emerge, new business models appear.

Addressing causes at their source is more attractive in terms of return on investment.

This is why the source layer is not only “more impactful”; it is often more investable. It gives rise to services for which institutions are willing to pay, operational platforms to which operators subscribe, training and certification models, data production and monitoring mechanisms, quality and compliance standards, deployment and maintenance contracts, replicable formats generating measurable results. Where financing the symptom produces one-off results, financing the source creates recurring revenues, while also generating ecological, social, and intellectual value.

Thus, the search for the root cause is not merely a moral preference. Properly structured, it becomes a driver of sustainable profitability.

Combining the two levels: an architectural strategy

The most robust strategy does not consist of choosing between symptom and source. It consists of intentionally combining them. One starts with the symptom, because it mobilizes partners, citizens, and initial funding. It is then translated into a roadmap toward the source, where scale becomes possible. Then a bankable architecture is built: clear governance, solid evidence, an understandable economic model indicating who pays and why, an identified deployment mechanism, an explicit replication logic.

It is precisely within this logic that differentiated yet complementary roles emerge. The Geneva Forum, for example, supports the emergence of projects, stakeholder alignment, and the structuring of initial conceptual phases. The Geneva Foundation for the Future intervenes to consolidate investable structuring, and its AGILE impact finance tool ensures mission alignment and opens pathways toward return and resilience. The transition thus takes place from emotion to execution, from urgency to industry.

Taking action: from observer to strategic actor

For those who wish to move from observing impact to capturing opportunities, several entry points are available. Project leaders can translate their initiative from the symptom register to that of the source, clarify their offering, define what must be proven, identify who will pay and for what value, design a credible path toward scale. Philanthropists can use their capital to unlock systemic change, finance both urgent action and the architecture that will make it sustainable, become catalytic rather than merely reparative. Investors, banks, and family offices can position themselves upstream, at the structuring stage, where value is still being created, with readable governance, evidence under construction, and clear trajectories.

Ultimately, the initial question remains: are we financing the symptom or the source? The most fruitful answer is neither exclusive nor naïve. It consists of using the mobilizing power of the symptom to pave the way for transforming the source. This is where impact ceases to be a one-off act and becomes a structural dynamic. This is where urgency turns into strategy.