About fifteen years ago, I was director of a departmental service
of the State, a departmental direction of the equipment.
For those who remember what it was, we managed
roads, building permits and a whole bunch of other services.
A little less than a thousand agents spread over ten sites.
And the state had decided to transfer a major part of the missions
General Councils and then reorganize the rest.
It was decentralization.
So of course, the staff did not lose their job,
but they were questioned quite profoundly.
Some were going to change their status, they would have to change places,
they would have to change their employer, change jobs.
And so that day, the unions had organized a demonstration
to show their opposition.
So when you arrive in the morning, that you are the director, and you know that
waiting for you on the parking lot over a hundred people with banners,
with a megaphone, with a lot of aggressiveness,
to show you that they are totally
against a reform that you know you will have to implement …
You have the choice.
You can go park quietly in the street, we were downtown,
get in your office,
tell your Human Resources Director
that he has to take care of it because it is his job, the social dialogue.
And then you have important things to do,
there is surely a meeting going on.
Or you can make the choice to go chat.
That morning, that choice I made, even though it was difficult.
I paged, the barrier opened.
I went back to the parking lot,
I advanced in the crowd,
I parked.
I got off the car,
and I advanced towards the leaders of the movement.
I knew them all, we used to work together.
But there, faced with their anger, it was difficult, it was not the same.
But I wanted to tell them myself that
the decisions we would make
take into account their constraints.
I wanted to tell them that I needed them to participate in building them.
And above all I wanted them to feel that for me,
they were not numbers on a dashboard,
but many people like me, with their emotions,
with their personal constraints, with their professional conscience.
Despite my fear and aggression,
we have discussed,
the threads of trust were woven gently, and then
we stopped the demonstration and went to work.
We worked for two years,
and we deployed decentralization
in the best interests of everyone, I think.
Why am I telling you this story?
I wanted to share with you three stories of my professional life for
to disassemble a discourse that one hears more and more, and which insists on me.
The world is changing faster and faster.
And in this changing world,
companies would have become places of suffering.
Because of the change on which we would have had no hold
and who would destroy us?
Those responsible would be elsewhere: finance, politics,
globalization…
Everyone finds his scapegoat.
And we would wait for a providential man to save us.
This is the time.
Finally, the only solution, the only alternative to depression,
demobilization,
to demotivation would be resistance, revolt,
believe we can say stop.
Since the beginning of my career,
I work in organizations in change.
Like you, I think.
And since about twenty years, I led organizations of sizes
variables, public, private, from one hundred to almost one thousand people
all of which were faced with very important developments.
What guided me in these evolutions, on these functions,
it is the awareness that businesses are first and foremost people.
They are communities of individuals, like you, like me.
And these are not distant decision makers who make our daily
professional, but the people we live next to,
by their behavior and by the quality of our interaction with each other.
So everyone chooses each day,
to continue his personal project in competition with others,
even considering that these are obstacles to his own success
and to his own professional development.
Or, on the contrary, to pursue a more collective project.
Build what I call an ecosystem of development, learning
in which, ultimately, everyone will find his place and who knows,
as and when
ask the problems that concern him, to find solutions
the most adapted possible.
To finally build an environment
more in line with our wishes.
By telling you the history of the Departmental Direction
equipment of Eure et Loir, I wanted to share with you the fact that
in very constrained and conflicting environments,
we could think
that we have no other solution than to fade away
behind rules,
decisions made by others, a law,
processes, procedures …
When we think we have no leeway,
we always keep the choice.
And that’s the freedom we took that day,
the unions and myself.
We took the risk of assuming our room for maneuver.
We took the risk of taking responsibility,
dialogue and then cooperation.
So we managed to build a form of collective intelligence.
And it is thanks to this collective intelligence that we have found,
built solutions that were satisfying a problem
that we were not prepared to solve neither one nor the other.
This collective intelligence, how was it built?
From my point of view, there are two fundamental ingredients
to move in this direction.
The first type of ingredient is kindness, empathy,
I would even say: it is kindness.
By kindness, we usually hear: “We’re not at the bison. “
but I say, “Why not? “
It’s not me who says it, it’s Google.
I do not know if you read the results of this study
they led.
Almost two hundred teams audited.
They were finally trying to find out
which made the teams more efficient.
They tested a lot of criteria
and the main criterion they arrived at,
it’s kindness.
This is the level of kindness between members.
Finally, it’s pretty natural,
because when we trust
in each other,
when you know you can count on people around you,
we take risks.
We are innovative, we are creative, we advance.
The second ingredient
to build that collective intelligence,
it’s the individual commitment.
This is the legend of the hummingbird that tells Pierre Rabhi.
Legend says that one day in the forest, there was a huge fire.
Then all the animals were helpless to the disaster.
They were stunned, terrified, and there is just a small hummingbird,
who takes water with his beak, then will throw a few drops of water on the fire
then he goes back to get water, throws a few drops of water, like that.
Then his return, it annoys the armadillo who finally said:
“But stop Hummingbird, you’re not going to extinguish it, fire! “
The hummingbird stops, looks at it, and says, “I know.
I am not crazy. But I’m doing my part. “
A second personal example:
I was a young engineer, it was my first job.
I was responsible for a design office, engineering in the field of water,
sanitation, river management.
Where I worked, the norm, in terms of river management at the time,
it was channeling the rivers, so it was a bit of a disaster
in terms of ecosystem.
So as a young engineer, I was trying to change things
to use more natural techniques.
I was given a big project on a collapse of the Berges de Seine,
not very far from here.
So I had to present my technical recommendations.
We were in a big room on the banks of the Seine, I was the only woman,
I was a young engineer, there were only gentlemen of a certain age
facing me.
They were experts of the Ministry.
So I presented my project, 100% natural, with only plants.
Here ! (Laughter)
There was a big white at the end of my presentation
and I was clearly referred to my goals.
As if I was totally incompetent.
A real blonde.
And I understood from their eyes that they said to themselves, “But how is this
that we could recruit on this post a young woman like that? “
His stories of small fish, plants …
it’s a woman’s story, it’s not an engineering story.
Well, you understood that it was not that day that I managed to convince.
But I went back a number of times with a smile.
And above all we worked together with colleagues.
A network of pilot sites has been created
to show that it could work.
Foreign experiments were mobilized,
finally we managed to convince
and in quite a short time, we changed the norm.
You see, I was the hummingbird and my fire was these rivers
that we destroyed by force of concrete.
And with my little drops of water, I helped extinguish it.
It was a great pride.
(Applause)
So you too, I’m sure you have a fire that concerns you.
There are surely things you want to see change.
Put yourself in motion! Offer solutions!
In addition, time plays for you.
For example, studies say that within five years,
50% of the jobs that will be recruiting do not exist yet.
It means that the margins of maneuver are enormous!
And above all do not be afraid of failure.
Because we never get there the first time.
We must come back, come back …
Children fall a lot before they know how to walk.
What is difficult in France in this dynamic,
it is that we are fed to distrust.
So it’s not easy to engage in this direction.
When we look at international studies,
France is still at the bottom of the pack on this theme.
Less than one in four French people consider
that we can generally trust others.
That’s almost 40% for the OECD average.
And I’m not talking about some countries in Northern Europe where we are at 50-60%.
That means
to raise our children in this idea.
So it means that they are plumbed to act in this world
which is ours now
where the level of uncertainty, the level of complexity will require
cooperation for action. So trust.
So that’s why I wanted to go to the roots.
I wanted to advance on this issue as a director of engineering school.
This will be my last example.
I bet that the school, for students,
it could be the first company they cooperate with.
And that in this company, we would make them practice
concretely the collective intelligence so that afterwards,
they can spread.
And that they can bring this way of working
in the different companies that they would join later.
So that’s why the new premises we inaugurated last year,
at ESTACA, were the most open and the most decompartmentalized possible.
So that finally students, teachers, researchers,
administrative staff, partners have as much as possible
opportunities to cross each other, to talk to each other, to know each other and thus to cooperate,
to move forward together, to do things together.
That’s also why when you worked on the digital campus,
we decided that students too could
produce educational content
so that they finally learn to support each other,
to help each other beyond their simple circle of friends.
That’s why we’ve been evolving over several years,
the distribution system means
which were allocated to associative projects, to student projects.
Moving from a system where the administration distributes these means
to a system where the students make the choices.
And it took several years because trust, sense of responsibility,
the taking of responsibilities, it is not decreed, it is built.
And finally we had to deconstruct a number of representations
and particular behaviors, those related to the fear of arbitrariness,
fear of cronyism in connection with power.
And then build others, more conducive to trust.
I hope that through these examples, I would have managed to share with you
my conviction that we are all co-responsible for the future that is being built,
to make you want to assume, to mobilize your margins of maneuver,
want to engage you to participate in building the world you want.
Want to cooperate, to go to your co-workers.
So, those you enjoy, of course, but also those who annoy you.
Because, like you, they are fragile,
they may be waiting,
with their fears, with their difficulties in communicating,
but also with their desires, with their dreams, with their passions.
Trust them,
trust yourself.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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