For companies capable of learning with and from living milieux

In partnership with Ideas Laboratory (CEA Y.SPOT Grenoble), IASPAT has designed a unique experimental program to support managers confronted with the growing fragility of the living milieux upon which economic activities depend. The challenge is not to adapt management tools to environmental constraints, but to reconfigure the very frameworks of perception, decision-making, and action, starting from a radical question: what if cohabitation with other living beings became an active principle of transformation?

A listening approach: preparing the inner ground

It all starts upstream, not with a top-down transmission, but with an individual setting in motion. Personalized interviews are offered to each participant: not as a logistical formality, but as a real turning point. These exchanges help to identify personal resonances, lay the groundwork for sensitive questioning, and open up an inner space of availability.

Embodied immersions in living environments

For a period of eighteen months, a group of around ten managers and executives from industrial companies and SMEs involved in transition processes, along with public service managers and researchers, embarked on a sensitive learning experience on pioneering farms. What these places have in common is that they combine agro-ecological practices, attention to the environment and the hospitality of transformation. It's not a question of looking for reproducible models, but of allowing oneself to be affected, to be shifted, to experience other ways of being in relationship with living things. These immersions allow us to deeply integrate the meaning of cohabitation, not as a concept but as the lived experience of co-dependence.

Walking in a hedgerow, brushing a calf, cooking herbs gathered together: these seemingly simple gestures open up a broader relationship with time, rhythms and invisible interdependencies.

Immersions are woven from sensitive practices: silent walks, blind strolls, thermoception experiments, situated landscape readings, bodily fictions, peasant transmissions, ecological constellations... These experiences mobilize the body, memory, senses and imagination. Their aim is not so much to "understand" as to perceive differently, to develop a situated intelligence capable of making room for what resists the usual schemas.

Draw, connect, transform

In order to anchor experiences and ensure their resonance over time, the group relies on living documentation tools: field notebooks, shared notes, cosmograms to map relationships, and self-descriptions in a language freed from the lexicon of performance.

These materials feed into a collective reworking process, carried out through integration workshops: analogical analyses, sensitive cartographies, fictitious narratives (introspective letters, job offers for jobs to be invented...). The aim is not to produce deliverables, but to allow the transformative effects on the decision-maker's posture to emerge.

Places that teach differently

The course has been designed with three of the institute's partner practice milieux in mind. Each immersion gives rise to a singular encounter with a territory and its particular strengths. These places stimulate the speculative imagination to explore other ways of being and acting, rooted in care and relationship.

At Zone Sensible, being one with the milieu

In this urban farm in Seine-Saint-Denis, it's the birds that teach the gardener to slow down and readjust the tempo of his work. The permacultural garden experience, from picking to cooking together, gives rise to ecosomatic practices: the body becomes permeable to the milieu. Here, attention to the actions of other living beings reveals new forms of cooperation, beyond utility.

Learning to "think like a mountain" at Montlahuc

In the Drôme region, the presence of wolves and beavers shifts the farmer's posture, leading him to recognize the territory as a living partner, not a resource. Territorial constellations open the way to active listening to non-human entities, enabling an embodied understanding of ecological interdependence.

At La Mhotte, robustness is the art of cohabitation

In the Bourbonnais bocage, health is experienced as the ability to live with uncertainty. Through simple gestures - entering the barn in silence, brushing a calf, observing without forcing contact - participants experience a quality of presence based on listening, slowness and adjustment. Here, care becomes relationship, and robustness is experienced in the living complexity of the links between humans, animals and milieux.

Concrete effects in the workplace

At the end of the course, a follow-up system is in place to support feedback. End-of-course interviews provide a space for reflective elaboration, while collective feedback highlights the transfers made to the company.

These include the creation of a collaborative orchard, and experimentation with non-hierarchical modes of governance that encourage cooperation within companies.

But beyond these explicit results, an in-depth transformation is underway: the company is no longer a machine to be piloted, but a living environment to be inhabited, capable of finding its bearings in the unpredictable, of learning, and of transforming itself through contact with the ecosystems on which it depends.

Towards an ecology of organizations

This course acts as an operator of cognitive, affective and political reconfiguration. It enables managers to exercise other forms of intelligence: not just strategic or analytical, but perceptive, contextual and dialogical. It opens the way to an ecology of organizations, where robustness is embodied in attentiveness, porosity to the milieu, the ability to deal with the living. In the image of what Michel Serres called the "natural contract", it is no longer a question of dominating or exploiting, but of entering into an alliance. The challenge is no longer to protect ourselves from an external environment, but to institute a common milieu - a fabric of reciprocal attachments where relationships are inscribed in a pact of co-dependence... By reconnecting knowledge with care, we can move away from a logic of control and create forms of organization that are sensitive, evolving and ecologically responsible.