Hello everyone,

This article, this message, is a bit out of the ordinary for me. I’m reaching the end of a cycle. Following the acquisition of benext, a typical three-year phase runs for executives after selling their company. I’m reaching the end of this phase, and so I’m going to open myself up to possibilities. That is to say, I’m going to start another cycle. I’m going to tell you what’s going through my head (nothing but very common thoughts it seems to me).

One of the reasons for this article: to let serendipity work, to let myself be surprised by the connections you’ll make and perhaps tell me about.

I could create a new company. Yes. That’s certain. But I don’t want to recreate the same thing. You only live once. And to create something new I need to be nourished by opportunities, ideas, to perceive things that intersect, and suddenly tell myself: this is where innovation lies, this is what I want. For that, I need to be in the saddle. Right now, for the past year, I’ve been rather in the stable brushing the horse, meaning I’m making music, doing some conferences, making contacts, and writing (edition 2 of Kanban coming, as well as the “little manual of organizational thinking”; the first is nearing completion, the second is finished, I’m waiting for the end of a period to see if publishing houses are interested, and if not I’ll venture into self-publishing). This magnificent life (writing and making music) must come to an end, and above all, I want to get back to it.

So to dive back in, I can be freelance like many others. That’s certain too. It allows me to generate these intersections and perhaps make something bigger emerge again. Without a doubt a sociocratic collective in any case. Everyone does it? Yes, so what? Everyone does it their own way, and I think my way is interesting.

I can also be a transition manager. I’m thinking about this one a lot. Why? There was a time when it was the cleaner, the executor of dirty work. But this role has really changed: it’s now the person who comes to transform a department, or launch a new product, turn things around. I like the mud. And I like leading. In “agile coaching,” which word do you prefer? Coaching or agile? For me it’s agile. It matters more to me to be agile than to coach. And agile, sociocracy, systemic thinking, are approaches with biases, an opinion, a direction, a worldview. The pleasure I had at benext, and smartview before that, was leading internally and coaching externally. A good coach in my eyes is a leader (which already excludes me from quite a few forms of coaching), a good leader is a good coach. So therefore transition manager, which allows me to decide, to make decisions, to move an organization toward agility, impact, product management, sociocracy, systemic thinking, and not “just” coach well. My target? Probably startups that are failing or emerging, or even SMEs, or departments of groups seeking to modernize.

Freelance, transition manager is a way to immerse myself again in this entire professional world, all the human and intellectual dynamics around it. To generate all these perspectives that allow me to suddenly have perhaps the vision, the desire, for an original approach to recreate a structure. But I can also meet fascinating people who bring me into their adventure. Or that this innovation doesn’t come from me but that I’m a component of it: that I’m the foreign component that’s placed in an environment not used to it to generate new things. Sometimes I tell myself that the military or the DGSE (who hasn’t seen Le Bureau des Légendes) would have interesting subjects for me and I would have interesting things for them, or an NGO, a mission-driven company, or a political cabinet (yes indeed). I think about all this when I’m brushing the horse (it’s a metaphor, I never have contact with horses).

So I’m writing this text. A bit like the copies of “little manual of organizational thinking” sent to the winds at certain publishing houses, I tell myself that something interesting might happen. Who knows? So like a good role-playing gamer, I roll my dice!