The
International Forum For Social Innovation
Founded in 1976, the
International Forum for Social Innovation is an international association whose
aim is to promote social innovation and institutional transformation in private
and public institutions.
In I.F.S.I.'s reasoning,
"institution" designates organizations of all kinds, highlighting the
end products they generate as well as the factual and mythical history that
underlies them, the implicit and explicit rules that govern them, the conscious
and unconscious emotional life that sustains them, and, generally speaking,
everything that makes them exist.
By "social
innovation", I.F.S.I means the ability to innovate in terms of social
behaviour, whether personal or professional. The term also entails the capacity to
envision options other than repetition and reproduction of past behaviour; it
implies the ability to transform roles and thereby contribute to the
transformation of institutions.
By stressing the function of
roles in the transformation of institutions and by taking into account the
psychic aspects of institutional life, I.F.S.I. makes reference to theoretical
currents such as personalism, psychoanalytic theory applied to groups and
institutions, and systems analysis. Its intent is to probe the
complementarities, contradictions, and tensions of these disciplines. One of
I.F.S.I.'s principles is that evolution in behaviour takes place through work
on mental representations; it further holds that transformation cannot take
place without conflict. The origins of its approach can be found in the work of
W.R. Bion and associates. Moreover, I.F.S.I. has developed its own approach by
extending practices that were developed for the helping professions to the
world of private enterprise. This has been accomplished by systematically
holding an international frame of reference, and by using as a resource the
conscious and unconscious expression of diversity in language and culture.
I.F.S.I. is now developing its own
approach, that of Institutional Transformation.
In concrete terms, since 1978, the main activity of the Forum has consisted in
organising an annual, international Conference in
Today, it has developed
activities or similar conferences abroad (Belgium, the Caribbean,
Catalonia-Spain, Cuba, Finland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Palestinian
Authority, Peru, United Kingdom, USA) at its own initiative or in co-operation
with other organizations. It maintains close relationships with foreign
associations that share its theoretical and methodological references.
It also develops new methodologies and
specific intervenes in areas such as training for consultancy, conferences
within companies, and socio-technical analysis. Since 1993, I.F.S.I. has
utilized this methodology for an entire company or for one of its units (Intel
Inc., EDF-GDF and TSTT: Telecommunication
Services of Trinidad and
In 2001, I.F.S.I. developed in
co-operation with the Business School of The University of Glamorgan, and then
the one of the University of Hull (UK) an ambitious training programme for
managers and consultants: Leading Consultation. The third programme starts in November
2005. It awards participants the following diplomas: M.Phil. and Ph.D.
Finally,
it has created and renewed, since January 2004, a new international annual
conference on the theme of Femininity, Leadership, Authority and Masculinity: the F.L.A.M. conference.
I.F.S.I. is both a learning institution, devoted to transformation, as well as a
place of transit where it is possible to work individually and collectively in
the "here and now" towards the transformation of roles and
institutions. I.F.S.I. considers the diversity of the origins of its members,
consultants, and board members to be a source of richness that it intends to
enhance through the high demands it makes on itself as an institution in
transformation.
I.F.S.I. is financed through individual
and institutional membership fees and the fruits of its activities. It uses
these resources to support and develop its own projects, award scholarships to
participants who otherwise would not be able to participate in its activities,
and initiate new programs conducted independently or in co-operation with other
organizations in
1978 - 2003: the Journey of
I.F.S.I.
Between Tradition and Transformation:
from Social Innovation to Institutional Transformation
After World War II, a distinction was made
by some between "institutions" and "organizations" in order
to differentiate the attitudes, behaviour and motivation between the members of
social systems. By "organizations" was meant systems whose only goal
was to accomplish a defined task; their stereotype was the corporation.
"Institutions" represented systems such as armies, churches and
schools which had an explicit goal of generating meaning in and for the society
in which they existed. The change process was seen as simply the ability to
accomplish a task. Other internal or external factors were not considered.
Soon, however, a more complex formulation of organizations was developed by
W.R. Bion and associates who brought psychoanalytical theory to group dynamics,
and by A. K. Rice and P. Turquet who applied the theory of open systems to
social organizations called Group Relations. This model differentiated between
the institution and the organization and focused on the conscious and
unconscious processes affecting authority, role and task in these systems.
As more and more perspectives and models
have been linked with Group Relations work, these concepts have broadened
through contact with industrial and commercial organizations. Facing the
globalization of the markets as well as increasing competition, these
organizations have been the first to acknowledge how much they need to adapt
themselves to the evolution of their environment.
Thus, acknowledging their desire for
change, I.F.S.I. has continued to support the idea of social innovation but has
also insisted on the importance of persons within organizations. The assumption
of I.F.S.I. is that no innovation (in-novare) can happen without a
transformation process. Thus, the usual word change should be replaced by the
idea of Institutional Transformation.
Indeed organizations use the word
"change" very often to express their will to transform a situation
that does not satisfy them: when they are continuing or accelerating their
decline, when they are focused on their survival, when they appear hyperactive
and frantic and, more rarely, when they want to be innovative or generative.
The approach called Institutional Transformation
(IT) and developed by I.F.S.I. completes and enriches the tradition of Group
Relations. It not only includes psychoanalytic and open systems theories but
also draws on socio-political, philosophical and spiritual dimensions. It deals
with defences and learning and focuses at the point of conflict, often
unconscious, between this learning and these defences in the context of the
whole, both inside and outside. It stresses how, along with their learning
experience, people unconsciously develop individual and collective defences
that are more and more sophisticated and effective.
Thus, at this point in our history,
I.F.S.I. members submit that the broader concept of Institutional
Transformation may be helpful in understanding systems and the leaders and
workers in those systems. Five reflections summarize what they have learned
from their experience as leaders, managers or consultants, supported by the
work and research mentioned above.
1. No doubt that the most tricky ‑
but also crucial ‑ step of any transformation process is the
transformation of our mental representations (or system in the mind) which is
the place for our prejudices and resistances. Only the experience to come can
put into question these representations.
2. To work towards the transformation of
systems (institutions being systems), people need to attempt to transform their
own roles. What they need to focus on is the transformation of the chosen or
projected-introjected roles and not the transformation of themselves as individuals.
3. Achieving the transformation of our
roles implies that we accept the mobilization, not only of our thoughts but
also of our feelings and desires, and that we enable ourselves to acknowledge
and work out the unconscious factors, which affect them. The transformation
process largely involves work with our resistances and defences and implies the
transformation of resistances.
4. As a consequence, the institutional
transformation process forces us into an interaction between the work on
individual roles and the work on the system (the institution). For this reason,
we consider the Institutional System Event in Group Relations conferences to be
the place where the political and the spiritual dimensions emerge as products
of the psyche. The revelation of this emergence and the interactions in and by
management in public become determining conditions for fruitful learning for
all participants, members and staff. Similarly, the daily life of institutions
could also be understood as an "institutional systems event."
Leaders, managers and consultants, engaged in institutional transformation, may
learn from their experiences in the institutional system event in group
relations conferences and connect this learning to their daily work life in
institutions.
5. The trans-formation process is not
predictable, with an initial state, a final state and the possibility of
regularly measuring the gap between the two. It is a journey in zigzags which
we begin without any guarantee of arrival, and without any certainty of a happy
ending, except the satisfaction of learning, of undertaking, of living the
human condition with its joy and despair, its progression and regressions, its
fertility and sterility, its repetitions and surprises.
Thus, the concept of Institutional
Transformation continues, enlarges and deepens the Group Relations approach.
The core of the work focuses on institutions and not only on groups. It also
underlines the importance of transformation as a journey composed of various
states of development or change.
Leaders, managers, and consultants who
refer to institutional transformation favour a hermeneutics of events as they
happen in and between systems, sub-systems and the environment ‑ from the
individual, as a sub-system, to the eco-system. The heuristic posture adopted
stimulates perception and interpretation by all the participants of the
feelings they have, the projections that are in play, the drama and the issues
that are at stake.
Doing this, they offer to each participant
and also to themselves the occasion to transform their roles, their relations
and their projections and to contribute to the transformation of the
institution, rehabilitating the initial, and, subsequently, the actual meaning
of politics. Thus, institutional transformation aims not only at analysis and
understanding in depth; institutional transformation is committed to continuous
action.
Only when leaders, managers, consultants,
or members of any institution acknowledge and work with the increasing
complexity of political, psychic or spiritual dimensions, they enable the
institution to leave the path of decline, survival, frantic acceleration or hyperlife
and to move toward a state of generativity and reflection: LIFE.