1. IFSI vocation

A. Our purpose

Founded in 1976, the International Forum for Social Innovation (IFSI) is an international association whose objective is to promote social innovation and institutional transformation within private or public institutions :

- Companies,
- public administration offices,
- associations,
- educational or health facilities (secular or religious),
- sports teams,
- etc.

To this end, it organises international seminars to further reflection and the application of ideas and focuses on providing training for consultants.

B. Heritage

The principles behind the Forum's actions are drawn from the works of the psychologist and psychoanalyst W.R. Bion and the English school of "Group Relations" which resulted from them.

The theoretical and practical origins of the methodology developed by IFSI:

In the aftermath of World War II, British social psychology introduced a distinction between institutions and organisations that differentiates the attitudes, behaviour and motivation of the members that make up each of them.
By organisations, it described the systems, such as companies, which have no purpose other than to complete a task.
Institutions, for their part, designated systems whose explicit purpose was to create meaning in and for the society in which they operate, such as the army, churches or educational systems.
Within this context, the processes of change were simply regarded as the ability to perform a new task while excluding any other internal and external factors.

Very quickly, however, a more complex definition of organisations was developed by WR Bion and his associates. They and their successors used a psychoanalytical grid in order to more closely examine group dynamics within organisation. To do this, they applied the theory of open systems to social organisations, which made it possible to clearly differentiate between institutions and organisations, while highlighting the conscious and subconscious processes that determine the authority, role and task of each individual in these systems.

Gradually, as new perspectives and new models supplemented the work on Group Relations, these concepts were broadened through contact with private companies. Faced with the opening of markets and increased competition, the latter were indeed the first to recognise the need to adapt to changes in the environment.

While acknowledging this heritage, IFSI, driven by its unique experience, has taken these studies and theories even further. Firstly, the Forum has extended a practice taken from the world of social workers to that of the business environment. Secondly, it systematically positions itself within an international reference framework and therefore uses the diversity of languages and cultures, in their conscious and subconscious expressions, as a resource.

Today, the Forum therefore proposes its own approach, that of institutional transformation: the result of over thirty years' work in political, economic and social environments.

C. Our activities

The IFSI's primary activity involves organising the annual international TransformaCtion seminar, on the subject of "Authority, Leadership and Transformation".
TransformaCtion is the Forum's core seminar. It was created in 1978 and entitled ALT until 2005.

Since 2004, the Forum has put in place a second major, international annual event: the FLAM seminar, on the subjects of femininity, leadership, authority and masculinity.

Alongside FLAM and TransformaCtion, IFSI is today developing, alone or in partnership with other organisations, similar activities or seminars abroad, mainly in Spain, Switzerland, Finland, Israel, Peru and Cuba. In the past, such seminars were also organised in Belgium, the English-speaking Caribbean, the United States, India, Ireland, Italy, Palestine, the United Kingdom and Ukraine.
To do this, the Forum maintains ongoing relationships with foreign associations who share its theoretical and methodological references.

In addition, IFSI has created new methodologies and, through these, conducts specific training operations for consultants, intra-company seminars and socio-technical analyses.
Thus, from 1993, IFSI has been running seminars for entire companies or one of their units (Intel Inc., EDF-GDF, TSTT: Telecommunication Services of Trinidad and Tobago). In these types of working seminars, the company management board make up the staff (management and consultants), while the rest of the managers take the role of participants.
In 1994, IFSI also supported the creation of "Imagining Europe", the first seminar to use art materials Created in the United Kingdom and then used in Belgium for a major industrial company, this type of work is now used in many seminars, as part of specific sessions. From 1999, the Forum participated in the creating and developing the international seminar-Body, Soul, and Role-, focused on body language. Created in Israel, it was later used in Belgium, the United Kingdom and Bari (Italy) in 2004.
Since 2003, to give just one example, IFSI has been working in Cuba, where it has set up two seminars in partnership with the Psychology University of Havana. Issues of racism, identity and diversity are among the main topics addressed at these events.

Finally, since 2001, IFSI has initiated an ambitious training programme for managers and consultants: Leading Consultation, run jointly and respectively with the Business Schools of the Glamorgan University, Hull University, and now Bath University, in the UK. This training course leads to several diplomas: Master's in Philosophy (M.Phil), Doctorate (Ph.D). The programme's fifth graduation class will begin in January 2012.

2. Our methodology

A. General principles of action

The Forum highlights the links between the system, the individual and the role of people in the transformation of institutions, taking into account the dimensions of the imagination and the subconscious. It draws on schools of thought such as personalism, psychoanalysis applied to groups and systemic analysis. Consequently, it aims to highlight their complementarities, contradictions and tensions.

Within this theoretical framework, it sets out the following principles of action:

In addition, the Forum refuses to confine its action to a single national or professional sphere. Indeed, it works on an international level, based on a multi-disciplinary methodology and strong social commitment.
It believes it is essential to transform our working institutions in order to guarantee their long-term existence and ensure the collective and individual well-being of the people within them. In this sense, the Forum is an educational institution focused on transformation and a place where people come together for seminars to work on an individual and group level with a view to transforming their roles and their institutions. This is founded on the concept of learning through experience.

IFSI also considers the diversity of the social, cultural and professional backgrounds of its members, consultants and administrators as an asset which it actively draws upon by working on itself as an institution in transformation.

As such, it aims to consolidate this diversity by allowing young workers and professionals from Southern countries to participate in its seminars and conferences, by funding all or part of the costs. Social "dedication" and the refusal to simplify the complexity of modern and largely transnational institutional systems are key principles which the Forum wishes to promote.

The IFSI's financial resources come from its members’ (individuals or corporate entities) subscriptions, as well as from the fruit of its activities. It uses these resources to support and develop its activities, provide grants to certain participants and initiate new projects, conducted alone or in partnership, in France and abroad.

B.Institutional Transformation

To meet the development requirements specific to every institution while continuing to support the idea of social innovation, INSI emphasises the importance of the people within the organisation. It asserts that no innovation (in-novare) is possible without a transformation process and discards the usual term of "change" by putting forward the idea of institutional transformation.

Indeed, organisations frequently use the word "change" to express their desire to transform a situation which does not satisfy them: when they continue or accelerate their decline, when they focus on their survival, when they are hyper-active and frenetic, and when, although this is more rare, they are innovative and productive.

The approach known as Institutional Transformation (IT) is the key concept at the heart of the methodology developed by IFSI. It complements and enriches the tradition of the Group Relations School. It not only includes psychoanalytical and open-systems theory, but also socio-political, philosophical and spiritual dimensions. It highlights the often subconscious conflict which opposes homoeostasis and learning. In other words, it underlines how, during their education, people subconsciously develop individual and collective defence mechanisms, which are ever-more sophisticate and defective, in order to block transformation.

Based on the above, the members of IFSI are convinced that the broader concept of Institutional Transformation is useful for understanding systems, as well as the leaders and operators within them. Five ideas summarise what they have learnt from their experience as managers and consultants, supplemented by the work and research mentioned above.

1. The most delicate and yet most crucial stage in the transformation process is the transformation of our mental representations (or "systems in the mind"), the basis of our fixed ideas and resistance. Only future experience can call these representations into question.

2. To work on transforming systems (institutions being systems), the people that make up the system need to transform their own roles. We underline that this involves transforming the roles chosen or projected/imagined within the systems and not individual personalities.

3. Working to transform our roles means that we must agree to fully consider our thoughts, feelings and desires, and that we accept to acknowledge and work on the subconscious factors that govern them. The transformation work therefore involves, for a large part, working on our resistance: work on transforming resistance.

4. As a consequence of the two previous ideas, working on institutional transformation requires interaction between the work on individual roles and the work on the system, i.e. the institution.

5. The transformation process is not a clearly-marked route, with an initial state, a final state and the possibility of regular measurements of the distance remaining from that final state. It is a winding journey on which we set off without knowing exactly where and when we will arrive; there is no guaranteed happy-ending, just the satisfaction of learning, undertaking and having a more intense experience of the human condition with its moments of despair and joy, its steps forward and steps backward, its fertile moments and sterile periods, its repetitions and surprises.

Thus, IT continues, expands and develops the Group Relations approach. However, the focal point of its work is "the institution", and not simply groups. IT also underlines the importance of perceiving transformation as a journey consisting of a series of developments and changes. It is not only aimed at analysis and greater understanding: IT is continuously at work in the action.

3. The Consultants network

Since its foundation, IFSI has developed an international network of consultants, whose education, backgrounds and professional activities are extremely diverse.
Engineers, historians, psychologists, company directors and even designers have been trained by the Forum, and now conduct its seminars and constitute a major asset for the association in terms of resources and experiences.
Indeed, it is vital for IFSI to remain in touch with the real world of business and to feed its seminars through the broad-ranging experiences of its consultants.
Conversely, it would be far too sterile to confine the work of IFSI to the field of psychology and psychoanalysis, a world of ideas and concepts.
Therefore, our consultants include French, Italians, Swedes, Swiss, Americans, Cubans, Belgians, Peruvians, and Indians, to give just a few nationalities. Finally, each year, IFSI trains new consultants through its international seminars.