Training in Toulouse - by Michael Walling

Kuamé

Our week in Toulouse was the last of five in which the partners have offered a combination of their own working methodologies with introductions to their national and local contexts in relation to migration, and particularly refugees.  The week was extremely well organised and run with the combination of efficiency and bonhomie that has characterised the i2u consulting team’s approach throughout the project.

The structure of the week, with a speaker coming in each day to create a dialectic with the facilitated sessions, made perfect sense.  All of the speakers were excellent, but it was the last, Kuamé, who made the greatest impression of all.  To meet a young man who had endured so much deep suffering, and had somehow emerged from it with a great capacity for creativity, organisation, charity and political thought was quite extraordinary.  His talk emphasised the need, which we have already identified in our policy recommendations, to shift the narrative away from one of threat to one of humanitarianism and of opportunity.  Kuamé is surely somebody who any society should rejoice to call a citizen.

Corinne Torre gave a comprehensive, if disturbing, overview of the challenges faced by migrants in French society; while Philippe Coustel offered a more positive view in his account of the practical steps his organisation was taking to train refugees and migrants for the French job market.  This talk began to touch on what had been announced as the key theme of the week: what business can do for migration, and what migration can do for business.  It was a little disturbing to realise that Philippe’s work, positive though it is, concentrates largely on bringing migrants into manual trades, particularly the construction industry, and that the “integration” this necessitates is an almost exclusively one-way process, as migrants are trained to adapt to the proud secularism of French society.   The talk by Remi Dumas of Airbus compounded this impression.  While the exercises he demonstrated were useful tools to demonstrate the inadequacy of stereotypes, and so of potential value in overcoming prejudice, he was unable to name any steps that French business was taking to make the workplace more accommodating of cultural difference, or to provide any answer to the question of how a diverse workforce might be more beneficial in terms of innovation.  We were, it seemed, stuck with the model that there was an existing European society to which migrants had to adapt in order to be accepted.  This is the static, assimilationist approach that THE PROMISED LAND project has continuously rejected in favour of a dynamic, two-way process of dialogic integration through innovation.

In our facilitated sessions, led with great skill and tact by Alain Pottier, we explored approaches to Systems Coaching used in businesses to improve the ways in which people work together.  The implication was that these tools could be utilised in businesses to help integration processes between newly arrived and more established employees.   I certainly found many of the tasks to be very useful as team-building exercises, with one of them (the “string game”, dealing with “Power, Privilege and Revenge”) offering a striking model of the ways in which established approaches can be disrupted and threatened (or, just as possibly, revitalised) by new arrivals.  The game made very clear how critical thinking is an essential part of any creative working process: it started as a game which we played in a purely intuitive way, before reflecting on what had happened, using our critical, distanced thoughts to apply those actions and decisions that took place within the game to much broader contexts.  However, I also felt that the systems approach reflected some of the concerns I expressed in relation to Remi’s work - there was a clear element of assimilation here.  This was why I felt it important to include Critical Thinking as an element in our agreed systemic approach: it is not enough to say that we will all be nice to one another if we don’t engage with the genuine issues raised by cultural difference.

The facilitated sessions were carefully structured to lead us towards a large-scale exercise in “Deep Democracy”.  This was a concept which I found very appealing: it is an essential part of the conclusions that are arising from the project as a whole that European democracies need to be revitalised, with the participation of all, both new citizens and more established populations, in the political process at a complex, nuanced level.  I engaged in the exercise with some vigour, enjoying its role-playing possibilities: but ultimately it left me unsatisfied and indeed disturbed.  The problem with the exercise as it was structured was that it encouraged the reiteration of known, entrenched positions, rather than nuanced debate or the possibility of actually changing minds and shifting perceptions.

There was an exception to this.  In the thick of the exercise, Micaela Casalboni continually took on identities of specific individuals whom she had encountered and who were in some way part of the migration narrative.  Within the exercise, this went for very little and was pretty much ignored by other participants; but thinking back on it now, this seems to me to show a potential way forward that unites the best of this business training with the work of the cultural sector.  Contemporary Western society has become so obsessed with systems that it has come to ignore stories.  There is an assumption that the answers lie in how we do something, and not in what it is that we do.  This approach, regarding management (framed by a growth-driven agenda) as key, asserts only that people need to work better together.  It does not question the fundamental aim of what they do.  Micaela’s interventions suggested to me the need for an imaginative leap that re-frames the narrative towards inclusion and diversity on a profound level.  This would require genuine processes of self-analysis: not simply in terms of “rank” (which is, after all, itself the product of an existing system), but in terms of the deconstruction of the wider social and political assumptions that serve to generate inequalities, hatred, fear and prejudice.  This seems to me to be the proper role of the cultural sector, which can then collaborate with other areas of society to turn the imagined polity into practical realities.

There was much talk in the week about what we could do next – and this was very encouraging, as it suggested a strong sense of a working group with great potential.  But whatever we decide to do, it should not be inward looking.  Our partnership exists to do more than examine itself: it exists to initiate change.