The individual and their potential for ‘revolution’

Anyone who joins a collective structure immediately makes two contributions: who they are, and a little of the world to which they belong. They bring a breath of fresh air, new methods, and perhaps also a different perspective on the work. In turn, they will discover the internal codes of communication, the working methods and the ‘hidden’ organisational chart that implicitly exploits internal networks of influence.

On their own, they influence the structure and will help to transform it – thanks to or because of them. A person represents a microcosm in contact with a macrocosm, and the two will interpenetrate.

According to Max Weber, power is the ability to impose one’s will within a social context, despite any resistance, whilst the sociologist Michel Crozier argues that authority is synonymous with power legitimised by organisational rules. Stanley Milgram points out, however, that it is not so much the order itself that matters, but the source from which it emanates. And it seems to us that the source may or may not embody a collective meaning, which itself may or may not respect each individual.

However, the individual possesses a multifaceted power: the power to act, the power to communicate and pass on knowledge, the power to decide… and this is true regardless of whether or not they hold any authority. Their mere presence makes a difference within the macrocosm.

Today, technology and AI are attempting to play a key role within the macrocosm because they are used by microcosms. In today’s organisational systems, the individual gains unprecedented power by entrusting all or part of their activity to an external system that is not the macrocosm in which they work, thereby relinquishing some of their power to this system.

The challenge we face is called revolution. A term which, in its original sense, means a return to the past, the movement of an object around a central point, bringing it back to the same point. Perhaps for a macrocosm, it is a matter of returning to the individual and discovering their potential; for the individual, to return to their true self, having submitted or surrendered to a system they do not control, with which they may be writing a collective history within a macrocosm, yet being influenced by an external system whose rules they do not fully understand and which they will never quite master.

The issue is societal and civilisational; the challenge lies in the meaning given to activity, that is to say, to reality on the ground.