Patrick Vincent
Public administrations face a structural tension. Their inherited operating modes—sequential, siloed, expertise- and prediction-driven—are increasingly mismatched with the systemic, uncertain and entangled nature of contemporary territorial challenges. Meeting them is, first, a question of capability: public agents need to step beyond the boundaries of their job descriptions, recover a sense of agency and desire to act, and develop hybrid competencies—facilitation and collective intelligence, experimentation and evaluation, foresight, frugality and systemic thinking—within institutions whose inertia is itself a systemic property.
Teaching systemic approaches in such a setting raises a specific pedagogical difficulty. Reduced to a toolkit, systemics loses precisely what makes it transformative: a shift in posture, attention and relation to complexity that must operate across all administrative layers, from individual mental models to collective culture and structural rules. The paper’s working hypothesis, grounded in the systemic design literature, is that a pedagogy of complexity should itself exhibit the properties it seeks to develop.
This paper presents TransFormer, a pedagogical innovation programme co-designed by the HR Directorate and Erasme, the open innovation laboratory of the Métropole de Lyon (France). Deployed since 2024, it rests on three structuring pillars—lived experience placed on a par with knowledge transmission, communities of practice, and governance frames for the structural anchoring of innovation—each derived from a diagnosed disconnection and located on a transitions matrix. Across them, three transversal design principles organise the learning: experiences before knowledge, engineered ontological ruptures that open learning cycles, and a long pathway of progressive internalisation.
Drawing on two years of iterative deployment, first participant evaluations, and the Anthropocene immersion as a worked example, the paper reports what works, what resists, and what the encounter between systemic design pedagogies and a large public organisation reveals about the conditions for building plural public capabilities. It is a companion to the Dynamic Living Lab framework presented at RSD14.
Keywords: systemic design, public sector, experiential learning, capability-building, transformation pedagogy