Marjory Valckenaere (EDHEC Executive MBA 2010) and Compoz'Om: facilitating and activating collective intelligence.

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Marjory Valckenaere, I’m 43 years old, and I design and moderate collaborative encounters. I’m the founder of Compoz’Om. I graduated from EDHEC in 2010 and started out in several cross-disciplinary management positions in my company, as well as exploring CSR and innovation. I then underwent further training and worked as a facilitator of collective intelligence, applying the ASE method developed by CAPGEMINI.

Tell us briefly how your project came about.

During my Executive MBA at EDHEC, I took time to decide what I wanted to do with my life. Without knowing it at the time, that was a crucial exercise. It’s when I began my inner exploration. I wanted to create my own business, my own activity. I had quite a few ideas, all different from one another. What they had in common was the search for sharing, support and mutual assistance. I knew I had to provide something to society, even on a small scale. That was essential for me. My activity had to have a raison d’être. Generating revenue just for the sake of it makes no sense. But on paper I couldn’t really deliver a single one. Inclusion, believing in each individual’s talent, caring for others, these are things that really resonate with me. And it would be difficult for me to engage in all that without respect for what we share, i.e. our environment. We can’t act for others and at the same time indirectly act against them. The hardest aspect of all this ultimately is the how. Deciding how to act. I think you discover that how question, or at least the beginning of the how, when you encounter some kind of trigger. Then you still have to implement it. But at that point some kind of detonator occurs in your life. All businesses are born out of a history, lived experiences.

The trigger for me was what I call a “professional trauma”. When you’re second in command after your company’s director and from one day to the next the director changes and you’re made to believe you’re not worth much in the end and that you’re not in the right place. That forced me to take some time out and focus on what I really enjoyed doing, to get away from that automatic and frenetic pace. So I opened up to another profession, which was just emerging, that of collective intelligence facilitator.

Then came the detonator. When I was working on Compoz’Om and then launched the business, I was in a complicated relationship. With hindsight, I know now that Compoz’Om was my form of resilience, pushed by the need to survive, to exist and to be able to express who I was.

Working as a facilitator is a wonderful profession. It’s a profession where you give a great deal to others. The only objective is to help the business or group of individuals progress together and for each participant to emerge from the experience a little wiser. It’s extremely gratifying on a personal level.

Compoz’Om came about from a desire to pursue a profession, which I am passionate about and which enriches me each day, as well as a desire to act on everything that is important to me.

Tell us about your company.

Compoz’Om is a business that serves all companies, associations and organizations. I use my facilitation know-how to serve any company, association or organization that wants to work effectively with groups on a transformation, to obtain results and to make lasting and carefully thought-out decisions.

What makes this facilitation original is that it is intended to be conducted in an eco-responsible mindset. That means that the format, procedures and consumables are thought through so as to reduce the carbon footprint of each collaborative encounter as much as possible.

What is your initial assessment of this entrepreneurial adventure?

When I launched Compoz’Om, I was on my own, well actually not quite. There were already two of us. A few months later, there were three of us, one founder and two co-founders. Each of us had our own expertise, complementing each other nicely but with the same objective and shared values.

We are only at the beginning of Compoz’Om. We are building it up as we go along, without the slightest preconception of what the final artwork will look like. We know our summit. We know each handhold and the steps to reach it, and we’re laying down each one, one at a time.

And so the first product we deliver, facilitation, led to the second, inspiration, with our “inspirational wanderings” and the diary of an ordinary girl whose goal is to share and expand our knowledge about the way humans work and interact. And the latest product, “collaborative circuits”, which are turnkey methods to moderate a he group discussion on a specific theme.

Our objective is to facilitate and create collective intelligence in organizations with a view to supporting their transformations towards greater societal and environmental awareness. 

What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs?

Not to be too impatient and to take the plunge, whatever the method, once they have a clear vision of why they want to do it. There will always be time to adjust things later, to modify, complement, improve and transform ... In any case it’s inevitable, even if the project is structured down to the last detail, that you will have to make changes, and that will be easier if it’s not perfect from the outset.

What’s next for your business?

The next phase will be to set up two services to complement design and ségalement outside of collaborative encounters. It could use facilitation or the graphic illustration provided by Emmanuelle Faure, as part of or independently of any collaborative encounter. This service can quite easily be delivered to illustrate a medium or a text or to back up a speech or conference.

It could also rely on the graphic design of Léa Krysiecki to create a poster for an event, flyers, invitations or a webpage as part of a long collaborative process, such as the search for a shared vision. Again, this can be done with or without the facilitation of a collaborative encounter.

Finally, there will be a fourth one, but it’s surprise …

In the long term, our objective is to make sure our clients have a meaningful experience beyond a mere encounter, to make them undergo a transformation.

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