Page 137 - Book_Artelia_10years

Hackathon “Living in a lighter way”
Youth Workshops - March 2020

Looking to the future

When we launched our “foresight” activity, we began with a blank page. It is rare to find
businesses adopting such an approach, which is more the preserve of academic circles
and public research. By definition, foresight should not ignore any aspect of human activity,
but we had to be pragmatic and concentrate on three major issues of particular interest to
Artelia, namely the planet, global geopolitics and employment. In the same way, we felt it
was essential for this activity to be shared widely by the Group’s employees, that it should
be an opportunity to reflect together and move forward collectively. We therefore invited
everyone who wished to join the discussion groups set up to look at various issues.
Over 200 employees eventually came together to work on a “grand project”, imagining
an ideal city in which everyone would like to live. This was both utopian and extremely
down-to-earth, being based on all our expertise and know-how in the field of urban
development. Other groups began thinking about the place for ecology in our modern
societies, requirements in the area of resilience and the circular economy, changes in
organisations and behaviour in relation to work such as uberisation, or the position of
Europe in the China-USA dichotomy. Our objective is to pick up the multiple signals,
however faint or strong, emitted by our societies in order to keep one step ahead and
continue to anticipate.

Tristan Legendre
Director, Foresight

134 I ARTELIA, 10 YEARS OF EXISTENCE, 100 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE ARTELIA, 10 YEARS OF EXISTENCE, 100 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE I 135