I Got a Good Grade... Before I Understood What I Was Saying

You can have the words before you have the lens. You can even get a good grade before you truly understand what you are saying. Then one day, something clicks, and the social world becomes legible in a different way.

When I was a student, I had to give a presentation on Michel Crozier’s strategic analysis, based on the proceedings of the 1994 Cerisy conference. I got a good grade. But deep down, I had not understood a word of what I had said.

I knew how to reproduce the concepts. I did not yet know how to see.

At the same time, I was applying to several Master’s programs at Sciences Po Paris. Almost by chance, I applied to the one called Sociology of Organized Action.

On the day of the interviews, Michel Crozier himself was conducting them. At the time, I had no real sense of his stature. I did not grasp the significance of his name, or the very particular privilege of being interviewed by the very person who had helped shape this way of thinking about organizations.

And yet, what I remember is not an intimidating eminent professor. It is a presence.

No theoretical questions. No traps. No performance of authority.

He asked me open-ended questions: what interested me, what intrigued me, what I noticed, what held my attention. Very quickly, I no longer felt as though I were being assessed. I felt as though I were meeting up with a friend. When I walked out, I was stunned: I had revealed ten times more about myself than in any of the other interviews.

In the end, I was accepted into three programs out of four: comparative politics, international relations, and sociology of organized action. I was rejected by the history of ideas program, which remains fairly ironic given my love of philosophy.

I hesitated. Then I chose sociology of organized action for one very simple reason: Michel Crozier’s demeanor had intrigued me far too much.

I have never regretted that choice.

The Day Strategic Analysis Finally Became Concrete

At the CSO (Centre de sociologie des organisations, the joint CNRS/Sciences Po research center), strategic analysis finally became simple—or rather, it stopped being abstract. It became operational.

I could see human strategies, implicit rules, the games actors play, zones of uncertainty, room for maneuver. Where before I had only somewhat opaque notions, I was beginning to perceive very concrete dynamics.

It felt as though a veil had been lifted.

My mind had become a genuine chessboard.

That shift is decisive. Because strategic analysis is not just a theory about organizations. It is a way of learning how to look. It forces you to leave behind naive explanations such as “this person acts that way because that is their personality” or “you just have to apply the rule and the system will work.”

It teaches something else: in any organization, behavior is also a response to constraints, dependencies, information asymmetries, divergent interests, formal rules, and tacit rules.

In other words: you understand very little about human action if you do not also look at the system in which it is embedded.

What You See Once You Know How to Read

Once this analytical lens truly takes hold, it does more than help you comment on authors or deliver a successful presentation. It changes the way you observe reality.

You begin to notice:

• what is at stake beneath official discourse;
• what each person is protecting, sometimes without saying so;
• the invisible rules that structure behavior;
• the dependencies that give certain actors power;
• misunderstandings produced not by bad faith, but by different forms of rationality.

That is, in my view, where organizational sociology becomes valuable: it restores lucidity where people often project morality, quick psychology, or the illusion of transparency.

It does not excuse everything. It does not erase responsibility. But it keeps us from telling ourselves nonsense about what is really happening.

A Rare Transmission

Later in my professional life, I attended introductory trainings in strategic analysis where the trainers sometimes seemed to be in much the same half-light I was in during that first presentation.

They were repeating concepts they did not really command.

And I will admit it: I was often tempted to step in.

With hindsight, what I mostly see is how lucky I was—to have received that transmission almost at the source. Not in the form of a theoretical catechism, but in the form of a lens. A way of entering reality without flattening it under slogans.

That debt of transmission matters deeply to me.

Why EPIC PERSONA® Was Also Born from This

EPIC PERSONA® was also born from this experience.

Not to lock people into a fixed portrait. Not to say who you are as though identity alone could explain action.

But to introduce another way of reading power: how you act under constraint.

When pressure rises—when you have to arbitrate, protect, slow things down, make the call, rally others, or resist—what matters is not just some personal essence. What matters is a logic of action: what you are trying to preserve, what you are willing to risk, what you struggle to tolerate, the way you read other people, rules, and power relations.

That, to me, is precisely where a more accurate reading of human dynamics begins.

EPIC PERSONA® does not replace organizational sociology. It makes no such claim. But it does try to carry something living, legible, and operational from it: a way of observing and understanding human trade-offs other than through the usual labels.

And perhaps, sometimes, it offers others that very particular moment I once experienced myself: the moment when something that had long remained hazy suddenly comes into focus.

The moment when you stop repeating words.

And finally start to see.

Have you ever had that feeling too—the feeling that, on some subject, the veil had finally been lifted?