Sylvain Bureau, thanks for joining us on  XERFI Canal. You are an Associate Professor at ESCP Europe,
you are an expert of the concept of
the improbable, and you've been working on
this concept with teams at Stanford
University, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in
Paris and also with the famous venture
capital firm Mistletoe in Japan. So first
question: could you tell us more about
this concept, the improbable? Yes, so the
improbable is a big challenge today.
Let's take the case of the election of
President Trump, the Brexit in the UK or
the yellow vests movement in France.
All these situations were highly improbable, and it's hard to predict these situations.
It's not like when you play the lottery,
for instance, you face a risk, you
have one chance out of 36 million to win,
but these situations were completely
unpredictable and highly implausible, and
many markets work the same way so you
have more and more new competitors, you know, Facebook, Airbnb, BlablaCar,
you name them, were completely disruptive markets. Today, one statistic: if you take the case
of Standard & Poor's Index in the USA. In
the 60s, the life expectancy of
companies was 60 years, today it's less than 20 years. So the big challenge
is how not only to reproduce what you
have been doing, not only to improve what
you have been doing, but completely
rethink the way you do things and
produce, fabricate the improbable. You
have developed some methods to build this
improbable. Could you tell us more about
these methods? Yes, so I basically try to
compare what artists were doing and what
entrepreneurs are doing, because artists
are really good at creating the improbable
and make sense out of that. So I designed
this method called Art Thinking. Art
Thinking is a method to help you create
the improbable with certainty. So we
don't need you to be creative, you follow
the method and you're going to be
creative for sure. Art Thinking is
complementary to Design Thinking.
Design Thinking is really focusing on
the users. Business Thinking is also
focusing on the clients. We don't care
about the clients. We don't care about
the users. What we care for is you as a
creator. We care for the fit between you
and your project because we know that if,
you know, for instance this commercial, 
even if it's a great product, a great opportunity,
this commercial alone is not enough. You need to connect it with this magazine to
create the authority. Same is true with your project: if it's
not connected with you, it's not
connected with your passion, your
ecosystem, it won't work. Art Thinking
helps you focus on this creation of a
fit between you and your passions and
your projects. So what are the
entrepreneurial techniques that we can
learn through Art Thinking? So, Art
Thinking, we teach this method in
various contexts, for entrepreneurs,
students, executives. We did it in 10
countries and basically, it's working
because we focus on the practices so
people can create interesting pieces of
art that are improbable but still make
sense for them, and we focus on practice
like the deviation. So for instance,
in 1917 Marcel Duchamp deviated a
urinal to create this famous piece, 
The Fountain, and the purpose was to
challenge the existing context in the art
world at that time, where pieces were
supposed to be aesthetic, were
supposed to be highly technical, and he
wanted to make a joke and challenge his
peers. It worked very well and the same
is happening in the entrepreneurial
world, so for instance Adam Neumann, who
created WeWork, a massive co-working
space that you can find in 500
cities today, was inspired by his
history, his roots, because he's connected
to Israel and the kibbutz, where you know
people work and live together, where
informality is highly important, where
they connect through informal social
networks, and he wanted to replicate
these elements in the world of New York
City originally, so he deviated many of
the aspects of kibbutz, to make it the
kibbutz 2.0 with WeWork. That's a typical
example of a deviation, so here you don't
really need to be highly creative but
you need to find this capacity to
connect to environments which are not
supposed to be connected. So it's
through Art Thinking that we make that
happen. Well thank you very much Sylvain
Bureau and for those of our viewers who would
like to know more about deviation, you
wrote a short introduction to deviation
in your latest book, which is called Free
your Pitch. it has been published recently
by Pearson. Thank you very much. Thank you.
