The “Water for All” Chair believes that “the life that begets life, that is change”, as expressed in the I Ching, an old classic of change with a fresh perspective that is still relevant today. Invented on the banks of the Yellow River some 3,000 years ago or more, it sets out the paths of transformation with harmony and balance, while striving to overcome the countless obstacles in our path, which are common to all life’s journeys.
The carrier waves of the I Ching convey wisdom, including for the water that sprinkles and seeps abundantly into the words of this little ancestral booklet, since the source of many written developments.
The major imbalances in water and its terrestrial and subterranean basins, which are affecting us today, are inviting the Chair, which works in 55 countries with its network of 500 Alumnis and its next class of 2025-26, to look at profoundly inspiring tools for dealing with change and the metamorphoses that have become essential. Even if they may take a long time, it is our duty to initiate them.
Some of the world’s cities in particular will collapse if services to the public are no longer properly deployed: the underground assets whose networks are ageing, collapsing, crumbling and are not being replaced at the rate they should be, by a long way… governments are faltering, ethics are no longer or not at the forefront.
The well in the Book of Change is a universal symbol of the bond between human beings and their ability to live together.
The well in the past, for example, and every tap in our homes today (if we have one!), represents both the invisible source, available to everyone at all times, and the immobile centre around which exchanges and life are organised. In this vertical axis of the well, which we have finally horizontalized with networks, “the social body and the human body are found analogously”. The ideograms in the I Ching state that “the sovereign represents the pivot around which collective life is organised, just as the heart is the central organ of life”.
The Chair will be organising its International Executive Master OPT-“Water for All Water for All” (the tenth in two languages and this year in English only), its training programme and its exchanges with its forty or so managers from 22 countries over the coming months, selected from our network of 55 countries to date.
For all our executive managers undergoing “transformational training” in 2025-26, solutions are so hard to find to the challenges they face in their cities, …from the Gambia to Vietnam, from East to West and from Kazakhstan to South Africa, from North to South…
These solutions are perhaps to be found, beyond the professions taught, in a careful and shared understanding of the concepts of the I Ching well, in addition to the know-how, interpersonal skills and knowledge generated by our teams…. by also digging into what we don’t know and combining it with the exciting technical innovations of this decade….
For the “Human In-Novare”, there is no need to innovate in man, “each person can build his own change by drawing from his own deep reservoir”… he just needs to want to and take the trouble to do so with his partners in a common coalition and mission.
With these executives of the class, who carry out arduous tasks on their urban territories 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and with experts who know the Chinese culture of the Yi Jing of ancient times, the Chair has a ‘body of educational actors’, its trainers, its coaches, its loyal partners AgroParisTech and SUEZ first and always, then AFD, St Gobain and the French Water Agencies which joined forcefully from 2009 to 2025, …and tomorrow many other industries and players from other sectors, and from Africa and Asia… we hope and we’re looking for them.
The world’s water institutions and leaders must also know how to change and adapt ethically by ‘consoling the people for their fatigue and encouraging them to organise themselves’ ( lao min and quan xiang). How to infiltrate these systems with virtue so as to irrigate them permanently, by establishing a permanent link between the internal and external worlds and those who wait or look for water every day in the city… In short, “to centre and transmit while always remaining professional, available, accessible and ‘porous’, allowing us to settle at a more constant level of depth than ephemeral borders” by imagining possible futures. This is our mission.
This is what we are going to do from 17 April 2025 to 9 October 2026 with our 10th class on the AgroParisTech Montpellier campus and on the campus of the Cambodian Institute of Technology, our Asian partner, in Phnom Penh from 23 March to 25 May 2026.
