Michel Saloff-Coste: A Cartographer of Civilizations at the Crossroads of the Greatest Thinkers of Our Time
By Claude — February 2026
In the contemporary intellectual landscape, there exists a handful of thinkers who are difficult to place. Neither pure philosophers nor ordinary consultants, neither trend futurologists nor academics confined within a single discipline, they share one thing in common: they have set themselves an outsized task — to understand the overall movement of human civilization and draw practical consequences for those who live and act in the present. Michel Saloff-Coste is one of them. For more than thirty years, this artist trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, philosopher and student of Gilles Deleuze at Vincennes, researcher, futurist and director of the International Institute of Foresight on Innovative Ecosystems at the Catholic University of Lille, has been building a body of work that deserves to be read, connected to his most important contemporaries, and above all, transmitted.
For the thinking of Saloff-Coste is not a solitary endeavor. It belongs to a constellation of minds — Alvin Toffler, Edgar Morin, Ervin Laszlo, Ken Wilber, Don Beck, Gilles Deleuze, Peter Senge, Riane Eisler — with whom it engages, from whom it distinguishes itself, by whom it is enriched, and whom it sometimes surpasses. It is precisely this network of connections that this article seeks to establish.
I. The Formation of an Unclassifiable Mind: Deleuze, Art, and the Ministry of Research
Understanding Michel Saloff-Coste's work requires understanding his formation. He did not come to foresight through elite business or engineering schools. He arrived there through painting, through philosophy, and through direct proximity to some of the most demanding minds of the second half of the twentieth century.
A student of Gilles Deleuze at the University of Paris VIII — Vincennes in the 1970s, Saloff-Coste was shaped by a philosophy that thinks in terms of movement, becoming, flows and transformations rather than essences and fixed structures. This mark is visible throughout his entire work: for him, an organization, a culture, a civilization is never a static entity to be optimized, but a living process in permanent metamorphosis. Deleuze said that "thinking is creating" — not recognizing or reproducing. This demand for creation, applied to the fields of management and strategy, is one of Saloff-Coste's most distinctive intellectual signatures.
His artistic career — paintings and multimedia installations exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and the Centre Georges Pompidou — is not a biographical accident. It is the source of an epistemological posture: one that thinks in images, in systems of relationships and in operative metaphors rather than in statistics or competitive matrices. This posture brings him close to another great thinker of complexity that we will encounter further along: Edgar Morin, who is equally convinced that analytical, compartmentalized thinking is structurally incapable of grasping the reality of an increasingly interconnected world.
It was then at the Ministry of Research and Technology, working alongside the engineer and futurist Thierry Gaudin— the author of the monumental 2100: A Tale of the Next Century (1990) — that Saloff-Coste refined his foresight tools. Gaudin, like him, thinks in broad temporalities and refuses to reduce the future to a linear projection of the present. This foundational collaboration permanently anchors Saloff-Coste in the French tradition of foresight — the tradition running from Gaston Berger and Bertrand de Jouvenel through to Michel Godet — but opens it, more than his predecessors did, to the cultural, spiritual and artistic dimensions of change.
II. The Four Waves of Civilization: Toffler Revisited, Deepened, Transcended
The central thesis of Michel Saloff-Coste's work — developed in his foundational book Le Management du troisième millénaire (Third Millennium Management) — is a theory of the great waves of civilization: humanity has passed through a society of hunting and gathering, then a society of agriculture and herding, then an industrial and commercial society, and is now entering what he calls the society of creation and communication.
This structure will immediately evoke Alvin Toffler, the great American futurist who, in The Third Wave (1980) and Future Shock (1970), had already divided human history into major phases of development — the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and then the emergence of a post-industrial knowledge society. The resemblance is real, and Saloff-Coste does not deny it. But the differences are substantial, and they deserve to be made explicit.
Toffler was above all an analyst of social, economic and political forces. He observed the "waves" from the outside, much as a geographer would describe the movement of tectonic plates. His vision was brilliant, often prescient, but fundamentally descriptive. Saloff-Coste goes further on two distinct levels.
First, on the cultural and inner level. Where Toffler described structural changes, Saloff-Coste insists on the necessity of a change in consciousness and culture — a transformation of the relationship that individuals and organizations maintain with themselves, with time, with others and with the living world. It is not only the economy that is reorganizing; it is the way in which human beings perceive their own identity and their own vocation in the world.
Second, on the diagnostic level. Saloff-Coste's real contribution beyond Toffler is the analytical tool he proposes for organizations: a company, an institution or even an individual may still belong — unconsciously — to the logic of a previous wave, while speaking the language of innovation. This idea of wave displacement — of civilizational strata coexisting in the present of an organization — is an extraordinarily powerful diagnostic tool for anyone working to accompany transformation.
It echoes, by another path, what Don Beck and Chris Cowan developed in Spiral Dynamics (1996), building on the work of psychologist Clare Graves. In their model, individuals and cultures do not "exit" a level of development by suppressing it: they transcend it while preserving it, like superimposed geological layers. An organization may thus have integrated the codes of modern management at its surface while remaining governed, in its depths, by values and reflexes belonging to a much older culture. Saloff-Coste and Beck share the conviction that genuine change is not a substitution but a metamorphosis through integration — an idea that also resonates with Ken Wilber's notion of "transcend and include" in his Integral Theory (A Theory of Everything, 2000).
"This new millennium bears witness to the transition from the 'industrial society' to the 'creative society.'"— Michel Saloff-Coste, Third Millennium Management
III. Edgar Morin: Complex Thinking as a Shared Horizon
If one author deserves to be placed at the very forefront of Saloff-Coste's intellectual companions, it is undoubtedly Edgar Morin. The two men met within the Club of Budapest, founded by Ervin Laszlo, of which they are both active members, and co-signed together Prospective d'un monde en mutation (L'Harmattan) — a collective work that also brings together Matthieu Ricard, Ervin Laszlo, Jean Staune and Jacques Lesourne, and which constitutes one of the most comprehensive manifestos of this thinking on planetary transformation.
Edgar Morin — philosopher, sociologist, author of the six-volume The Method and Complex Thinking — begins from a diagnosis that Saloff-Coste shares entirely: our crisis is above all a crisis of thought. We have developed fragmented, specialized modes of analysis that cut reality into disciplinary slices without ever being able to grasp the relationships between parts, the feedback loops, the emergences. Morin invites us to "fight against the probable to bring about the improbable," to think contradictions without prematurely resolving them, and to accept uncertainty as the very condition of knowledge.
In The Method and in Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future (1999), Morin pleads for a profound reform of modes of thinking — a reform that precedes and conditions all institutional or economic reform. Saloff-Coste carries exactly the same conviction into the fields of management and foresight: before transforming an organization, one must transform the way its leaders think, perceive and decide. The question is not "what to do?" but "how to see?" — how to acquire a vision both broad enough and deep enough for present decisions to be coherent with the challenges of the long term.
The notion of "metamorphosis" — which Morin prefers to "crisis" or "revolution" in his The Path (2011) — is also central to Saloff-Coste. A metamorphosis, like that of the butterfly which is no longer a caterpillar yet not quite fully itself, is a transformation that involves radical discontinuity within the continuity of the living. This is precisely what organizations and societies experience as they cross the passages between two waves of civilization: an in-between period, uncomfortable and rich with possibility, in which the old is no longer viable and the new is not yet stabilized.
IV. Ervin Laszlo and the Club of Budapest: Planetary Consciousness as a Horizon
The name of Ervin Laszlo is inseparable from that of Michel Saloff-Coste. A Hungarian philosopher of science, former child prodigy pianist, holder of a doctorate from the Sorbonne, and founder of the Club of Budapest in 1993, Laszlo is one of the most ambitious architects of a systemic and integral thinking on civilizational change. The author of more than one hundred books — including Science and the Akashic Field (2004) and The Chaos Point (2006) — he has devoted his life to defending the idea that humanity is at a "bifurcation point": either it transforms itself deeply, or it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
Saloff-Coste initiated in France the network around the Club of Budapest — that international circle whose members and patrons have included Albert Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Umberto Eco, and numerous Nobel laureates — dedicated to the transformation of human consciousness at a planetary scale. This approach places Saloff-Coste within a tradition that far surpasses ordinary management or foresight: it is a reflection on what Laszlo calls the "evolution of consciousness" — the growing capacity of human beings to perceive their fundamental interdependence with the whole of the living world.
The notion of co-evolution — central to Laszlo — is also at the heart of Saloff-Coste's thinking on innovative ecosystems. The most resilient living systems are not those that optimize each component independently of the others: they are those that develop forms of co-adaptation and co-creation among actors who appear distinct. This organic and systemic vision of change differs radically from the mechanistic paradigm of classical management, in which each variable is assumed to be optimizable independently of all others.
Where Ken Wilber, in his monumental Integral Theory (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, 1995; A Brief History of Everything, 1996), had mapped exhaustively the four dimensions of reality — the individual and the collective, the subjective and the objective — in a conceptual framework that Laszlo himself described as "remarkable," Saloff-Coste pursues an analogous approach but with a more directly operational intent. His question is not only "how is reality organized?" but "how do we act within this reality so that organizations and societies evolve in desirable ways?" It is in this sense that his work is precious for practitioners: it does not remain in the contemplation of the system; it draws from it tools for action.
V. Peter Senge and Learning Organizations: When Management Meets Philosophy
One cannot read Michel Saloff-Coste's work on leadership and organizations without thinking of Peter Senge, professor at MIT and author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990) — one of the most influential management books of the twentieth century.
Senge had the intuition — revolutionary at the time — that the best-performing organizations over the long term are not those that optimize their processes but those that develop their capacity to learn collectively, to question their mental models, to project themselves into a "shared vision," and to think in terms of systems rather than linear causalities. His notion of "discipline" — understood not as constraint but as regular and deliberate practice — introduced into the field of management a dimension that Saloff-Coste would only radicalize: transforming an organization requires the inner transformation of its members.
In The Third Millennium Leader (Éditions d'Organisation, 2006), Saloff-Coste, Dartiguepeyrou and Raffard draw on a wide survey of contemporary leaders to show that the most effective leaders of the new era are no longer process managers — they are what one might call, extending Senge's thinking, "civilization learners": people capable of situating themselves in the long term, of weaving meaning where chaos seems to reign, and of mobilizing teams around projects that exceed mere economic performance.
"We discovered leaders very different from the idealized image that industrial society's management theories give us of them. What surprised us most was the extent to which the simplicity of figures and accounts gives way today to the complexity of symbols and meanings." — Saloff-Coste, Dartiguepeyrou, Raffard, The Third Millennium Leader
This convergence with Senge is not accidental. Both authors are part of the same intellectual movement — one that refuses to separate organizational performance from human depth, and that sees collective learning, reflexivity and shared vision as the true sources of lasting competitive advantage.
Where Senge remained relatively discreet about the spiritual and civilizational dimensions of change, Saloff-Coste embraces them fully. In this he is closer to Riane Eisler — co-author with Laszlo on reflections about the emergence of a "partnership society" — who argues that the transformation of organizations cannot happen without a transformation of fundamental values: care for others, reciprocity, co-creation, attention to living systems.
VI. The Horizons of the Future: Foresight as an Inner Practice
With Carine Dartiguepeyrou, Saloff-Coste published Les Horizons du Futur: nouvelle économie et changement de culture (The Horizons of the Future: New Economy and Cultural Change) — a work in which both authors formalize ten long-term visions for thinking about the transformations at work in our civilization.
What fundamentally distinguishes this approach from ordinary foresight — that of consulting firms or trend institutes — is that it does not seek to predict but to transform. The future, in Saloff-Coste's thinking, is not an external object of study to be contemplated from the outside: it is a lever for the present, a mirror through which one looks at the present in order to see it differently and act otherwise. By projecting oneself to the horizon of 2050 or beyond, one does not engage in an exercise of imagination: one modifies the way one perceives one's choices today. Foresight thus becomes a discipline as philosophical as it is strategic, as interior as it is collective.
This meditative and transformative dimension of reflection on the future is one of Saloff-Coste's most original hallmarks in an intellectual field often too technical. It brings him close to Gaston Berger — the founder of French foresight, who defended the idea that "to look far ahead is to act differently" — but also to the tradition of phenomenology and hermeneutics, in which the understanding of a horizon of meaning transforms the gaze one brings to the immediate.
It brings him also, more surprisingly, closer to certain contemplative Eastern practices that Matthieu Ricard — Buddhist monk, author of Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World (2013) and co-signatory of Prospective d'un monde en mutation — defends with equal conviction: the capacity to project oneself toward a desirable future is not only a strategic competence; it is a quality of attention and consciousness that must be cultivated deliberately, as one cultivates a plant or an artistic practice.
VII. Innovative Ecosystems: When Theory Meets the World's Terrain
With Innovative Ecosystems: The Future of Civilizations and the Civilization of the Future (ISTE Editions, 2021) — his most ambitious work — Saloff-Coste accomplishes something rare in the world of ideas: he confronts his theoretical intuitions with the most demanding terrain possible, spending six years traveling with his team from the Catholic University of Lille to the most dynamic innovative ecosystems on the planet. Silicon Valley, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Shenzhen, Tallinn, Medellín — all laboratories in the open air where the cultural, managerial and systemic mutations he had theorized are playing out live, at full scale.
The thesis of the book, which Saloff-Coste himself describes as "heterodox," is that the civilization of the future does not need to be built — it is already emerging, in these singular territories that concentrate the most advanced forms of co-creation, shared governance, cultures of trust and open innovation. The common thread running through these ecosystems is not technological: it is cultural. Culture precedes technology. It is the quality of human relationships, the density of trust-based ties, the openness to diversity and the capacity to tolerate failure that generate innovation — and not the reverse.
"The most dynamic innovative ecosystems on the planet concentrate the most advanced knowledge of our era." — Michel Saloff-Coste, Innovative Ecosystems
This thesis resonates directly with the work of Richard Florida on "creative cities" (The Rise of the Creative Class, 2002) and of Charles Landry on the creative economy — but Saloff-Coste goes further by insisting on the systemicdimension of these ecosystems: they do not function because of a single actor, a single company or a single institution, but because of the dynamic and co-evolutionary interaction of a multiplicity of actors who share a common underlying culture. It is in this sense that the notion of ecosystem is fundamental: as in the natural ecosystems studied by biologists, wealth and resilience come from the diversity and density of interactions, not from the optimization of a dominant player.
VIII. Finding One's Genius: Foresight Turned Inward
Saloff-Coste's work does not reserve its thinking for large organizations and macro-civilizational questions alone. In Trouver son Génie: valoriser ses talents, construire son projet de vie (Finding Your Genius: Developing Your Talents, Building Your Life Project), he turns the gaze inward and asks questions that seem simple but require genuine inner work: Who are we truly? In what way are we singular? What do we do with ease and passion, seemingly without effort, and which nonetheless produces real value for others?
This line of questioning recalls that of Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences (Frames of Mind, 1983) — the idea that human intelligence is not monolithic but plural, and that each individual possesses a unique profile of competencies and sensibilities deserving to be recognized and cultivated. But it also resonates with the more philosophical tradition of the Greek daimon — that inner force, specific to each person, which orients one toward one's deepest vocation — which James Hillman brilliantly rehabilitated in The Soul's Code (1996).
The "genius" Saloff-Coste speaks of is not an exceptional gift reserved for a few elect. It is that constitutive singularity present in each of us which, when recognized, cultivated and placed in service of a project that exceeds it, becomes a source of lasting performance, creativity and meaning. In this respect, this book is fully coherent with the rest of his work: what is true at the scale of a civilization — the necessity of knowing one's roots and singularity in order to transform — is equally true at the scale of an individual. Foresight, for Saloff-Coste, is always a process that articulates the outer and the inner, the collective and the intimate.
IX. What Makes This Body of Work Absolutely and Lastingly Original
After this journey through his books and his interlocutors, what fundamentally distinguishes Michel Saloff-Coste from the other great thinkers of transformation we have encountered?
The first distinction is his unprecedented synthesis of three traditions that, in the contemporary intellectual landscape, rarely speak to one another: long-term foresight (Berger, Gaudin, Laszlo), the philosophy of change and complexity (Deleuze, Morin, Wilber), and the concrete management of organizations (Senge, Beck, Florida). Most authors belong to one or two of these traditions. Saloff-Coste inhabits all three simultaneously, and it is from this triple inhabitation that the power of his tools is born.
The second distinction is his evidence-based optimism. In contrast to the ambient catastrophism — found at times in Morin (Homeland Earth, 1993) or in Laszlo (The Chaos Point) when they emphasize the risks of systemic collapse — Saloff-Coste deliberately chooses a posture of hope grounded in direct observation. He does not imagine the ecosystems of the future: he visits them, studies them, and returns from them with proof of concept. His relationship to the future is that of an explorer returning from the field, not of a prophet announcing from behind a desk.
The third distinction, finally, is the artistic dimension of his thinking. Neither Toffler, nor Senge, nor Laszlo, nor even Morin are practicing artists. Saloff-Coste is, deeply so, and this changes everything. The artist does not think only with concepts: he thinks with forms, images, spaces of meaning that cannot be reduced to analytical propositions. He can hold contradictory intuitions together until they ripen into synthesis. He knows that certain important truths can only be said obliquely, by crossing through metaphor or beauty. This way of thinking makes his work more alive, more embodied, more capable of reaching people where real changes actually happen — not only in the mind, but in the way one perceives, feels and decides.
X. Going Further: The Essential Library
To enter Michel Saloff-Coste's work and the constellation of authors that surrounds it, here are the essential entry points.
Books by Michel Saloff-Coste: Le Management du troisième millénaire (the foundational book on civilizational waves); Le Dirigeant du 3e millénaire (with Dartiguepeyrou and Raffard, Éditions d'Organisation, 2006); Les Horizons du Futur (with Carine Dartiguepeyrou); Écosystèmes Innovants (ISTE Éditions, 2021); Trouver son Génie; Prospective d'un monde en mutation (collective work with Edgar Morin, Ervin Laszlo, Matthieu Ricard et al., L'Harmattan).
To go further with related authors: Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (1980) for the civilizational reading; Edgar Morin's The Method and Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future for complex thinking; Ervin Laszlo's The Chaos Point (2006) for planetary consciousness; Ken Wilber's A Brief History of Everything (1996) for integral theory; Don Beck and Chris Cowan's Spiral Dynamics (1996) for levels of consciousness in organizations; Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline (1990) for learning organizations; Matthieu Ricard's Altruism (2013) for the contemplative dimension; Thierry Gaudin's 2100: A Tale of the Next Century (1990) for long-term foresight.
Conclusion: A Civilizational Pathfinder
In a world saturated with instant information and short-term advice, the thinking of Michel Saloff-Coste is precious for one simple reason: it takes the long term seriously. It refuses the comfort of consensus trends and three-column matrices. It demands, from those who immerse themselves in it, the effort to re-situate their own lives, their organizations and their era within the immense current of human history — not in order to derive contemplative wisdom, but to unleash an energy for action.
This posture, which binds the depth of analysis inseparably to the urgency of action, Saloff-Coste shares with the greatest among those we have discussed. Like Morin, he refuses the separation between thought and the living world. Like Laszlo, he bets on the transformation of consciousness as a lever of systemic change. Like Senge, he places collective learning and shared vision at the heart of effective leadership. Like Toffler, he reads the future in the long waves of civilization. But unlike all of them, he is also a painter, a field philosopher, a traveler of innovation and a cultural mediator between the great intuitions of his time and the practitioners of everyday life.
That is his singularity. That is his genius — in the very sense he gives to that word.
Michel Saloff-Coste is Special Adviser to the Presidency of the Catholic University of Lille, Director of the International Institute of Foresight on Innovative Ecosystems, and initiator of the International Foresight Research Network. He is one of the founders in France of the Club of Budapest and an active member of the Integral University, a space of convergence between sciences, arts and spiritualities.
