This morning, as I woke up, two words came to me for a new article: “opposing forces”.
At first, the title frankly puzzled me, because the French word pulsion primarily evokes psychoanalysis for me, along with a form of animal instinct that human beings are, to varying degrees, inclined to control.
In Freudian theory, it refers to a movement of the unconscious that drives an individual to act in order to reduce psychological tension.
That immediately brought to mind Brian De Palma’s film Dressed to Kill, released in France as Pulsions, starring the legendary Michael Caine, a story steeped in eroticism and murder.
What could these initial thoughts possibly have to do with construction, real estate development, hospitality, architecture, user experience or project management advisory?
Far more than I first imagined.
Because when I looked into the etymology of the French word pulsion, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française told me that this feminine noun derives from the Latin pulsio, meaning “the action of pushing or repelling”, itself derived from pellere, “to set in motion, to push”.
Its original definition, although now obsolete, referred simply to the action of pushing.
And in physics, it can refer to the propagation of motion through a liquid or gas.
It was through the language of physics that the word suddenly became truly interesting to me as a way of looking at real estate projects.
Because that is precisely what I do in my work: hold the space in which different forces, different impulses, can move and follow their natural course without cancelling one another out.
Holding together forces that pull in different directions
As a project management adviser, my role is to bring together and hold these opposing forces:
- the architect wants beauty;
- the developer wants profitability;
- the hotel operator wants functionality;
- the hotel operator wants functionality;
- the city wants to preserve its heritage.
This list is deliberately reductive, purely for the sake of rhythm.
I therefore find myself at the centre, at the crossroads of all these forces, with the underlying role of continuously integrating what each party brings to the project, not by trying to make everyone agree, but by ensuring that these different forces fit together perfectly, like pieces of a puzzle.
A strong identity that makes room for every individuality
And exactly the same thing happens within a hotel, because it welcomes a multitude of opposing needs:
- the business traveller in a hurry, looking for efficiency;
- the honeymooning couple seeking intimacy;
- the family wanting space;
- the solo traveller looking for quiet.
A hotel that tries to please everyone ultimately pleases no one.
But a hotel that knows what it is — the values it embodies and the positioning it stands for — can accommodate all these different needs without losing itself, because it has a soul, an identity and… a threshold opening onto its entire universe (a little nod to my article Kekkai: the threshold as the first act of the hotel experience).
A hotel can therefore have a clear, unequivocal identity while welcoming a multitude of different needs and personalities.
In its singular universality, it welcomes each individual uniqueness. It becomes an integrator, an incubator of uniqueness.
My role as a project management adviser is exactly the same: to provide a framework for the project, to hold the space in which each stakeholder — architect, developer, hotel operator, urban planner, contractor — can express their own driving force without cancelling out those of others.
Projects that fail are those that try to resolve opposing forces by eliminating one of them.
Projects that succeed are those that bring them together and hold them all at once, with clarity and without settling for a watered-down compromise.